Minding the Self

Jungian meditations on contemporary spirituality

Murray Stein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317754121
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Many people have an aptitude for religious experience and spirituality but don't know how to develop this or take it further. Modern societies offer little assistance, and traditional religions are overly preoccupied with their own organizational survival. Minding the Self: Jungian meditations on contemporary spirituality offers suggestions for individual spiritual development in our modern and post-modern times. Here, Murray Stein argues that C.G. Jung and depth psychology provide guidance and the foundation for a new kind of modern spirituality.

Murray Stein explores the problem of spirituality within the cultural context of modernity and offers a way forward without relapsing into traditional or mythological modes of consciousness. Chapters work towards finding the proper vessel for contemporary spirituality and dealing with the ethical issues that crop up along the way. Stein shows how it is an individual path but not an isolationist one, often using many resources borrowed from a variety of religious traditions: it is a way of symbol, dream and experiences of the numinous with hints of transcendence as these come into personal awareness.

Minding the Self: Jungian meditations on contemporary spirituality uses research from a wide variety of fields, such as dream-work and the neuroscience of the sleeping brain, clinical experience in Jungian psychoanalysis, anthropology, ethics, Zen Buddhism, Jung's writings and the recently published Red Book. It will be of interest to psychoanalysts, Jungian scholars, undergraduates, graduate and post-graduate students and anyone with an interest in modern spirituality.

Chapter 1

“New wine needs new skins”

To expand on my theme of minding the self, I will make use throughout this book of C.G. Jung’s life and work. I do not apologize for this since my intention is not to make Jung into a hero and set him up as an ideal. I will use his biography and writings to add flesh to the bones of the discussion. This is nothing more than a way of speaking about the spiritual dilemma that faces many modern people because Jung exemplified it so exquisitely and wrote about it so fulsomely throughout his long life. His brilliant attempts to resolve the collective problem of spirituality within a culture of modernity, on a lived and a theoretical level, are of use for advancing the discussion even if they do not provide all the answers one might desire. Jung took note of the spiritual discontent in modern society and tried to do more than merely diagnose it. He tried to relieve it. It turns out to be quite a radical treatment.

By now it is well known that throughout his life Jung was continuously engaged, in one way or another, in a conscious dialogue with religion, most intensely of course with his own background religious tradition, Christianity. This is made clear in the late autobiographical work, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, where he recalls his childhood in a Protestant parsonage, his failed discussions with his Swiss Reformed pastor father, Paul Jung, and his early and late struggles with faith and belief. Unlike Freud, Jung did not identify fully with the Enlightenment and the supreme value of reason and positivist science to the detriment of feeling and especially intuition. In this respect, he leaned in the direction of German Romanticism and its high regard for myth, symbol and mystery. The intellect, Jung often said, was a trickster and could lead one away from a full consideration of reality, especially psychic reality. Moreover, he felt himself to stand in partial continuity at least with Christianity, the tradition of his forebears, even if he did not claim belief in its dogmatic formulations. In his deepest registers, Jung responded to life as a homo religiosus, a man keenly attuned to spirituality even though he stood apart from religious organizations. He had a strong sense of what Max Weber memorably named “religious musicality”, which Weber also noted is generally absent from modernity. In a sense, Jung can be seen even as a throw-back to the Middle Ages, but with the difference that he was educated and trained as a modern scientist, and had the intellectual tools to wrestle with the spiritual questions of modernity and not simply brush them aside. For these reasons, his writings have offered guidance for the spiritually perplexed in our times.

It is of fundamental importance to understand that when Jung takes up and uses the religious language of his ancestors, he is using the terminology in a symbolic and a psychological sense rather than in a literal or metaphysical sense. He does not speak of God, for instance, as traditional religious people or theologians do, namely as a metaphysical and transcendent being, but rather of God images, which are generated by a psychological agency, the archetype. This is essential to keep in mind when reading Jung on religious themes and images. Much confusion has arisen and much ink spilled pointlessly as a result of misunderstanding his position on this critical point.

In an earlier work, Jung’s Treatment of Christianity, I discussed the biographical and intellectual background and reasons for Jung’s many writings on Christian doctrines and his extensive conversations and exchanges with its theological representatives. Briefly stated, I argued there that Jung in his mature years (roughly after the age of 60) took it upon himself to offer Christianity a type of psychotherapeutic treatment. This would be psychotherapy for culture, an extension of individual psychotherapy. Jung’s treatment was directed at Christianity’s deeply ingrained tendency to split the polarities of the human psyche into irreconcilable opposites: good against evil, masculine against feminine, spirit against body. In healthier philosophical and religious systems like Taoism, for instance, these polarities are seen as essentially related and existing in a dialectical and dynamic relation to one another. In Christianity, they are eternally warring opposites. As such, they foster neurotic conditions. Moreover, he saw that Christianity was becoming feeble as a religious and cultural force in the world and would be destined for extinction unless it found a way to heal these internal conflicts within its collective manifestation. He wanted to offer it a way out of this impasse. In the end, he recognized that he had failed in this project. The patient was not interested in pursuing wholeness.

Nevertheless, the effort left a trail of hints for a possible way forward in our own troubled times. This is a way, however, that will be distasteful to traditionalists and also unacceptable to many moderns. It is what I will call a third way, neither pre-modern/traditional nor modern/secular. It is a vision for a new type of humanism based on the idea of integration of the divine into the human, which amounts to the incarnation of the full imago Dei for all who accept the challenge. This is the challenge and the opportunity that psychology offers, a challenge to the traditional religious notion of a supernatural metaphysical God and an opportunity for a future in which spirituality will be woven into the fabric of conscious and everyday life. For this, however, a huge shift in thinking needs to take place that will transpose the theological Gods of traditional religions into psychological God-images available for integration into human consciousness.

This vision of a possible path to spirituality for modern people finds vigorous expression in Jung’s late and highly controversial work, Answer to Job. There he states: “God wanted to become man, and still wants to” (Jung 1954: para. 739). The daunting implications of this idea remain to be worked out, and in what follows I will attempt to make a start. It has to do with individuation in the fullest sense of the word.

Answer to Job grew in part out of a long exchange with the Dominican professor of theology at Blackfriars, Oxford, Victor White, O.P. That dialogue marks a highpoint in Jung’s attempt to engage creatively and therapeutically with Christianity. The relationship between the two men is richly detailed in their correspondence, begun in 1945 when Jung was 70 years old. The exchanges with White engaged him profoundly on several levels, but most especially with respect to the pressing problem of the relationship between analytical psychology and traditional Christian theology and practice. By entering into an intense emotional and intellectual relationship with Victor White, Jung gained further insight into the psychological conflicts that rage within the Christian psyche, particularly in a person who attempts to include the psychological attitude while trying to remain faithful to the Roman Catholic tradition of priesthood at the same time. His book, Answer to Job, published in German in 1952 and in English translation in 1954, appeared in the midst of their dialogue. In part it can be read as specifically addressed to White, but clearly it was also meant for all of Christendom. Its audience includes anyone who lives within and participates in a predominantly Christian culture. It is Jung’s answer to the problems engendered within the Christianized psyche, and those who seek to remain faithful and committed to the Christian mythos do not easily digest it. For Victor White, the message of Answer to Job turned out to be too divergent from his religious and philosophical convictions and effectively ended the attempt at collaboration with Jung. In fact, White thought that Jung was betraying his own psychological theories by criticizing the God image of Christianity and venturing such strange ideas as a continuing incarnation and “the Christification of many” (Jung 1954, para. 758). Jung, he felt, was inviting archetypal inflation and paranoia.

What is the radical message that Jung is communicating in Answer to Job? Basically, it is the idea that the location of the biblical drama has shifted from the metaphysical and mythical to the psychological realm, and that human beings are themselves individually now responsible for redemption, atonement, and the reconciliation of the opposites, not a transcendent God “out there” in a supernatural realm. For the modern person, salvation and atonement come no longer from above, they must now come from within. The age of the psychological is upon us. This is a huge problem, but it is also a huge opportunity for further development of the human being.

In the West, and increasingly worldwide today in all modernizing societies, the cultural vanguard has left mythical and metaphysical thinking behind and has moved on to a secularist, pragmatic and instrumental attitude and a materialist philosophical outlook. The platform of consciousness attained by modernity is no longer subject to the authority of religious creeds or figures. It is secular, scientific, and increasingly individual. It is also averse to abstract metaphysical speculation. Valid and relevant knowledge must be grounded in research and experience, not based on faith or trust in religious authorities, whether texts or persons. This means that individuals have to re-imagine their purpose and destiny post-mythologically and post-metaphysically. They must look to a different source of inspiration and information to carry them forward since the logic of theo-logy no longer illuminates the human condition. A new kind of light must be turned on in the darkness of modernity if spirituality is to be found in contemporary terms. This would come, Jung surmised, from the logos of psyche, psycho-logy. But what is “psyche,” and what is its logos? Certainly it is human, it is natural, and it is grounded in the body. But it also may observe and think deeply about hints of transcendence, as we shall see in later chapters.

Answer to Job is a psychological commentary on the Bible and the biblical tradition from the beginnings in ancient times to the present. As biblical interpretation, it does not belong or subscribe to any particular religious tradition or perspective, whether Hebrew or Christian, and it is equally unfettered by the conventions of modern historical inquiry and scholarship. It is neither religious nor academic; it is psychological. In Jung’s hands, this meant that it would be governed by the rules of psychological dynamics, most importantly by the rules of individuation. That is to say, the psychological interpretation follows the logic of the psyche and its development (individuation), and it also importantly includes emotion and intuition within its methodology. The interpreter’s psychological reactions to the text are essential to the hermeneutic, since the interpreter fully recognizes that there is a personal relationship with the text and works within this relationship. The interpreter’s psyche is self-consciously at the center of the interpretation and therefore takes responsibility for the result. Answer to Job gives us a vivid taste of what psychological interpretation can produce in the hands of a master.

As Jung lays out his psychological perspective on the Book of Job and the rest of the Bible, he creates a unique and astonishing narrative of the biblical God-image’s individuation. God is the main character of the Bible, and in this sense is a literary figure or, as Jung would say, a God-image, not the Godhead as it might be in and of itself. He creates a distance between the text and the referent. The arc of the biblical narrative runs from the creation of the world to the end of time and tells of the biblical God-image’s psychological development. In Answer to Job, Jung himself achieves a supreme act of authorship, which in some ways surpasses that of Thomas Mann and even Goethe, both of whom took up the theme of God’s wager with Satan in their respective works, Doctor Faustus and Faust. In effect, Jung rewrites the supreme fiction of Christendom, the Bible. In Answer to Job, we find what Harold Bloom refers to as a “strong misreading”, which creates the possibility of a great poem. Answer to Job is a poem of the psyche that lays out a vision for a new kind of humanism, one that is not religious in any traditional sense of the word but is also not atheistic or secular. It is spiritual but shorn of all metaphysical assumptions. It advocates knowledge by experience, a type of modern gnosis.

Here is a summary of Jung’s misreading, about which the theologian Karl Barth said correctly that it reflects the mind of the psychologist, not the mind of God.

Jung places the Book of Job at the center of the biblical narrative. This enigmatic book is the pivot point upon which the psychological transformation of the Bible’s main character, the God image, Yahweh, turns. In the Book of Job, God is found guilty of unconsciousness and misconduct. God is utterly wrong in treating Job as He does. In the blameless and noble figure of Job, God confronts a level of consciousness superior to His own. Job holds his ground and shows supreme integrity, while God shows sheer unconsciousness and arrogant misuse of power. Human consciousness has outstripped the divine in the sense that Job is right in his pleas of innocence and God is in the wrong in treating him as His inferior. In the confrontation with Job, God has been found inept and cruel. He has violated his own sense of justice, broken his covenant, and lost his integrity. He has mobbed Job through the so-called comforters, and Job has become a scapegoat in his community. Yahweh is miserably out of contact with His own supreme Wisdom, Sophia, His feminine counterpart from eternity. After the rude episode with Job, God realizes that power cannot prevail over righteousness, and so he is forced to reconstitute Himself and make amends. First of all, He must recognize his inferiority to mankind. The critical issue is shadow awareness. God had not been fully aware of what he was doing. He had treated Job unjustly. First, he gave his left hand, Satan, the freedom to test the faithful but frail human’s fidelity by stripping him bare of earthly possessions, family, and health, and then when Job had proven equal to the test and retained his integrity, God had reacted angrily with a display of might that overruled Job’s plea for justice. Clearly, God had betrayed Job, first by mistreating him, a righteous man, and then by reducing him to impotent silence. God’s vaunted wisdom and justice were totally absent in this display of frivolous mischief.

This drama produces a crisis in God’s conscience. As a psychological factor, the God image can be influenced and affected by what is going on in consciousness. The God image, even though it is collective and embedded deeply within the archetypal layers of the unconscious, is not beyond the reach of consciousness but is actually powerfully affected by what transpires within the consciousness of the individual. In order to catch up with Job and regain His moral standing, God enters into a profound relationship with man and becomes incarnated as an individual person within His own creation. Thus an important aspect of the archetypal self actually enters into the domain of ego consciousness. Now God’s experience of suffering, in and through the life of the human figure, Jesus of Nazareth, becomes equal in quality and degree to that which He had earlier inflicted upon Job. God’s life as a human being culminates in an experience of betrayal and abandonment – the crucifixion. Like Job, Jesus became a scapegoat, first lifted up as an ideal and then violently rejected by the mob. When Jesus utters from the cross, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” God fully partakes in what Job experienced. Jesus had placed his trust in his Father in Heaven, and this trust is betrayed in a moment of total abandonment. God, as incarnated in Jesus, now suffers the same identical betrayal that Job had suffered by trusting in Him. This is God’s heartfelt “answer to Job”. The betrayer becomes the betrayed, and so experiences the full effect of His own shadow. The reversal is complete, and the result is greater consciousness. In this, God advances in consciousness and brings his own up to the standard set by Job. This represents an enormous increase in consciousness on the part of the archetypal self. It is a historic advance of consciousness on a collective level.

In fact, however, God surpasses Job because he recognizes his own infidelity, something Job never did or had to do. A God image is reborn from this ordeal as a figure of unimaginably higher standing than He held before, a model of integrated consciousness. This represents a dramatic change in the God image, from an arbitrary Power to a Being conscious of His own shadow and taking responsibility for it. This is a new God image and a psychologically advanced image of Divinity. In this, the archetypal self, which is the basis of all God images worldwide and in all mythologies and theologies, has achieved a new level of individuation.

In the biblical narrative, all of this takes place at the level of myth where God is seen as transcendent but undergoes a change from the characterization in the Old Testament to that in the New Testament. At the psychological level, this development indicates a possibility for the God image to become more inclusive of “the opposites”, good and evil, masculine and feminine, and to bring them into a better relationship with one another. Biblical religion had the chance to approach the Taoist vision of opposites in a dialectical relationship with one another. This would find expression in a universal and inclusive religion, which Christianity proposed in its early days but sadly did not realize as it succumbed to splitting tendencies active in the theological mind and in the cultural milieu of the ancient world.

Coming forward to the present time, human consciousness as we know it today in modern culture has advanced past, or out of, the pre-modern state of mythical and metaphysical consciousness. With this development comes the psychological attitude, a new way of thinking about religious experience and imagination. In this new paradigm, the psyche takes the place once occupied by the divine. The self, the central archetype of the collective unconscious, occupies the position of what was considered earlier a supernatural deity. We speak of God images, which are products of the archetypal self, rather than of metaphysical gods and goddesses. The human psyche has become the central player in the narrative, the subject and object of individuation processes at work consciously and unconsciously. The psyche is now seen as the locus of heavens and hells, of mythological beings like gods and goddesses, of angels and devils, and so forth. The psyche is now regarded as the source of their existence and as the ground upon which the conflicts that once raged in imagined supernatural realms and among its denizens is to be located. It is within the psyche that these noisy battles must be won, lost, or endured; and with this enormous shift in human consciousness comes the psychological and the ethical responsibility that human beings, individually and collectively, take up the challenge of individuation. What was once myth is now read as a psychological story, and the implications of this change in awareness are enormous for humanity.

For example, in traditional Christian theology, the myth of incarnation is generally regarded as a unique event in which God became man in the person of Jesus Christ. This happened only once and it will not, and cannot, happen again. Jung recasts the notion of incarnation in a psychological mode as a developmental process in which the unconscious becomes assimilated into consciousness over the period of an individual’s lifetime. He calls this process individuation. For modern men and women, incarnation means entering actively and consciously into the individuation process, which requires enduring the battle of the opposites as they come into play and submitting to the extreme suffering of this conflict as Jesus Christ suffered on the cross, a symbol of hanging between the opposites. This suffering for the sake of individuation is for Jung the genuine imitatio Christi, which no longer means becoming Christ-like in the traditional sense of trying to become perfect as Christ was perfect or following his example. Rather, it means enduring the agony of the inner warring opposites until a unifying symbol is born in the individual soul. In other words, each person is required to incarnate the full complexity of the psyche, conscious and unconscious. This is what it means to “mind the self”.

Individuals who take up the task of individuation must bear the suffering of the conflict of opposites inherent in their own nature. In this modern consciousness, people cannot dodge fundamental conflicts by embracing a comforting notion like, “God will take care of it.” That would be to shrink from the essential task. The God image does not function apart from the human anymore. Atonement (at-one-ment) arrives from within through individual struggle to become conscious, not from without by divine intervention. Irrational and implacable suffering is meaningful if assumed consciously. To take this responsibility is now the human task. The shadow cannot any longer be swept under the carpet but must be taken on board conscious...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 “New wine needs new skins”
• 2 Making room for divinity
• 3 Changing and emerging God-images
• 4 The way of symbols
• 5 Attending the lunar mind
• 6 Hints of transcendence
• 7 Turning on the transcendent function
• 8 Not just a butterfly
• 9 Spirituality in the psychoanalytic context
• 10 Mapping the psyche
• 11 Initiation into the Spirit of the Depths
• 12 Humanity’s shadow monster
• 13 The problem of ethics
• 14 The gifts of cultural dialogue
• 15 Minding the self
• References
• Index