Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche

This article was downloaded by: [University of West Florida]
On: 01 January 2015, At: 06:23

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office:
Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription
information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ujun20
Jung’s The Red Book Dialogues with the Soul

a
Dr. Lionel Corbett
a
Pacifica Graduate Institute , 249 Lambert Rd, Carpinteria , CA , 93013
Published online: 01 Feb 2013.
To cite this article: Dr. Lionel Corbett (2011) Jung’s The Red Book Dialogues with the Soul, Jung Journal:
Culture & Psyche, 5:3, 63-77, DOI: 10.1525/jung.2011.5.3.63
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jung.2011.5.3.63
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”)
contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our
licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or
suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication
are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor &
Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently
verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any
losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities
whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or
arising out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial
or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or
distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use
can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
Jung’s The Red Book Dialogues with the Soul
Herald of a new Religion?
lionel corbett
Downloaded by [University of West Florida] at 06:23 01 January 2015
On January 5, 1922, in an active imagination Jung complains to his soul that he is

tired, but the soul will not let him sleep (2009, 211). He asks his soul why it is keep-
ing him awake. The soul replies that this is no time to sleep; the great work begins. The
soul tells him that the work is difficult, and he has been unconscious for too long. The
soul announces: “To no longer be a Christian is easy. But what next? For more is yet to
come . . .” The soul goes on to say that Jung has received a revelation that he should not
hide. His calling should take priority, and his calling is the new religion and its procla-
mation. Jung is startled by this and has no idea how to carry out this task, but the soul
says that no one knows it as he does and no one could say it as well as he could. He has
the requisite knowledge, and he should publish his material. As the conversation goes
on, the problem becomes how to embody this knowledge in daily life. The soul tells
him that, rather than being a rational process, “The way is symbolic.” What follows is
well known to us. The symbolic manifestations of the soul become a main focus of ana-
lytical psychology.
This and other dialogues raise the question of whether Jung’s psychology repre-
sents the beginning of a new form of spirituality that is arising alongside our existing
religious traditions.1 Jung has often been accused of trying to start a religion, initially
by Freudians and more recently by Richard Noll (1997a, 1997b), to whose criticisms
I return later. Sonu Shamdasani has shown that Noll’s charge is baseless, but it is typi-
cal of the kind of misunderstanding that Jung’s approach engenders (1998). We might
see more of this kind of criticism as reviews of The Red Book emerge because of a lack
of understanding of the process of active imagination.
Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, Volume 5, Number 3, pp. 63–77, ISSN 1934-2039, e-ISSN 1934-2047.
© 2011 Virginia Allan Detloff Library, C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. All rights reserved. Please
direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of
California Press’s Rights and Permissions website at www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo/asp. DOI:
10.1525/jung.2011.5.3.63.
JUNG5003_05.indd 63 7/22/11 10:14:05 AM

64 jung journal: culture & psyche 5:3 / summer 2011
Is Jung a Christian?
In what way is Jung “no longer a Christian”? After all, a great deal of Christian and biblical
imagery appears in The Red Book, and in one of the dialogues, Jung even experiences a
momentary identification with Christ. However, Jung points out that we cannot Chris-
tianize the unconscious because the unconscious is autonomous (1938/1969, CW 11,
¶¶40–44); it spontaneously produces numinous imagery that may or may not take tra-
ditional Judeo-Christian forms (Corbett 2006). James Hall points out that when our
authentic spirituality is repressed, perhaps because it is too unusual or idiosyncratic, it
may emerge in dream imagery in a form that is radically different than our expectations
(1993). For example, Ulanov reports a dream in which a man sees himself worshiping
a giant pig (1986). When numinous imagery is linked to our psychological structures
in this kind of way, religion becomes personal, internal rather than external, and no
longer projected onto outer savior figures. The divine is no longer located purely in a
transcendent realm; it is now found deeply within our subjectivity. No longer is every-
thing we need found in the Bible and the Church. The fact that the Self or the trans-
personal levels of the psyche produce novel, personally relevant numinous imagery is
particularly important for people for whom the Judeo-Christian tradition no longer
contains much emotional power. If the sacred manifests itself by means of the uncon-
scious—in dreams, visions, and synchronistic events—we have direct contact with it,
with no need for liturgy or prayer books or a Church hierarchy. Jung is, therefore, not
a traditional Christian, although in a 1959 letter he said, “I think of myself as a Chris-
tian, since I am based entirely upon Christian concepts” (1975, 524).
Jung interprets the Christian story in his own way. For example, according to
Jung, we can no longer load everything onto Christ; every person has to carry God; the
descent of spirit into matter is complete: “We all must do what Christ did. We must
make our experiment . . . we must live out our own vision of life . . . When we live like
this we know Christ as a brother, and God indeed becomes man . . . then only does
God become man in ourselves” (McGuire and Hull 1977 97–98). This sounds like
theology, but in this interview, Jung goes on to deny that he is a religious leader, say-
ing he has no message or mission but speaks as a philosopher who just tries to under-
stand what he observes. Jung may have found some justification for his reinterpretation
of the meaning of Christ in his Red Book conversation with the anchorite Ammonius,
who points out that we do not know the hidden meaning of the Gospels; their mean-
ing is yet to come: “Every subsequent form of religion is the meaning of the anteced-
ent” (2009, 272). Religion proceeds in stages, and we only know the meaning of the
previous stage when we are in the new stage.
Jung would often deny that he was doing theology, insisting that he was simply
an empirical observer of the psyche. But perhaps Jung is being too modest, because
he makes statements that are incompatible with traditional notions of a transcendent
JUNG5003_05.indd 64 7/22/11 10:14:05 AM

Lionel Corbett, Jung’s The Red Book Dialogues with the Soul 65
divinity. Consider comments like this: “It was only quite late that we realized (or rather
are beginning to realize) that God is Reality itself and therefore—last but not least—
man. This realization is a millennial project” (1939/1954/1969, CW 11, ¶631). Most
radically, as Dourley points out, the defining characteristic of Jung’s approach is that
he recalls the gods back to their origin in the psyche (2009). So, unlike Rudolph Otto
(1958), for whom the divine is wholly other, for Jung the experience of the numinous
is immanent, located within the psyche. Jung’s description of numinous experience is
intended to be psychological and not metaphysical (1955–56/1970, CW 14, ¶781).
He insists he is not talking about the nature of the divine itself. He is talking about peo-
ple’s experience, and he is not trying to impose a metaphysical system.
Theologians are often not happy with Jung’s vision of the numinous as radically
immanent because they want to preserve the notion of a divinity that is transcendent and
accessible only by means of the sacraments or rituals of a particular institution and priest-
hood. For example, as John Dourley points out, the Vatican does not approve of Jung;
in a document titled Jesus Christ, the Bearer of the Water of Life,2 Jung is explicitly men-
tioned and rejected as a founding member of so-called New Age spirituality (2009, 6).
Various elements of Jungian psychology are said to be incompatible with Christianity.
Jung is in good company; this Vatican document does not approve of William James
or Pierre Teilhard de Chardin either. In fact, I believe that Jung is a greater threat to the
religious establishment than Freud; Freud said that religion is based on projection and
illusion, whereas Jung not only insists that religion is important, but he also seems to
offer an alternative to established traditions.
In Jung’s The Red Book, dialogues with the soul often contrast the spirit of the
depths (SD) with the spirit of the times (ST). The ST is a system of rational thought
that began with the Enlightenment’s veneration of reason, followed by the develop-
ment of positivist science. One of the main points of The Red Book dialogues is that
the ST, or an excessive emphasis on rationality, alienates us from symbolic thinking.
Jung points out that although traditional religious symbols are derived from the arche-
typal level of the psyche and were originally emotionally powerful, today religion
means collective consciousness or mass-mindedness, which is dangerous to human-
ity (1916/1969, CW 8, ¶426). The only counterweight to this is to attend to the SD,
the objective psyche, and the process of individuation, which is a spiritual journey. Tra-
ditional collective religions have lost the deepest meaning of their symbols by making
them literal and historical. Collective religion has now become part of the ST, either a
matter of believing in some kind of dogma or reading a book about what happened to
someone else a long time ago—what William James called secondhand religion. In this
way, collective religion has severed people from their depths.
Jung is in the tradition of writers such as William James who find the sources of
religion in personal experience. Jung was most concerned with individual experience of
the numinosum because he had seen from his father’s difficulties that a focus on belief,
JUNG5003_05.indd 65 7/22/11 10:14:05 AM

doctrine, and dogma alone leads nowhere. Numinous experiences are usually very rel-
evant to the psychology of the individual, and they often have a healing effect—hence
Jung’s letter of 1944 in which he says that his theory of therapy is based on contact with
the numinosum (1973, 377). For Jung, healing in psychotherapy requires a religious
attitude but not necessarily adherence to a particular tradition. This attitude means
paying attention to spontaneous numinous experience.
The New God-Image

Yet another way in which Jung is no longer a Christian lies in his insistence that our
God-image is changing. In another dialogue with the soul in The Red Book, Jung says
that our gods require renewal, otherwise the God (image) becomes “shadow and non-
sense,” and “the greatest truth becomes the greatest lie” (2009, 242). For Jung, the new
God-image cannot be confined to Christ or the image of God in the Hebrew Bible;
it has to include any manifestation of the Self, including its dark side and its feminine
aspects.
Another source of Jung’s proposal that we are developing a new God-image is
found in The Red Book dialogue that occurs after a vision of the hero’s death, in which
Jung kills Siegfried. In a later commentary on this vision in his 1925 seminar, Jung says
this means he has killed the inner hero, the superior function, or the intellect (1991).
In The Red Book itself, Jung says that when the hero had been slain and he had recog-
nized the meaning of that experience, he became aware of the birth of a new concept
of God. He says that this God sank into his heart when he was in a state of confusion;
then the new image was born “as a child from my own human soul, which had con-
ceived him with resistance like a virgin” (2009, 244), although he had not realized
that his soul had been pregnant with God. He goes on to say that this God could not
come into being before the hero had been slain; because the hero is perfection, he is an
enemy of God because perfection has no need of God. The new God (image) laughs
at people who try to imitate the hero and be perfect; the new God does not need imi-
tation or discipleship. This dialogue is obviously one of the sources of Jung’s idea that
personal experience of the numinosum is more important than belief taken from oth-
ers, and his belief that wholeness is more important than perfection. Jung pays a great
price for accepting the idea of a new God-image; in a horrifying active imagination,
against enormous resistance, he complies with his soul’s insistence that he eat the liver
of a divine child who has just been killed (290–291). The liver in its symbolic sense
represents the seat of life; by eating (that is assimilating and embodying) the life force
of the old God-image, he says we can dissociate ourselves from this image. Apparently
we have to digest the old spiritual forms before we can embody the new.
JUNG5003_05.indd 66 7/22/11 10:14:05 AM

Jung believed that Nietzsche’s ideas about the death of the Christian God-
image heralded the advent of an age in which individuation and the experience of the
transpersonal Self would replace the Church as the vehicle of human religious experi-
ence ( Jarrett 1988). Throughout The Red Book, Jung wrestles with the idea that a new
God-image is emerging. During the imaginal dialogue with Elijah and Salome, Jung
is told that the soul brings tidings of the new God-image and the mysteries of his ser-
vice (2009, 245; fn163, 246). This is important because the biblical Elijah was fiercely
antagonistic to the introduction of any God-image other than that of the Yahweh tra-
dition, so Elijah would be a figure with whom Jung has to deal. Salome was responsi-
ble for the death of John the Baptist, who announced the new God-image in Christ.
These are significant associations for Jung. Perhaps to express the tension between his
own experience and the biblical tradition, Jung quotes a passage from Jeremiah that
warns against false prophets and tells people not to rely on dreams and individual
revelations (259).
Do we need a new God-image? What is the state of contemporary religions that
are in service to the traditional God-image? The benefits of our established religious
institutions are clear, but their shadow problems are enormous (Kimball 2002). The
sad truth is that, in spite of the profound wisdom and morality taught by the tradi-
tions, which must be acknowledged, even after 2000 years these traditions often have
little beneficial effect on many of their adherents. The traditions give good advice, such
as “love thy neighbor,” but this advice is impossible to follow when it does not corre-
spond to the individual’s psychological constitution. A person who is full of rage can-
not turn the other cheek. The problem with such spiritual teachings is that they only
address consciousness; the unconscious may be unaffected.
The monotheistic traditions each proclaim their version of an objective, transcen-
dent God whose will they are entitled to interpret. Each of them insists that they have
the absolute Truth and that at least the core of their scripture is historically true. These
assertions are problematic, since the only thing that authenticates the truth of the Bible
or any other sacred text comes from within the text itself; there is no way to corrobo-
rate such claims. The fundamentalist followers of these texts rely on their literal mean-
ing. They take the symbol as objectively and concretely real. They mistrust metaphor
because it doesn’t seem secure, whereas commandments and scriptures feel solid. Fun-
damentalists need absolute certainty, but the price for this apparent security is that
other traditions must be less valid, leading to “holy” war. Fundamentalists have no
compunction about killing people with competing God-images or fighting over land
that they claim is divinely given. Theocracies tend to be dangerously militaristic, and
even the United States had a president who is reported to have felt divine justification
for going to war. I need hardly mention the religious conflicts in the Balkans, the Mid-
dle East, and other places in which tribal barbarism passes for religion.
JUNG5003_05.indd 67 7/22/11 10:14:06 AM

The recent flood of atheistic literature by writers such as Christopher Hitchens

mainly attacks fundamentalism because this kind of religion is an easy target, leaving
sophisticated theology untouched or misrepresented (2008). This kind of atheism is
part of the ST, and its authors have no concept of the psyche’s religious function. But
even sophisticated theology has no convincing explanation for the obvious evils and
injustices we see all around us, and in any case, high-end theology does not seem to per-
colate down to the pulpit.
I believe that the monotheistic traditions hijack the psyche’s innate religious func-
tion when they insist that their way is the only way. Clearly, human beings had an
organic spirituality for tens of thousands of years before the advent of monotheism, as
we know from burial sites, cave paintings, shamanic practices, and stone monuments.
It would be preferable if we could see each of the monotheisms as simply one expres-
sion of the human religious impulse, each with valuable contributions to make, each
arising from the sacred dimension, each archetypally based, but none of them repre-
senting the whole Truth.
Is Jungian Psychology a Religion?

In a 1937 lecture, Jung directly addresses the issue of whether analytical psychology is
really a religion (McGuire and Hull 1977, 95). He points out that the activation of the
unconscious is a new phenomenon; we have a different psychology than people sev-
eral hundred years ago who were not aware of the existence of the unconscious, which,
in those days, was quiescent. In us, the unconscious is tremendously aroused, and new
layers of the psyche are becoming active. Archetypal contents that the Church used to
take care of are now troubling us; these include questions such as where are we going
and why. In other words, Jung believes that for a long time the energy of the uncon-
scious was contained and held relatively dormant within the structures of Christian-
ity, but since the Enlightenment, when the power of Christianity began to fade, the
unconscious has become more active. A great deal of new energy has been released,
and the capacity of the unconscious to produce spontaneous numinous imagery has
become an important compensation to the waning of the Christian tradition. In this
lecture, Jung suggests that the life has left the Churches and it will never go back; the
gods do not reinvest dwellings that they have left. Jung believes that our time is analo-
gous to the time of the Roman Empire when Christianity was taking over and pagan-
ism began to die.
Given the state of religion today, it seems to me that looking at Jung’s alternative
is worthwhile. This alternative says that the psyche is the source of religious experience,
and this experience is irreducible. It is important to acknowledge that Jung wanted to
think of himself as a psychologist, and although he recommended a religious attitude
to the psyche, he did not want to conceive of analytical psychology as a creed in the
JUNG5003_05.indd 68 7/22/11 10:14:06 AM

sense of a set of dogmatic beliefs, an attitude for which he criticized the Freudian tra-
dition. Nevertheless, in 1942, Jung asserts that psychotherapy could be called a reli-
gion in statu nascendi, in a state of being born (1943/1966, CW 16, ¶181). In a 1934
article, Jung notes that “we stand on the threshold of a new spiritual epoch; and that
from the depths of man’s own psychic life new spiritual forms will be born” (McGuire
and Hull 1977, 68). Edward Edinger develops that theme, suggesting that we are on
the cusp of what he refers to as a “new dispensation,” a new way in which divine grace
enters the world, and a new form of human spirituality (1984). For Edinger, this means
we are in relationship with transpersonal levels of the psyche, what Neumann called
the ego-Self axis, a relationship between the ego and the transpersonal Self (1973).
However, if we are developing a new religion in the institutional sense, it is at a very

early stage. Zeller reports a dream in which the foundations of a temple are being built,
and he asks Jung if this represents the beginning of a new religion (1990). Jung replies
that he has heard similar dreams, but he thinks the completion of the building will take
hundreds of years.
Some Jungians are uncomfortable with the notion that Jungian psychology is a
spiritual practice, as if there is something wrong with the idea; it’s a forbidden topic
among psychologists who prefer to think of psychology and psychotherapy as secu-
lar disciplines. Jung was criticized both by theologians such as Martin Buber (1952)
and by psychologists such as Erich Fromm (1950). The theological criticism of Jung is
that by focusing on the divine as it is manifest intra-psychically, Jung is trying to reduce
the divine to “nothing but” a psychological phenomenon. He is, therefore, guilty of
“psychologism,” reducing a trans-psychic divinity to something merely psychological,
or reducing spirit to psyche. Jung’s reply is that the psyche is real, so to say that some-
thing is psychological is to insist that it is real, and he is simply pointing out the empir-
ical observation that the mysterium magnum manifests itself psychologically. Jung’s
approach makes the experience of the numinosum wholly immanent and ignores the
traditional descriptions of God as transcendent. But for some theologians, the divine
is too immanent in Jung’s psychology. They think of the divine as transcendent of
the psyche, whereas Jung finds the Self, the imago dei, subjectively. Jung discovered
the numinosum could manifest itself in ways that did not correspond to traditional
theology, which was intolerable to conservative theologians. For their part, psychol-
ogists such as Fromm and others in the Freudian tradition could not tolerate Jung’s
turning the unconscious into a religious phenomenon.
Jung has addressed these criticisms in various ways. He points out that his interest
is in the psychology of individual religious experience and the psychology of doctrine and
dogma. He does not make any ontological or metaphysical claims about the nature of
the divine. Whether there is or is not a transcendent divinity beyond the psyche is not
answerable from the discipline of psychology. The presence of a God-image in the psyche
is empirically demonstrable, but whether the Self is synonymous with the divine itself
JUNG5003_05.indd 69 7/22/11 10:14:06 AM

is not answerable. Jung simply insists that there is a consistent psychological relation-
ship between the Self and the divine. For Jung, all our ideas about God have a psycho-
logical origin. We do not know the divine itself; all we know is what the psyche says
about the divine. The idea of God is universal, archetypal, and nonrational, and has
nothing to do with the question of God’s existence, which cannot be answered by the
intellect (1917/1969, CW 7, ¶110). In point of fact, in Jung’s later work when he talks
about the psychoid dimension and invokes the idea of the unus mundus, Jung does, in
fact, introduce a transcendent level to his theorizing.
Jung’s emphasis on the experience of the numinosum needs a cautionary note. It
is based on a subjectivist epistemology (inspired by Kant). This attitude says that the
only reality we have is psychological reality—Jung’s esse in anima. In this view, all there
is to know is our inner experience, and the contents of the psyche are as real as outer
objects. We must believe in the dictates of the soul; there is something inside us that
knows what is true; there is an inner experience that is not dictated by outer objects but
by the experience of the Self. With respect to our spirituality, we have no need to rely
on outer authorities. This attitude is important, especially for introverted people, but it
can be carried too far, in which case any subjective experience can be considered to be
valid, leading, as Nagy pointed out, to the confessional atmosphere found among some
Jungians and to too much of a sacrifice of the intellect (1991, 32). At the extreme, this
attitude would deny the value of science and may discourage critical inquiry.
In spite of these caveats, Jung’s approach to spirituality allows us to say things that
have not been said before and gives us a new vocabulary for talking about our spiritual-
ity. For example, the complex has an archetypal core with a human shell, and according
to Jung, the archetype is an “organ” or tool of God, an idea that has important spiritual
implications (1975, 130). Because the Self is the ordering principle in the psyche and
the complexes are important intra-psychic structures, the personality is permeated
with spiritual principles. Accordingly, when we struggle with a painful complex, we
struggle with the dark side of the Self. This makes psychotherapy a spiritual practice
and not a purely secular pursuit (Corbett 2010).
In one of the more difficult sections of The Red Book, Jung talks about the birth
of a new symbol within himself. He refers to this symbol as the “divine son who is the
supreme meaning, the symbol, the passing over into a new creation” (2009, 250). Jung
says that he is not the supreme meaning himself, but that “the symbol becomes in me such
that it has its substance, and I mine. Thus I stand like Peter in worship before the miracle
of the transformation and the becoming real of the God in me.” He goes on to say that
he is not the son of God himself but he represents this son, as one who was a mother to
God (because he symbolically gives birth to the son of God in himself ), and “one there-
fore to whom in the name of the God the freedom of the binding and loosing has been
given. The binding and loosing takes place in me.” This is a reference to Matthew 18:18:
“Whatsoever you shall bind (forbid) on earth shall be bound in heaven and whatsoever
JUNG5003_05.indd 70 7/22/11 10:14:06 AM

you loose on earth shall be loosed (permitted) in heaven,” which means that what the
apostles speak and write when moved by the Holy Spirit, or what they allow or disal-
low, will be ratified in heaven as long as it is God’s will. To paraphrase The Red Book text:
Jung goes on to say that this binding and loosing takes place in him, but also through
him in the world. It does not happen according to his own will, and it is unavoidable.
This occurs through his transformation; he is the servant of this transformation, like
the Pope. Perhaps he mentions the Pope because the Roman Catholic Church bases its
papal system on Matthew 16:19: “And so I tell you, Peter: you are a rock, and on this
rock foundation I will build my church . . . I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of
heaven; what you bind on earth will be prohibited in heaven, and what you loose on
earth will be loosed in heaven.” Supposedly Peter is the first Pope with special author-
ity, and the authority given to Peter was also given to the other Apostles in Matthew
18:18. If we were to take this allusion literally, we could argue that Jung saw himself as
the Pope of the new religion; I hope to show that what follows in The Red Book, and
in Jung’s overall attitude, does not support such an idea. According to the footnote in
this section of The Red Book, in a later draft Jung says that the coming God becomes
the lord of the world, which happens first in him, but not only in him but in others he
does not know (250). He realizes that it is incredible to believe this about himself, but
he insists that it is not him but the symbol that becomes his lord.
Perhaps this material is truly inspired. At least Jung felt it was a kind of revelation.
If we look at the image on page 125 of The Red Book, we see Jung has placed it oppo-
site a section titled “The Three Prophesies.” Clearly, the upper mandala represents the
Self, and the lower imagery shows scenes of everyday life, with a human figure mediating
between the two levels. I think this was Jung’s experience of receiving The Red Book. But
he is not too inflated; he recognizes that he is not on a par with his visions; he writes that
he does not believe he is significant just because he sees what is significant (2009, 251).
Cary Fink, an analysand of Jung’s, transcribed The Red Book in 1924/25. She made
notes after her talks with Jung, originally written in the form of letters that she did not
send. She says that Jung told her that he was sure that Philemon was the same figure
that inspired Buddha, Mani, Christ, and Mohamed, all of whom communed with God
(2009, 213). But these figures identified with this figure and Jung refused to do so; he
had to remain a psychologist who understood the process. It is noteworthy that by the
side of Jung’s painting of Philemon, he places a quotation from the Bhagavad Gita, in
which Krishna says he will incarnate whenever the world needs him, implying that
these figures are related in some way, which supports Fink’s report (154).
Jung’s Critics
Various critics raise the question of whether Jung was developing a new religion. John
Kerr suggests that Jung needed to conceive a “better” religion that wouldn’t condemn him
JUNG5003_05.indd 71 7/22/11 10:14:06 AM

and would justify the betrayal of his wife and the seduction of Sabina Spielrein (1994).
Frank McLynn’s biography says that Jung was a prophet to his disciples who developed the
legend of Jung as a “man-God” (1996, 529). Ronald Hayman’s biography also says that Jung
speculated like a prophet “relaying what was revealed to him” (2002, 444).
Noll describes Jungian psychology as “an anti-orthodox Christianity cult of
redemption or a Nietzschean religion,” actually a secret Church, “a pagan form of per-
sonal religion” (1997a, 289, 292). According to Noll, Jung was actually waging war
against Christianity and its distant, absolute, unreachable God and was training his
disciples to listen to the voice of the dead, to worship the sun, and to become gods
themselves” (224). Noll concludes his book with this rhetorical question: “Are we wit-
nessing the birth of another religious movement? . . . With the Jungian movement and
its merger with the New Age spirituality of the late 20th century, are we witnessing
the incipient stages of a faith based on the apotheosis of Jung as a God-man? Only his-
tory will tell if Jung’s Nietzschean religion will finally win its Kulturkampf and replace
Christianity with its own personal religion of the future” (297).
Noll believes that Jung’s 1912 essay titled “New Paths in Psychology” (now in
CW 7 in a revised form) was the equivalent of a political pamphlet written by Lenin
and titled What Is To Be Done? (Published in 1901, this pamphlet calls for the forma-
tion of a revolutionary party.) In Jung’s essay, according to Noll, Jung “calls for an intra-
psychic overthrow of custom, a revolution in the internalized European traditions that
enslave the individual personality” (1997a, 199). Noll believes that according to Jung
the only way to overthrow the neurosis-inducing Judeo-Christian religion and its sex-
fixated ethics is to establish a new religion, the religion of psychoanalysis. In the final
chapter of The Jung Cult, Noll describes the spread of “the secret church,” Jung estab-
lished and through which he transmitted his charismatic authority (275).
Noll believes that beginning in 1912 Jung “seems to have deliberately developed
his psychological method and organizational plans along an ancient-mysteries model”
(1997a, 279–280), recruiting former patients and Jung-worshipers, primarily women,
to be the high priests of his new religion. Noll’s accusation is largely based on an active
imagination found in The Red Book (2009, 252). In this experience, a black serpent lies
at Jung’s feet; Jung spreads his arms wide in an identification with Christ. Salome draws
near; the serpent winds around his body, and Jung’s face is transformed into that of a
lion. Salome tells him he is Christ. In his 1925 seminar, Jung says that Salome’s wor-
ship of him is that side of the inferior function that is surrounded by an aura of evil.
He says that this experience feels like madness, and it is madness, but one has to sur-
render to the unconscious. These experiences are part of the ancient mystery schools,
which “give[s]the individual the certainty of immortality” (96). This experience was
a symbolic deification; he transformed into the Deus Leontocephalus of the Mith-
raic mysteries (a lion-headed god, pictured in the frontispiece of Aion)—a figure with
JUNG5003_05.indd 72 7/22/11 10:14:06 AM

a snake coiled round a man who has the face of a lion. In other words, this was an ini-
tiation not only into Christianity but also into Mithraism. The initiate becomes a ves-
sel in which the opposites reconcile. In his 1925 seminar, Jung goes on to say that when
these images arise but are not understood “you are either in the society of the gods or
the lunatic society” (99). Noll says that this is the experience that Aniela Jaffé deliber-
ately suppressed from Memories, Dreams, Reflections for obvious reasons. Noll insists
that Jung believed that he had literally become deified and this makes him an Aryan
Christ (1997b). He believes that Jung’s active imagination led him into the belief that
he had become a god, or that he had become one with a god, and was now immortal.
Noll says that the lion-headed god Aion became his secret image of a god within, and
Jung and his close followers realized this truth and concealed it from the world (1997b,
214). Noll is amazingly concrete and literal in his criticism; he seems to not under-
stand the meaning of symbol and metaphor. As Anthony Stevens notes, Noll writes as
if Jung actually believed that this was an actual transformation into a god, rather than
a symbolic initiatory experience (1997). It is important to note that Jung analyzes his
experience rather than identifies with it. Furthermore, Noll wildly exaggerates Jung’s
effects on his followers. Although some of them overidealize Jung, they do not wor-
ship him. The highest praise afforded to Jung in the literature is Edinger’s opinion that
Jung’s life “inaugurates a new age in cultural history” (1984, 12).
Noll tries to prove that Jungian psychology is neither psychotherapy nor philos-
ophy but a form of “sun worship” (1997b, 136), a “Nietzschean religion” (137), and a
“cult of redemption” (175). He says that Jung set out to develop “a religious cult based
on Aryan mysticism and polytheistic paganism” (xi). In fact, as Shamdasani points
out, there is no evidence that Jung’s active imagination of the Deus Leontocephalus
shaped Jung’s self-understanding for the rest of his life or that he took it literally (1998,
50). I would add that, although it is true Jung believed that numinous experiences can
possess people and inspire them to believe they are prophets (1911-12/1967, CW 5,
¶41), he often warns that it is critical to overcome the experience of godlikeness and
not set oneself up as a prophet or world redeemer (1928/1969, CW 7, ¶502). He is
obviously very aware of this danger, as we can also see from his Zarathustra seminars
where he frequently points out that identification with the numinous leads to a dan-
gerous inflation, which he believes happened to Nietzsche. Noll ignores the fact that
Jung constantly warns against identifying with figures that emerge from the uncon-
scious. The reference to the experience of immortality is also not literal, but, accord-
ing to Jung, arises from the projection of the nonspatial and nontemporal experience
of the unconscious (1940/1968, CW 9i, ¶249). There is an identification with Christ
in this active imagination, but for Jung, the imitation of Christ means living one’s life
truly as Christ lived his; it means individuation rather than aping Christ in an exter-
nal sense (1929/1968, CW 13, ¶¶80–81). Individuation could be thought of as a
JUNG5003_05.indd 73 7/22/11 10:14:06 AM

psychological form of salvation not based on any particular creed. ( Jung equates salva-
tion with the process of healing; the Latin salvus means to be healed.)
For millennia in the West, either the Church or the Synagogue has been the col-
lective vehicle of human religious experience. The individual’s spirituality was typically
contained within these institutions. If Jung’s approach is correct, direct experience of
the transpersonal psyche is a new, evolving form of spiritual practice. Whether analytical
psychology can be called a religion depends on how we define religion, which is noto-
riously difficult to do. One might consider Jung’s approach to be a form of natural reli-
gion, in Kant’s sense of a religious sensibility, which we have by virtue of being human,
as distinct from the religion of a specific Church. Jung’s approach might be what Tillich
refers to as religion “in the larger sense” (1964, 182), an aspect of the depth dimen-
sion of the human spirit in contrast to the religion of a specific revelation, although
Jung believed that experiences of the archetype are felt as a revelation (1911–12/1967,
CW 5, ¶450). If the archetypal level of the psyche is the spiritual level, then the percep-
tion of the archetypal dimension of any situation gives it spiritual significance.
The psychological approach to spirituality is not a religion in the institutional
sense. It does not have an organized community of worshipers. There are professional
and lay societies that study Jungian psychology, but there is no specific God-image or
sacred text; there is no attempt to impose an ethical system or a set of rules of behav-
ior; and analytical psychology does not insist on a specific creation myth that explains
the world. However, I believe the practice of depth psychology can substitute for orga-
nized religion in some ways because turning to the transpersonal levels of the uncon-
scious for guidance is a spiritual practice, and seeing the Self as an imago dei is close to
thinking of it as the divine itself in a nonanthropomorphic form. As Dourley (1981)
points out, because the sacred manifests itself by means of the psyche, the psyche can
be seen as sacramental. Anthony Storr reports that Jung said to him, “Every night you
have the chance of the Eucharist” (1999, 538).
Sometimes the use of words such as “soul” by depth psychologists gives their work
a spiritual tinge, although this word has many meanings in depth psychology and is
impossible to define rigorously (Corbett 2010). What Jung calls the soul in The Red
Book seems to be a level of the psyche that acts as a bridge between the ego and trans-
personal levels of the psyche. In the dialogues, the soul behaves like an autonomous
inner power that grips the ego and often makes Jung suffer. His suffering is very striking
in many of The Red Book dialogues, and it seems to be an important component of the
transformative process Jung undergoes. Kluger points out that “Religion is suffered. It
is chosen only in the sense that one submits consciously to the inner voice . . .” (1957, 8.
Emphasis in original). Given the gripping power of the soul, I think it is clear from a
reading of The Red Book that we do not “make” soul; the soul makes us. It was his dia-
logue with the soul that made the Jung we know, in the sense that some of his major
theoretical ideas emerged out of it.
JUNG5003_05.indd 74 7/22/11 10:14:06 AM

Perhaps the publication of The Red Book had to be delayed until the Judeo-Chris-
tian tradition had lost enough authority for the culture to be ready to assimilate Jung’s
insights. Rather than relying on doctrine and dogma, or the spirit of the times, direct
experience of the transpersonal psyche may be the best way for the contemporary individ-
ual to deal with his or her existential difficulties. Belief and obedience to commandments
have been tried for two thousand years and obviously have not worked to transform the
individual, but direct experience of the transpersonal realm offers the possibility of
doing so. I hope the publication of The Red Book encourages this work.
endnotes
1. Here, I make the traditional distinction between religion in its institutional sense and spiritu-
ality more broadly understood as a personal connection to the transpersonal realm, how-
ever this is thought of, and one’s values and attitudes toward life’s ultimate questions.
2. Jointly issued by the Pontifical Council for Culture and the Pontifical Council for Inter-
religious Dialogue on February 21, 2003.
note
References to The Collected Works of C. G. Jung are cited in the text as CW, volume number, and
paragraph number. The Collected Works are published in English by Routledge (UK) and
Princeton University Press (USA).
bibliography
Buber, M. 1952. The eclipse of God: Studies in the relation between religion and philosophy. New
York: Harper and Row.
Corbett, L. 2006. Varieties of numinous experience. In The idea of the numinous: Contempo-
rary Jungian and psychoanalytic perspectives, eds. A. Casement and D. Tacey, New York:
Routledge.
———. 2010. Soul in depth psychology. In Encyclopedia of psychology and religion, eds. D. A.
Leeming, K. Madden, and S. Marlan. New York: Springer Publishing.
Dourley, J. 1981. The psyche as sacrament: A comparative study of C. G. Jung and Paul Tillich.
Toronto: Inner City Books.
———. 2009. On behalf of the mystical fool: Jung on the religious situation. New York: Routledge.
Edinger, E. 1984. The creation of consciousness: Jung’s myth for modern man. Toronto: Inner City
Books.
Fromm, E. 1950. Psychoanalysis and religion. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Hayman, R. 2001. A life of Jung. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Hitchens, C. 2008. God is not great: How religion poisons everything. New York: Hachette
Publications.
Jarrett, J. L., (ed.) 1988. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the seminar given in 1934–1939 by
C. G. Jung. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Jung, C. G. 1911–12/1967. Symbols of transformation. CW 5.
———. 1916/1969. General aspects of dream psychology. The structure and dynamics of the
psyche. CW 8.
———. 1917/1969. On the psychology of the unconscious. Two essays on analytical psychology.
CW 7.
———. 1928/1969. Appendix: New paths in psychology. Two essays on analytical psychology.
CW 7.
JUNG5003_05.indd 75 7/22/11 10:14:06 AM

———. 1929/1968. Commentary on “The Secret of the Golden Flower.” Alchemical studies.
CW 13.
———. 1938/1969. Psychology and religion: The Terry Lectures. Psychology and religion: West
and East. CW 11.
———. 1939/1954/1969. Psychological commentaries on Tibetan Book of Great Liberation.
Psychology and religion: West and East. CW 11.
———. 1940/1968. Concerning rebirth. The archetypes and the collective unconscious. CW 9i.
———. 1943/1966. Psychotherapy and a philosophy of life. The practice of psychotherapy. CW 16.
———. 1955–56/1970. Mysterium coniunctionis. CW 14.
———. 1973. Letters, vol. 1. Ed. G. Adler and A. Jaffé. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press.
———. 1975. Letters, vol. 2. Eds. G. Adler and A. Jaffé. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press.

———. 1991. Analytical psychology: Notes of the seminar given in 1925. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
———. 2009. The red book, Liber novus. Ed. Sonu Shamdasani. Trans. Mark Kyburz, John
Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Kerr, J. 1994. A most dangerous method: The story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein. New
York: Vintage Books.
Kimball, C. 2002. When religion becomes evil. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco.
Kluger, R. 1957. Paper # 8. Analytical Psychology Club of Los Angeles, February.
McGuire, W. & Hull, R. F. C. (eds.) 1977. C. G. Jung speaking. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
McLynn F. 1996. Carl Gustav Jung. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Nagy, M. 1991. Philosophical issues in the psychology of C. G. Jung. Albany: SUNY Press.
Neumann, E. 1973. The child. New York: Harper and Row.
Noll, R. 1997a. The Jung cult: Origins of a charismatic movement. Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press.
———. 1997b. The Aryan Christ: The secret life of Carl Jung. New York: Random House.
Otto, R. 1958. The idea of the holy. New York: Routledge.
Shamdasani, S. 1998. Cult fictions. New York: Routledge.
Stevens, A. 1997. Critical notice. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 42: 671–689.
Storr, A. 1999. Is analytical psychology a religion? Jung’s search for a substitute for lost faith.
Journal of Analytical Psychology, 44, 4: 531–538.
Tillich, P. 1964. Theology of culture. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ulanov, A. 1986. Picturing God. Salt Lake City: Cowley.
Zeller, M. 1990. The dream: The vision of the night. Boston: Sigo Press.
dr. lionel corbett is a psychiatrist and Jungian analyst. He teaches depth psychology at Pacifica
Graduate Institute, in Santa Barbara, California. He is the author of The Religious Function of the
Psyche, Psyche and the Sacred, and The Sacred Cauldron: Psychotherapy as a Spiritual Practice.
Correspondence: Pacifica Graduate Institute, 249 Lambert Rd, Carpinteria, CA 93013.
abstract
This article discusses one of Jung’s The Red Book dialogues that suggests Jungian psychology
may be a new spiritual form. Jung’s distinction between the spirit of the times and the spirit of
the depth is discussed. The possibility that a new God-image is arising, and Jung’s relationship
to traditional religion, especially Christianity, are examined. This article suggests that Elijah
appeared to Jung because of his opposition to any change in the God-image in the Hebrew
JUNG5003_05.indd 76 7/22/11 10:14:06 AM

Bible, and Salome appeared because of her association to John the Baptist, who announced a
new God-image. Jung’s approach to the numinosum is contrasted with that of Rudolph Otto.
The idea that Jung appears to be suggesting he is the pope of a new religion is refuted. This article
also examines theological criticisms of Jung, refuting Jung’s various critics, in particular, Noll,
who suggests that he was trying to start a new religion. Finally, the article suggests that Jung’s
psychology is a religious approach to the psyche, not a religion in the institutional sense.
key words
Buber, Christian, depth, dialogue, Elijah, God-image, John the Baptist, C. G. Jung, Noll,
numinosum, numinous, Otto, Philemon, pope, The Red Book, religion, Salome, soul, spirit,
theology, times
JUNG5003_05.indd 77 7/22/11 10:14:06 AM

Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

This article was downloaded by: [University of West Florida]

On: 01 January 2015, At: 06:23

Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche

Jung’s The Red Book Dialogues with the Soul

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jung.2011.5.3.63

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

On January 5, 1922, in an active imagination Jung complains to his soul that he is

JUNG5003_05.indd 63 7/22/11 10:14:05 AM

JUNG5003_05.indd 64 7/22/11 10:14:05 AM

JUNG5003_05.indd 65 7/22/11 10:14:05 AM

The New God-Image

JUNG5003_05.indd 66 7/22/11 10:14:05 AM

JUNG5003_05.indd 67 7/22/11 10:14:06 AM

The recent flood of atheistic literature by writers such as Christopher Hitchens

Is Jungian Psychology a Religion?

JUNG5003_05.indd 68 7/22/11 10:14:06 AM

However, if we are developing a new religion in the institutional sense, it is at a very

JUNG5003_05.indd 69 7/22/11 10:14:06 AM

JUNG5003_05.indd 70 7/22/11 10:14:06 AM

JUNG5003_05.indd 71 7/22/11 10:14:06 AM

JUNG5003_05.indd 72 7/22/11 10:14:06 AM

JUNG5003_05.indd 73 7/22/11 10:14:06 AM

JUNG5003_05.indd 74 7/22/11 10:14:06 AM

JUNG5003_05.indd 75 7/22/11 10:14:06 AM

ton University Press.

JUNG5003_05.indd 76 7/22/11 10:14:06 AM

JUNG5003_05.indd 77 7/22/11 10:14:06 AM

You might also like