Carl Gustav Jung: A Missed Connection

Published in Kierkegaard’s Influence on the Social Sciences, ed. J. Stewart (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, Vol 13. Ashgate, London, 2011.) Please refer to the published version if quoting. Carl Gustav Jung: A Missed Connection Anthony Rudd Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) was a Swiss psychologist and psychotherapist. He was born and brought up in the Swiss countryside where his father was a Reformed (i.e. Calvinist) pastor. Although he had strong interests in the humanities, and in Philosophy (especially Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche See Sonu Shamdasani, Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 197-202; Marilyn Nagy, Philosophical issues in the Psychology of C.G. Jung, Albany NY: SUNY Press, 1991, pp. 12-22.) Jung eventually focussed on the study of medicine and went on to specialise in the then just emerging discipline of psychiatry. For a time (from 1907-1912) he was a close associate of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) but he broke away from Freudian Psychoanalysis and eventually became the founder of his own distinctive School, which he called “Analytical Psychology.” Today, thousands of psychotherapists around the world have received an explicitly Jungian or ‘post-Jungian’ training, and many thousands more use Jungian methods and techniques without being so formally or exclusively committed to Jung’s principles. Some Jungian ideas have become part of the general stock-in-trade of psychotherapy, without even always being recognised as Jungian in origin. For instance, he introduced the practice of “training analysis” whereby a trainee analyst must him or her-self undergo a process of analysis. See Shamdasani (op cit) p. 2. Widely used methods of personality testing, such as the Myers-Brigg test, are directly derived from Jung’s psychological typology. And some of Jung’s ideas (such as the distinction between “introverts” and “extroverts” This is elaborated in C.G. Jung, Psychological Types, trans. by H.G. Baynes, revised by R.F.C. Hull, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971, pp. 330-407. (In referring to volumes in Jung’s Collected Works I also include the volume number and the number of the relevant paragraph(s). So in this case: CW 6; paras. 556-671) ) have become part of the everyday “folk psychology” which people use to understand themselves and others quite apart from any therapeutic or academic context. One sign of Jung’s impact outside of therapeutic and academic contexts is that in 1967 he received the ultimate accolade of having his photo included in the montage of counter-cultural heroes that adorns the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album. As I will show in this essay, there are many points of contact between Jung’s thought and Kierkegaard’s. Kierkegaard is correctly regarded as one of the pioneers of “depth psychology”; even apart from his two explicitly “psychological” works, The Concept of Anxiety and Sickness Unto Death (which deal with states – anxiety and despair – that are of direct interest to psychotherapists) he is throughout his work concerned with psychological issues. Indeed, the turn from metaphysics to psychology expressed in his focus on the subjectivity of the individual is at the heart of his thinking. As one commentator on Jung has put it: Philosophy has traditionally sought to transcend the particular individual in its quest for the universal forms of knowledge and being. Early in the nineteenth century, however, Kierkegaard alerted philosophy to the dangers inherent in this tradition and made a peculiar form of autobiography, his pseudonymous works, into material for thinking. Psychoanalysis is, in part, heir to this philosophical turn. George B. Hogenson, Jung’s Struggle With Freud, Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983, pp. 3-4. I Jung’s Kierkegaardian Psychology In what follows, I shall give a brief outline of some of Jung’s main psychological ideas, emphasising as I do so, the very striking parallels with aspects of Kierkegaard’s thinking. (I will, in a sense be using Kierkegaardian ideas to introduce Jungian ones.) I will organise this exposition under the following headings: Individualism. Both authors are concerned to address the individual, and they share a powerful distrust of “the crowd”, of mass culture. Neither has much faith in collective political endeavours, and both have been criticised as a result for elitism or political indifference. There are, in particular, very striking parallels between Kierkegaard’s analysis of his culture in Two Ages and Jung’s account of his in The Undiscovered Self. Jung’s dictum “the bigger the crowd, the more negligible the individual becomes” Jung, The Undiscovered Self (Routledge, London, 1958/1974) p.17 (Also in Jung, Civilisation in Transition, trans R.C.F. Hull, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964) p.254. (CW 10, para. 503) is extremely Kierkegaardian. And the title of one of Jung’s chapters “Religion as the Counter-Balance to Mass-Mindedness” Ibid, Ch 2 echoes Kierkegaard’s insistence that to escape the implacable force of “levelling” one must “leap into the embrace of God” SKS 8, 103 /T A 108 Moreover, Jung shares Kierkegaard’s concern that the drive to objective, scientific knowledge, as well as more purely political and economic developments, is helping to undermine the status of the individual. “Judged scientifically, the individual is nothing but a unit which repeats itself ad infinitum...[But] for understanding, it is just the unique individual human being who, when stripped of all those conformities and regularities so dear to the heart of the scientists, is the supreme and only real object of investigation.” The Undiscovered Self, p. 11 (CW 10, p. 251, para 497) Jung’s claim that we can’t solve the problem by an “either-or” choice between science and individual understanding Ibid, p. 11 (CW 10, p. 251, para 496) may be a dig at Kierkegaard (an ill-directed one, since Kierkegaard nowhere suggests we need to reject science or objectivity) but Jung’s claim that “Under the influence of scientific assumptions...the individual...suffer[s] a levelling down” Ibid, p. 13 (CW 10, p. 252, para 499) couldn’t be more Kierkegaardian. However, neither Kierkegaard nor Jung is an individualist in the sense of simply ignoring the deep rootedness of the individual in society. For neither of them is interested in encouraging a merely anti-social individualism, a wilful egoism. (For Kierkegaard, of course, this would be a form of the aesthetic life.). Both thinkers insist that one needs to transcend the concerns of the ego. What exactly this involves we will consider shortly. But we should note here one of Jung’s most distinctive ideas - that there is not only a personal but a collective unconscious. As I dig down deeper into my psyche, I find, not only contents that are personal to myself, but the “Archetypes” that are common to humanity as a whole. There is no close parallel to this idea in Kierkegaard’s thinking, But see The Concept of Anxiety, where Haufniensis insists that “the individual is both himself and the race…Perfection in oneself is therefore the perfect participation in the whole.” (SKS 4, 33-35 / CA 28-9) but I don’t think it stands in contradiction to anything in Kierkegaard. It is certainly compatible with his individualism, as it is with Jung’s. The process of “individuation” for Jung is one in which I discover psychological contents that connect me, at a deep ontological level, with the rest of humanity. But in discovering them, I am faced with precisely the challenge of taking personal responsibility for, not only the personal, but also the collective aspects of my psyche. Emphasis on the unconscious. Jung’s psychology, like Freud’s is, in large measure, an investigation into the unconscious mind. Kierkegaard is undeniably a pioneer of such investigations. It is axiomatic to Kierkegaard that we have a nature and that there is a good for us, given that nature. However, we are mostly unaware of that nature and that good; and this is because we, in some sense, choose to be. Kierkegaard is fascinated, therefore, by our capacity for self-deception, and for what Freud would call repression. In Sickness Unto Death in particular, he investigates the despair to which he claims we are all prone, mostly without being conscious of it. See SKS 11, 138-44; 157-62 / SUD 22-28; 42-47. I am assuming that both Sickness and The Concept of Anxiety are only “weakly” pseudonymous and can be taken as expressions of Kierkegaard’s own views. Perhaps in this he is closer to Freud than to Jung, although a notably difference is that Freud thinks that we tend mostly to repress the id’s demands for immediate sensual gratification, while Kierkegaard’s concern is with our repression of the demands that moral and religious ideals make on us. Jung does recognise the mechanisms of repression, and their role in building up the personal unconscious, but the collective unconscious he sees as a fundamental ontological fact about human nature, not something simply created by our desire to not recognise it. However, even here the contrast is not as sharp as it might at first seem. For the unconscious in Jung is probably best understood not simply as the unknown, but as that aspect of ourselves that we cannot or will not get into clear focus. (As one commentator has put it: “unconsciousness, for Jung, describes the quality of a life that is lived but not yet reflectively known.” Roger Brooke, Jung and Phenomenology, London: Routledge, 1991, p. 124 ) And there is a sense in Jung of an imperative to individuation – to the active taking of responsibility for all of what we are. This may not be so far removed from Kierkegaard’s notion of despair being the failure to fully acknowledge the polarities which constitute our being, of which we cannot be simply or wholly unaware. Teleological and non-reductive view of the psyche. In contrast to most schools of 20th Century psychology (including, for all their other differences, Psychoanalysis, Behaviourism and contemporary Cognitive Science) Jung rejects the notion that the psyche can be understood reductively – in terms of the supposedly more fundamental truths of the natural sciences. “The modern preference for physical grounds of explanation leads...to a ‘psychology without a psyche’ – I mean to the view that the psyche is nothing but a product of biochemical processes.” Jung, ‘The Basic Postulates of Analytical Psychology’ in his Modern Man in Search of a Soul (London: Routlegde, 1984) p.207. Also in Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, trans R.F.C. Hull, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960) p. 344 (CW 8, para 680) In contrast to what he acknowledges to be the characteristic “modern” view of psychology, Jung recommends that we “consider the possibility of a ‘psychology with the psyche’ – that is, of a field of study based on the assumption of an autonomous psyche.” Ibid p. 208. (CW 10, p. 344, para 681) Although neither Kierkegaard nor Jung attempts to solve the mind-body problem, Kierkegaard obviously, like Jung, rejects any kind of natural-scientific reductionism and presupposes the autonomy of psychological explanation. One aspect of this anti-scientism is that both thinkers endorse a teleological view of the psyche. One of the central differences between Freud and Jung is that Jung insisted that the psyche must be understood as being oriented towards goals. Freud, with his scientistic orientation, rejected teleology in favour of (in principle) mechanistic explanations. In practice, this meant that he traced neuroses back to early childhood traumas. Jung agreed that sometimes one needed to be freed from the tyranny of the past, but he focussed more on patients who, without any particular backward-looking cause, found themselves oppressed by their inability to move forward to a meaningful future. Hence the tendency of Jungian analysts to specialise in the “mid-life crisis” of people who have achieved the standard social goals of establishing a career, family life etc, but who then find themselves oppressed by a sense of emptiness. See, e.g. J. Hollis, The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife, Toronto: Inner City Books, 1993 Kierkegaard, of course, shares this teleological perspective; as noted above, his investigation of the unconscious presupposes a teleological understanding of the self. Individuation and Becoming a Self. For both Kierkegaard and Jung, the ultimate telos for each of us is to become a self. Kierkegaard sets this out in the famous formulation at the start of Sickness Unto Death; a self is a synthesis of psychological factors (“the infinite and the finite...the temporal and the eternal...freedom and necessity” SKS 11, 129 / SUD, 13 ); not just a passive synthesis, but an active process of consciously holding these factors together in creative tension – which is itself only possible through relating to God (“The power that established” the self. SKS 11, 130 / SUD, 14 ) But this is a goal to be achieved, not something that we just automatically are. “Considered in this way, a human being is still not a self.” SKS 11, 129 / SUD, 13 Jung too sees selfhood as the telos of the human person – failure to achieve which can bring neurosis or depression even to those who have achieved the more conventionally recognised goals of success in career, family life etc. The self, for Jung is the totality of the psyche (though he also sometimes talks of it as the organising centre of that totality): [T]he personality as a total phenomenon does not coincide with the ego, that is, with the conscious personality, but forms an entity that has to be distinguished from the ego…I have suggested calling the total personality, which, though present, cannot be fully known, the self. The ego is...subordinate to the self and is related to it like a part to the whole. C.G. Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, trans R.F.C. Hull, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959, p. 5 (CW 9.ii; paras. 8 & 9) The self in that sense exists, even while we are unconscious of it; but to achieve selfhood is to integrate the various aspects of the self, to consciously take them up as parts of who one is. One could perhaps say that for both Kierkegaard and Jung, one starts as a potential self, and has the task of fully becoming the self one can be. For Kierkegaard the failure to integrate and balance the various aspects of the personality leads to despair in its various forms. (“Possibility’s Despair is to lack Necessity...Necessity’s Despair is to Lack Possibility” SKS 11, 151, 153 / SUD, 35, 37 etc.) So in Sickness he sets out a schematic typology of persons, distinguished by which of their potentials they are overstressing and which they are neglecting. (The aesthete lost in imagination unconnected to reality; the “bourgeois philistine” lacking any imaginative sense for alternative possibilities etc. See e.g. SKS 11, 152-3, 156-7 / SUD, 36-7; 41-2 ) For Jung also, the process of individuation involves the recognition and integration of those aspects of one’s personality that have been left relatively underdeveloped, but which are necessary to complement the more developed and acknowledged aspects of it: [T]he unconscious processes stand in a complementary relation to the conscious mind. I expressly use the word “complementary” and not “contrary” because conscious and unconscious are not necessarily in opposition to one another, but complement one another to form a totality, which is the self… The self is a quantity that is supraordinate to the conscious ego. It embraces not only the conscious, but also the unconscious psyche, and is therefore, so to speak, a personality which we also are. C.G. Jung, ‘The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious’ in his Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, trans R.F.C. Hull, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966, p. 177 (CW 7: para. 274) This connects Jung’s explorations of the unconscious to his psychological typology. He distinguishes ideal types “Ideal” in the sense in which a scientific model is an “idealization”, abstracting from the more complex forms that actually exist. It is not, as we shall see, in any way an ideal goal, something one should strive to attain. along two main axes – introvert/extrovert and “rational”/”irrational” It should be noted that Jung is using these terms in a technical sense; there is nothing necessarily pejorative about “irrational” in this usage., the rational being further broken down into “thinking” and “feeling” functions and the “irrational” into “sensation” and intuition”. No one wholly conforms to these ideal types, and a healthy personality needs to include a balance of all these factors (though not necessarily in a precisely equal fashion). The less emphasised aspects of the personality will tend to get pushed into the unconscious and assume crude and undeveloped forms there. (Becoming what Jung calls “the shadow”.) But as complementary to the over-developed functions, they need to be integrated into the personality. A “rational” type needs to recognise his or her “irrational” side; a “rational” type who is predominantly oriented to thinking needs to recognise the complementary “feeling” aspect within the rational; an extrovert needs to recognise the introverted aspect of him or her-self. Thus Jung’s description of psychological types isn’t simply a set of idealisations which real people may approximate to. For the closer real people come to approximating to these ideals the more pathologically one-sided they will be. Thus Jung’s typology, like Kierkegaard’s, is a gallery of pathological possibilities. The similarities between Jung’s and Kierkegaard’s typologies are not merely structural but substantive as well (though of course they don’t simply map onto one another in any neat and tidy way.) The best known aspect of Jung’s account is his description of introversion and extraversion. The ideal (and therefore one-sidedly) extraverted type is focussed on externals and lacking self-awareness. “His whole consciousness looks outward, because the essential and decisive determination always comes from outside.” Psychological Types (op cit) p. 334 (CW 6, para 563) The danger here is that “a too extraverted attitude can also become so oblivious of the subject that the latter is sacrificed completely to so-called objective demands...” Ibid, p. 335 (para 564) This means that the neglected introverted side of the personality is largely repressed, becoming unconscious, and is thus only able to develop in a crude way. But it makes itself felt, nonetheless, through a process of compensation for the one-sidedly extraverted nature of the conscious personality. But as a result, “the unconscious demands of the extravert have an exclusively primitive, infantile, egocentric character.” Ibid, p. 338 (para 571) Jung’s analysis of the pathologies of the one-sided extravert bear striking similarities to the critique that runs throughout Kierkegaard’s whole work of those who, absorbed in externals (whether sensuality, work, duty or intellectual speculation) lack inwardness. Such people may “use their capacities, amass money, carry on secular enterprises, calculate shrewdly etc, perhaps make a name in history, but themselves they are not; spiritually speaking, they have no self...” SKS 11, 150-51 / SUD, 35 And Kierkegaard, like Jung, is well aware that the repressed aspects of the personality do not simply go away: “the anxiety that characterises spiritlessness is recognized precisely by its spiritless sense of security. Nevertheless, anxiety lies underneath; likewise despair also lies underneath.” SKS 11, 159 / SUD, 44 Jung insists that there are also corresponding dangers in a purely (one-sidedly) introverted attitude, which turns away from the outside world (“the object”): As a result of the ego’s unadapted relation to the object...a compensatory attitude arises in the unconscious, which makes itself felt as an absolute and irrepressible tie to the object...It is now the unconscious that takes care of the relation to the object, and it does so in a way that is calculated to bring the [conscious ego’s] illusion of power and [its] fantasy of superiority to utter ruin. In consequence, the ego’s efforts to detach itself from the object and get it under control become all the more violent. In the end it surrounds itself with a regular system of defences...for the purpose of preserving at least the illusion of superiority. Psychological Types, p. 378-9 (para 626) Kierkegaard certainly has more sympathy with the introverted than with the extraverted character. But he is also acutely aware of the dangers of excessive introversion. One example of this would be the aesthetic dreamer who looses reality by drifting too far into fantasy. SKS 11, 152-3 / SUD, 36-7 Another is what Kierkegaard describes as “inclosing reserve”. This is the attitude of a self, shut up as behind a locked door, that is in despair because it cannot (will not) express itself in the world or to others. In Kierkegaard’s sketch, this character may be “a university graduate, husband, father, even an exceptionally competent public officeholder...” SKS 11, 178 / SUD, 63-4 But this is a facade – what Jung calls a persona. It is hollow since the “inclosingly reserved” person does not fully inhabit or put himself into, these relations to the outside world. But his self cannot flourish in this self-imposed isolation, for the need to express itself in relation to the world is a crucial part of the self. Moreover, Kierkegaard suggests that such a person may (as Jung would expect) become overpowered by a crude compensation. The despair “may break through” with the result that “a person in this kind of despair may hurl himself into life...a restless spirit who wants to forget...Or he will seek oblivion in sensuality.” SKS 11, 180 / SUD, 65-6 A crude immersion in the external world attempts to compensate for the excessive introversion of a character whose isolation has become intolerable. Subjectivity and Existential Engagement. Kierkegaard’s emphasis on “subjectivity” is a call to serious self-examination. “Truth is subjectivity”, SKS 7, 173-228 / CUP1, 189-251 in that the truth about oneself can only be grasped in a mood of serious self-concern, not in one of detached intellectual inquiry. (An attitude that may be adopted precisely in order to evade the difficulty and pain of real self-knowledge.) This is compatible with the recognition that “subjectivity is untruth” also; SKS 7, 189 / CUP1, 207 that what one encounters in one’s struggle to self-knowledge is precisely one’s tendency to self-deception, to denial of (parts of) what one is. Jung also held these views together; indeed their conjunction is probably a necessary presupposition for any serious practice of psychotherapy. For a Psychoanalytic or Analytical Psychological “cure” is not something that can be performed by the therapist on the patient (as a doctor might set a broken leg) but can only be achieved through the joint efforts of therapist and patient, with most of the effort coming from the latter. For both Freud and Jung, what is needed is not just that the patient acquires an intellectual recognition of the source of his or her problems, but that he or she “works through” See S. Freud, ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working Through’, in the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed and trans J. Strachey with A. Freud, Vol 12, London: Hogarth Press, 1966 the issues in an intensely personal way. But Jungian analysis differs from classical Freudian analysis in that it typically takes place face to face, as an interchange between analyst and analysand, while in the classic Freudian mode, the analyst sits out of sight of the analysand, an (ideally) detached, objective observer. For Jung, the “counter-transference”, the emotional involvement of the analyst with the patient, is as important as the “transference” itself, in which the patient projects his or her feelings onto the analyst. See C. Perry, ‘Transference and Countertransference’ in The Cambridge Companion to Jung, ed P. Young-Eisendrath and T. Dawson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edition, 2008 As Kierkegaard reminds us, no one – analyst, scientist, metaphysician – escapes from being an existing human being, and, for Jung, the analyst cannot even be effective qua analyst if he or she retreats into a position of detached objectivity. But the heart of the analytic work has to be done by the analysand, and this cannot be achieved if he or she adopts an attitude of detached observation to him or her-self. Jung gives a particularly good illustration of this; an example that is, moreover, deeply Kierkegaaardian, as it involves an abstract intellectualising by a patient, motivated precisely by a desire to repress an uncomfortable ethical insight: [A] highly intelligent young man...had worked out a detailed analysis of his own neurosis...He...asked me to tell him why he was not cured...I was forced to grant him that, if it were only a question of insight into the causal connections of a neurosis, he should in all truth be cured. Since he was not, I supposed that this must be due to the fact that his attitude to life was somehow fundamentally wrong... Jung then discovered that a poor school-teacher who loved him had cruelly deprived herself to indulge the young man in...visits to pleasure-resorts. His want of conscience was the cause of his neurosis, and it is not hard to see why scientific understanding failed to help him. His fundamental error lay in his moral attitude. He found my way of looking at the question shockingly unscientific...He supposed that by invoking scientific thought he could spirit away the immorality which he himself could not stomach. ‘Basic Postulates of Analytical Psychology’ in Modern Man in Search of a Soul (op cit), 223-4 (Also in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (op cit) pp. 355-356. (CW 8, para 685) A wonderfully “Kierkegaardian” case study! Religious concerns The final, but centrally important connection to be noted between Kierkegaard and Jung is that both of them saw their psychological insights fitting into a religious context. Despite the efforts of some (over) ingenious commentators to downplay his religious concerns, I take it to be obvious that Kierkegaard’s thought is ultimately and indeed pervasively religious. Specifically, it is crucial for Kierkegaard that the self can only become whole – its potentially centrifugal elements can only hold together - if it is properly related to God. Jung’s psychology also had a centrally religious aspect to it. His attitude differed sharply from that of Freud, who took for granted the falsity of all religious beliefs, saw them as delusions standing in the way of a proper understanding of our nature and situation, and was professionally interested only in why such obviously irrational beliefs came to be held. See Freud, The Future of an Illusion (Standard Edition (op cit) Vol 21, 1961) Jung, on the contrary, saw religion as an expression of something fundamental to human nature. “[T]he human psyche, from time immemorial, has been shot through with religious feelings and ideas. Whoever cannot see this aspect of the human psyche is blind, and whoever chooses to explain it away, or to ‘enlighten’ it away, has no sense of reality.” ‘Freud and Jung: Contrasts’ in C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (op cit) 140. Also in Jung, Freud and Psychoanalysis, trans R.C.F. Hull, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961, p. 339, (CW 4, para 781) At the same time, just as Kierkegaard was intensely conscious of the way that Christian concepts (and indeed ethico-religious concepts in general) had been banalised and deprived of substantial meaning, so Jung was acutely aware of the contemporary sense of the “death of God”. Medieval faith “no longer seems real to us, even in our dreams. Natural science has long ago torn this lovely veil to shreds...modern man has lost all the metaphysical certainties of his medieval brother.” ‘The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man’ in Modern Man in Search of a Soul, p. 235. Also in Civilisation in Transition (op cit) p.81. (CW 10, paras 163-4.) But the religious need persists, however repressed or deprived of culturally established symbolic articulation, and that need is what Jung saw the discovery of oneself (one’s self) and the individuation process as meeting: Among all my patients in the second half of life...there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that to which the living religions of every age had given their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook. This, of course, has nothing whatever to do with a particular creed or membership of a church. ‘Psychotherapists or the Clergy?’ In Modern Man in Search of a Soul, p.264 Also in Psychology and Religion: West and East, trans R.C.F. Hull, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963, p.334. (CW 11, para 509) II: Jung’s Response to Kierkegaard Given all that they have in common, it is surprising that Jung has little to say explicitly about Kierkegaard, and that little is mostly hostile. But during Jung’s student days in the 1890s, Kierkegaard was still little known outside of Scandinavia. He began to attract more attention in the German-speaking world after 1900, but it wasn’t until after World War One that his became a household name amongst the intelligentsia. By then, Jung’s main ideas were already formed and, though he considerably elaborated on them, he showed little interest in considering new perspectives from philosophy or theology. This was despite the fact that some other eminent psychiatrists, such as Ludwig Binswanger (1881-1966) (who had studied with Jung) acknowledged Kierkegaard’s influence, See R. Thompte, ‘Historical Introduction’ to CA, xviii and that the vogue for Kierkegaard in German philosophical circles really began with Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) who had been an influential psychiatrist before turning to philosophy. There are precisely two references to Kierkegaard in Jung’s 18 Volume Collected Works. The first occurs in the important essay ‘Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious’ (1934, revised 1954). There Jung considers how many Europeans, finding the symbolic language of Christianity worn bare and reduced to pious cliché by its familiarity, but needing some means by which to articulate their religious needs “become attracted by the symbols of the East...just as once before the heart and mind of antiquity were gripped by Christian ideas.” He goes on: There are many Europeans who began by surrendering completely to the influence of the Christian symbol until they landed themselves in a Kierkegaardian neurosis, or whose relation to God, owing to the progressive impoverishment of symbolism, developed into an unbearably sophisticated I-You relationship – only to fall victim in turn to the magic and novelty of Eastern symbols.” C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, trans. R.F.C. Hull, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968, p. 8 (CW 9.i;. para. 11) Jung does not explain what he means by a “Kierkegaardian neurosis” (the sort of neurosis that Kierkegaard analysed, or the sort of neurosis from which Jung supposed him to suffer?); nor does he show any awareness that Kierkegaard was centrally concerned to respond to precisely the cultural situation Jung himself identifies in that passage – the banalisation of Christian concepts through the fiction of a “Christian” society or culture. The second reference to Kierkegaard comes in a rather similar context, in Jung’s ‘Psychological Commentary on the Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation’. Here again, Jung is contrasting “Western” and “Eastern” mentalities: “For [the Western mind] man is small inside; he is next to nothing; moreover, as Kierkegaard says, ‘before God, man is always wrong’. By fear, reticence, promises, submission, self-abasement, good deeds and praise, he propitiates the great power which is not himself but totaliter alter, the wholly Other, altogether perfect...” C.G. Jung¸ Psychology and Religion: West and East (op cit), p. 482 (CW 11, para. 772) This reference is a bit more precise – it shows at least some awareness by Jung of a specific Kierkegaardian text. (The sermon ‘The upbuilding that lies in the thought that, in relation to God, we are always in the wrong’, which concludes Either/Or. SKS 3, 320-332 / EO2, 339-354) And it gives us a clearer sense of what he might have meant by a “Kierkegaardian neurosis”. It would seem to be something much like what Hegel calls “the Unhappy Consciousness” See G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977) pp. 126-138 ( paras 206-230) – the attitude of someone who projects all that is of value outside himself and onto a purely external deity; before whom he then feels weak, sinful and unworthy. This analysis was taken up by Feuerbach, who extended it, as Hegel did not, to Christianity as such, not just to a particular phase of Christianity. From Feuerbach, this theory of religion as alienation was of course taken up - more or less taken for granted - by Marx and Freud as the basis for their critiques of religion. Jung is closer to Hegel than to Feuerbach; he is far more positive about religion in general than Freud, and is willing indeed to find important psychological symbolism in Christianity in particular. However, he seems to find the Feuerbachian analysis convincing so far as some aspects at least of Christianity are concerned, and to see Kierkegaard simply as a preacher of this alienated and alienating religiosity. At a number of places in his personal correspondence, Jung mentions Kierkegaard – usually in critical, even scathing, terms. He says at one point that he finds him “simply insupportable” C.G. Jung, Letters, Vol 1 Selected and Edited by G. Adler and A. Jaffe, trans R.F.C. Hull, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973) p. 231 (To R. Pannwitz, 27th March 1937) and at another, describes him as a neurotic. Ibid,, p. 332. To .A. Kunzli, 16th March, 1943.) He does admit that “Kierkegaard was a stimulating and pioneering force precisely because of his neurosis” but then goes on to say that his “grizzling” or “moaning” enabled him to “settle everything in the study” so that he “need not do it in life.” Ibid This patronising and insensitive comment can, sadly, be paralleled by comparably crude remarks on other philosophers – e.g. “Heidegger’s modus philosophandi is neurotic through and through, and is ultimately rooted in his psychic crankiness.” Ibid, p. 331 (To A. Kunzli, 28th February, 1943 In another letter Jung announces that “Kierkegaard’s view that animals have no fear is totally disproved by the facts. There are whole species which consist of nothing but fear. A creature that loses its fear is condemned to death.” Ibid, p. 399. To Pastor F. Buri, 10th December, 1945 But although Kierkegaard (Haufniensis) does claim in The Concept of Anxiety that “anxiety is not found in the beast”, this claim follows from his careful distinction between fear (which refers to “something definite”) and anxiety (“freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility”). SKS 4, 348 / CA, 42 Kierkegaard is clearly not denying the obvious facts about animal fear that Jung cites; and Jung’s impression that he was shows that Jung can have had only the haziest idea of what Kierkegaard was saying in The Concept of Anxiety, to which the distinction between anxiety and fear is, of course, crucial. It isn’t clear from these few references what, if anything, Jung had read of Kierkegaard; he had at least enough sense of him to find him seriously annoying, but his few off-hand comments tell us more about Jung himself than about Kierkegaard. Certainly they show little serious understanding of Kierkegaard on Jung’s part; nor do they show Jung making any serious attempt to reach such an understanding. This is puzzling (not to say sad) just because there are, as noted above, so many important commonalities in the thought of Kierkegaard and of Jung. III Religious Differences Given all that Kierkegaard and Jung had in common, why was Jung so dismissive and/or hostile towards Kierkegaard? I think the most plausible answer to this question, although I am being (unavoidably) a little speculative here, can be found in their attitudes to religion. For it is here that I think we can find, for all their commonalities, the deepest points of contention between them. And these (as well as purely contingent factors such as simple ignorance and/or misunderstanding of Kierkegaard on Jung’s part) may help to explain Jung’s attitude. That Kierkegaard and Jung are both essentially religious psychologists is one of the most important things they have in common, but religion is, notoriously, at least as prone to divide as to unite, and there are substantial differences between Jung’s and Kierkegaard’s religious ideas. (Though, as I shall try to show, these are not perhaps as great as they might at first appear.) One can start with a biographical speculation. Jung’s father, as noted above, was a pastor in the Swiss Reformed (Calvinist) Church, in which the young Carl Jung was naturally raised. In his autobiography, C.G Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffe. New York, Vintage Books, Random House, 1965. This book contains Chapters written by Jung, and others written up by Jaffe from the transcripts of interviews she did with Jung; the whole being then edited by Jaffe. So it is not exactly a straightforward autobiography, and should be treated with some caution. (See Shamdasani (op cit) pp. 23-4.) But it would be extravagant to suggest that it can be dismissed or ignored. Jung records his disillusion with the Church, which seemed to him to be spiritually empty, a place of mechanically observed routines. Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp. 45-6; 53-5 He was baffled by what he saw as the contradictions in the official Christian doctrines he was taught. Ibid pp. 46-7; 57-9 Though he had a strongly religious sensibility, he could find nothing of the terror and mystery of his religious experience in either the teachings or the activities of the Church. Ibid, pp. 47-8 And he came to believe that his father had really lost his own faith and was desperately trying to deny that to himself while going through the motions of a pastor’s professional existence. Ibid, pp. 52-3;55 In later life, Jung often expressed appreciation for the rich symbolism of Catholic liturgy, imagery and ritual, which he saw as performing a psychologically valuable role which the more iconoclastic Protestant Churches had given up on. For instance, ‘The Symbolic Life’ in Jung, The Symbolic Life: Miscellaneous Writings, trans R.C.F. Hull, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976, pp. 267-76. (CW 18; paras. 608-634) See also Ann Lammers, In God’s Shadow: The Collaboration of C.G. Jung and Victor White (Paulist Press, New York, 1994) 132-5. Focusing on Jung’s relationship with the English Dominican theologian Victor White, this is one of the best studies of Jung’s attitude to orthodox Christianity. He did sometimes continue to refer to himself as a “Protestant,” See e.g. ‘Psychotherapists or the Clergy?’ ’in Modern Man in Search of a Soul (op cit) 273, 281. Also in Psychology and Religion (op cit) pp. 340, 347 (CW 11, paras 522, 537) for he felt that his religious sensibility had been inescapably marked by his upbringing and heritage; moreover he saw himself as one who, in the spirit of Luther’s original revolt, stood alone before God, without ecclesiastical intervention. “[a] Protestant [is] a man who is defenceless against God and no longer shielded by walls or communities, he has a unique spiritual opportunity for immediate religious experience.” ‘Psychology and Religion’ in Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East (op cit) p. 49 (CW 11, para 86) However, his attitude to the mainstream Protestant Churches remained generally unsympathetic, conditioned by his own childhood experience. The wave of interest in Kierkegaard in post-World War One Europe had both philosophical and theological sources. Kierkegaard was an important influence not only on Jaspers and Heidegger, but on Karl Barth (1886-1968), and the radical “Crisis Theology” or “Neo-Orthodoxy” with which he was associated. Barth was Swiss and a prominent public figure; he and Jung were the only Swiss intellectuals of their day to enjoy real international fame and status. Jung refers to him occasionally, but generally with suspicion. In a letter he writes: “I wonder which devil Karl Barth (with his absolute God) worships in practice. It’s very likely one of them has him by the collar.” Letters, Vol 1, p. 58 (To Albert Oeri, 4th January, 1929) Although Barth was concerned to shake the Protestant (and especially the Reformed) Church out of the stupor that had so depressed the adolescent Jung, it seems that the mature Jung associated Barth with a spiritually arid Calvinist orthodoxy. If, as seems possible, Jung’s understanding of Kierkegaard was filtered, at least in good part, through broadly Barthian channels (that is to say, he understood Kierkegaard to a large extent as an intellectual ancestor of Barth), then that might explain his intensely negative reaction to Kierkegaard. Jung may have found that Kierkegaard carried with him too many deeply personal connotations – reminders of the dispiriting ecclesiastical background to his own childhood – for him to read Kierkegaard with any sympathy or open-mindedness. Instead a sort of allergic reaction, a defensive gesture of repudiation, may have been triggered by the association of Kierkegaard, via Barth, with his own religious upbringing. This is speculation, though I think it has some plausibility. We can get back to somewhat firmer ground by considering the actual differences between Jung’s and Kierkegaard’s religious ideas. These are certainly real, though not perhaps as great as they might at first appear. A first difference is that Kierkegaard is a committedly Christian thinker, and clearly differentiates (genuine) Christianity from all other religious outlooks. Jung, on the other hand, has an equally respectful interest in many different religions, and an exclusive commitment to none. (And he often shows a particular interest in and sympathy for marginal, esoteric or heretical movements, like Alchemy and Gnosticism.) Secondly, Jung has often been charged with a sort of theological anti-realism; many have wondered about whether God, for Jung, is ultimately anything more than the self. The self in the rich Jungian sense explicated above, of course; not just the ego. On this view, Jung, like Freud, is a reductionist, although a much subtler one. For him, there are genuinely religious needs and impulses in the human psyche, which are not just disguised expressions of more real forces such as infantile sexuality; but those religious impulses do not in the end refer to anything extra-psychical. The language of relation to God would thus expresses no more than a relationship to oneself. Martin Buber (1878-1965) criticises Jung along these lines in his essay ‘Religion and Modern Thinking’ Originally published in the German journal Merkur in 1952; reprinted in M. Buber, Eclipse of God (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, Humanities Press International, 1988). The first half of the essay deals with Sartre and Heidegger; the second half with Jung. I have focused on Buber’s critique of Jung as it has acquired something of the status of a locus classicus; and because Buber, though (as we shall see) he was himself critical of Kierkegaard, was also deeply influenced by him. Buber’s critique of Jung is distinctively Kierkegardian in spirit, and so is particularly useful for our purposes here. According to Buber, Jung “conceives of God not as a Being or Reality to which a psychical content corresponds, but rather as this content itself.” So, for him, “that which experiences the religious, the soul, experiences simply itself” Buber, Eclipse of God, pp. 80, 84 A third point of difference is that Jung rejects the traditional idea of God as perfect. Rather, according to Jung, God, like us, has a dark “shadow” side, an element of evil within Himself. An idea most fully addressed in Jung’s Answer to Job. (In Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East (op cit) pp. 357-470 (CW 11; paras 553-758) Of course, what one makes of this claim depends on what one makes of the realism issue. Is Jung’s account of God’s shadow a sort of Gnostic theology in which the really existing, extra-psychic God has an evil side, or is it merely a description of the God-image as it exists in the human psyche? (Or, more specifically, a description of “God” (Jahveh), the literary character presented in the Bible, which is the primary form of the God-image in the West.) But in any case, according to Jung’s critics, this idea leads to a fourth, this time ethical, difference between Jung and traditional orthodoxy. For on this view, Jung rejects the idea that we should strive to become good and eschew evil (“be ye perfect as your father in heaven is perfect” Mt. 5: 48), and proposes instead the goal of becoming integrated, which includes an acceptance of the evil as well as the good within one’s nature. As Buber puts it, “The soul which is integrated in the Self as the unification in an all-encompassing wholeness of the opposites, especially the opposites good and evil, dispenses with the conscience as the court which distinguishes and decides between the right and the wrong.” Buber, Eclipse of God, p. 87 Furthermore, all of this is for Jung an intra-psychic event. Buber complains that Jung is concerned only with the process of integration within the self, and fails to see it as essentially related to others. “[T]he self, even if it has integrated all of its unconscious elements, remains this single self, confined within itself.” For Buber, by contrast, what is needed is “a genuine contact with the existing being who meets me...full and direct reciprocity with him. [A way that] leads from the soul which places reality in itself to the soul that enters reality.” Ibid, p. 89 Although the differences between Kierkegaard and Jung are real, they can easily be exaggerated. On the first point, Kierkegaard does insist on the distinctiveness of the “paradoxical” religiousness of Christianity, but he remains respectful of non-Christian religiousness (the “Religiousness A” of the Postscript, exemplified by his beloved Socrates). Non-Christian religions are not so much false as partial in their grasp of the truth; and Socrates had a genuine God-relationship, however limited. Though religiousness A may be inadequate from a strictly Christian standpoint, its attainment is a significant spiritual accomplishment, a large step beyond the aesthetic or merely ethical standpoints on the way to becoming whole. And Jung, for all his refusal to treat Christianity as having a special status, continued to call himself a Christian and even specifically a Protestant. (“I am definitely inside Christianity...I am a Protestant in my soul and body.” Letters, Vol 2, 1951-1961. Selected and Edited by G. Adler and A. Jaffe, trans R.F.C. Hull (Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1973) p. 334 (To Rev. H.L. Philip, 26th Oct 1956) ) For all his interest in certain aspects of Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, he often claims that as a European, his religious outlook is necessarily shaped by Christianity, and that he can approach Eastern religious traditions only as an interested outsider. See e.g. Psychology and Religion: West and East (op cit) pp. 532-537, 553-557. (CW 11; paras. 865-876, 902-907) Of course, this is a remark about himself, and his historical/cultural conditioning, not about the intrinsic value or disvalue of any particular tradition, and so a genuine difference between him and Kierkegaard remains. As for the issue of realism, Jung’s position is not, I think, as clearly anti-realist as has often been supposed. His statements on this matter are often vague and sometimes apparently conflicting, “As for his personal religious convictions, Jung made such apparently blatantly contradictory statements that even his closest students tend to retire in discouragement with the attempt to follow him.” M. Nagy, Philosophical Issues in the Psychology of C.G. Jung (op cit) p. 2 but there is an underlying basic consistency in his thought. Although he often describes himself as a scientist, an “empiricist”, his philosophical position is basically Kantian. See Shamdasani (op cit) pp. 163-202; Lammers (op cit) pp. 114-16; Nagy (op cit) pp. 11-36 We cannot know what either the physical or the psychical is in itself, but we can study the ways in which they appear as phenomena to consciousness. Hence Jung sometimes describes himself as a “phenomenologist” (see e.g. ‘Psychology and Religion’ in Psychology and Religion: West and East (op cit) p. 2 (CW 11, para. 2) – which is really less misleading than “empiricist”. See R. Brookes, Jung and Phenomenology (op cit) for a detailed reading of Jung as (in practice, and despite various theoretical inconsistencies) a Phenomenologist. (This does not conflict with Jung’s essential Kantianism, as Phenomenology is itself a distinctively post-Kantian philosophy.) This is what both the physicist and the psychologist do. Metaphysical claims about the ultimate nature of that which appears phenomenally to us, or about realities that altogether transcend experience, can be neither affirmed nor denied. “Psychological truth by no means excludes metaphysical truth, though psychology, as a science, has to hold aloof from all metaphysical assertions.” C.G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2nd edition, 1967) p. 231 (CW 5, para 344) It should be noted, though, that Jung does not claim that metaphysical statements are, as the Logical Positivists would say, meaningless; but he regards them as lying outside his competence as a scientist and doctor. Describing “metaphysicians” as those who “think they know about unknowable things in the Beyond” he continues, “I have never ventured to declare that such things do not exist; but neither have I ventured to suppose that any statement of mine could in any way touch them...” ‘Religion and Psychology: Reply to Martin Buber’ in The Symbolic Life (op cit) p. 664 (CW 18; para. 1503) What he can assert is the reality of the God-image in the psyche, and the vital necessity for individuation of orienting oneself properly to it; but he can neither affirm nor deny the reality of an “objective” God corresponding to that image (or indeed, distorted or falsified by it). A real difference between Jung and Kierkegaard remains. For Kierkegaard it is only through relating to the genuinely extra-psychical reality of God that we can be made whole; the ontological question of the ultimately reality of God cannot be bracketed, as it is tied up with the existential issues of becoming a self. So, although Jung does not deny the extra-psychic reality of God, he does still differ from Kierkegaard who thinks it necessary to positively affirm it. Again, though, the difference can be made to seem starker than it is. For Kierkegaard also dismisses any merely abstract or speculative approach to God and, like Kant and Jung, rejects the traditional metaphysical ‘proofs” of God. See SKS 4, 244-249 / PF, 39-44; SKS 7, 186, 304-306 / CUP1, 203-204, 333-335 A genuine relation to or knowledge of God is an existential or subjective one; which means that we relate to God only via the ways in which we are able to apprehend Him (i.e. through our God-images.) For Kierkegaard, though, it is crucial that what we relate to via our subjectivity is the real God, whereas Jung is content to set that question aside. This connects to Buber’s complaint that, more generally, Jung makes individuation a purely intra-psychical event, unconnected to any relationship with a real other. For Buber God is such an other, but so, crucially are other finite selves, and he criticise Kierkegaard for neglecting the importance of our relationships with finite others as well as with God. Taking Kierkegaard’s own broken engagement as an example, Buber writes “God wants us to come to him by means of the Reginas he has created and not by renunciation of them.” Buber, ‘The Question to the Single One’ in M. Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. R.G. Smith, London: Fontana, 1961, p. 73 This criticism may be rather unfair, for whether or not Kierkegaard was right to break off with Regine Olsen, he was acutely aware that he was acting as “an exception”, not proposing a policy of renunciation as generally valid. But it is interesting to find that Jung criticises Kierkegaard in precisely the same terms in one of his letters: “when God appeared to him in the shape of ‘Regina’ he took to his heels. It was too terrible for him to have to subordinate his autocratism to the love of another person.” Letters, Vol 2, p. 145 (To Pastor W. Bremi, 26.12.53) This itself suggests (again setting aside the question of whether Jung is fair to Kierkegaard here) that Jung does not deny that psychological wholeness may, or may in part, come about through the relationship to another person. And, as is shown by the case noted above of the intellectually acute but ethically clueless young man who was sponging off his impoverished lover, Jung was well aware that a bad relationship to another can cause, or preclude the healing of, a neurosis (a mis-relation within oneself). Nevertheless there is at least a difference of emphasis here. Buber stresses the ways in which the self can become whole through relations to others, while Jung is mainly concerned with the need to establish a healthy self-relation in order to then be able to relate well to others, instead of simply projecting one’s inner conflicts onto them. But it does seem to me that these insights can be regarded as complementary, which makes the complete failure of mutual understanding which characterised the Jung-Buber debate particularly sad. (Similarly, Buber stresses the ways in which we can relate to God through relating properly to others, while Kierkegaard emphasises how we need to relate rightly to God in order to relate rightly to other people. Again, it doesn’t seem to me that we need be forced to an either-or here.) That Jung sees God as having an evil side to Him is, on the face of it, a serious divergence from Kierkegaard’s view. For the latter, in the words of his favourite Biblical quotation, God is “the father of lights, with whom there is no change or shadow of variation”, and from whom “every good gift and every perfect gift”, proceeds. Jas 1:17. Kierkegaard uses this as the text for several of his Upbuilding Discourses. (SKS 5, 41-56; 129-142; 143-158 / EUD, 31-48; 125-139; 141-58) Following a long tradition of Christian Platonism, Kierkegaard sees God as “the Good” in the single-minded willing of which “Purity of heart” consists. SKS 8, 138ff / UDVS, 24 ff Jung on the contrary rejects the Platonic/Augustinian view that evil is a lack of goodness, rather than something real in itself. The traditional doctrine he took (falsely, I think) to involve a trivialisation or glossing over of the reality of evil.”One could hardly call the things that have happened, and still happen, in the concentration camps of the dictator states an ‘accidental lack of perfection’ – it would sound like a mockery.” Jung, Aion (op cit) p. 53 (CW 9ii, sec 96) Jung at times seems to argue that the evil which so clearly characterises the world must be traced back to some evil in the creator of that world. “In a monotheistic religion everything that goes against God must be traced back to God himself.” ‘A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity’ in Psychology and Religion: West and East (op cit) 169 (CW 11; para. 249) This kind of argument, though, would go against Jung’s own rejection of “metaphysics”, as it attempts to argue to the nature of God from observations of the world. Jung is on stronger ground if his remarks about the evil in God’s nature are taken as remarks about the God-image. For the God of the Bible (in the New Testament as well as the Old) does seem to have a distinctly demonic edge to Him, and the efforts by orthodox theologians to reconcile the goodness of the Biblical God with His violence, from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis to the final apocalypse in Revelation, have a distinctly disingenuous ring to them. Liberal theologians typically set aside the demonic aspects of God as distorted representations of His true nature, but Jung, while maintaining his “official” agnosticism on this issue, “Analysis of the unconscious has long since demonstrated the existence of these powers in the form of archetypal images which, be it noted, are not identical with the corresponding intellectual concepts. One can of course, believe that the concepts of the conscious mind are, through the inspiration of the Holy Ghost direct and correct representations of their metaphysical referent. But this conviction is only possible for one who already possesses the gift of faith.” (‘Religion and Psychology: Reply to Martin Buber’ in The Symbolic Life , p.665 (CW 18,para. 1505) insists on the integrity of the God-image found in the Bible, which he also finds in other myths and religions, and considers to be an archetype deeply rooted in the Collective Unconscious. If Jung is not intending to refer to God’s intrinsic nature, then his claim that God (the God-image) is partly evil does not directly contradict Kierkegaard’s belief that God (in his real, intrinsic nature) is wholly good. But a large difference does remain between them. For Kierkegaard does not even take God-as-represented-in-the Bible to be (partly) evil. This claim might be challenged, for his most famous book, Fear and Trembling, is a meditation on Abraham’s response to one of the more strikingly “demonic” commands of the Biblical God – that he sacrifice Isaac. But although Johannes de silentio does entertain the possibility of God suspending the ethical and commanding the killing of the innocent, he is concerned with the existential horror of Abraham’s predicament, not with judging God to be evil. That the work is pseudonymous is worth remembering. I shalln’t attempt to consider the complex question of how Kierkegaard’s own attitude relates to that of Johannes. But Johannes himself, it should be noted, comes to no positive conclusion. He repeatedly insists that he cannot understand Abraham (SKS 4, 132, 200 / FT, 26, 112) and even that he is appalled by him. (SKS 4, 153 / FT, 60) Indeed, his emphasis is on Abraham’s faith; he prepares to sacrifice Isaac, not out of terrified submission to arbitrary power, or in a spirit of Dionysian identification with that sublimely amoral power, but in a spirit of trust; that all will ultimately be well, that God, despite all appearances, is not demanding of him something wicked and cruel. Certainly, religion is presented as transcending the merely ethical, and in that, Kierkegaard can be said to take a step in the direction of Jung’s position. But it remains crucial for Kierkegaard, as we saw above, that the teleological aim of the self is towards a real and wholly good God. Jung, however, dismisses such ontological claims as unknowable, and focuses instead on our need to come to terms with the powerfully numinous, but also terrifying, God-image within. It should be stressed though, that this is not a call for us to imitate that terrifying inner deity. (“Be ye therefore evil as your Father is evil.”) Jung’s response to the dark side of the Biblical God, expressed most nakedly in Answer to Job, is one of indignation and anger. Far from recommending that we worship or try to model ourselves on an image of cruel and arbitrary power, he protests vehemently against it. This brings us to the final, ethical, criticism of Jung, that he relativises good and evil. This is, I think, a misunderstanding, though one for which the lack of clarity in Jung’s own language is in part responsible. Lammers says that Jung’s arguments will be found “hopelessly confusing” if we do not make explicit a distinction that is left implicit in his work, between the “evil of myth” – the potentially creative shadow – and the “evil of history” – the actual cruelties and atrocities which people commit and to which Jung responded with as much outrage as anyone. (Lammers, In God’s Shadow (op cit), pp. 180-81 For Jung is by no means attempting to promote an antinomian acceptance of evil as legitimate, or to reject the normative distinction between good and evil. As he says, alluding to, and rejecting, Nietzsche: “Even on the highest peak, we shall never be ‘beyond good and evil’.” ‘A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity’ in Psychology and Religion: West and East (op cit) p. 180 (CW 11; para. 267) Rather, his call to us to integrate our “shadows” has two main aspects. Firstly, we should accept those aspects of ourselves which have been repressed due to social influences, or the accidents of our personal histories, and which are indeed potentially dangerous – but also potentially valuable and life-giving (e.g. sexuality, assertiveness, individual creativity). These need to be integrated with the other aspects of the personality (which does not of course mean that they should take over the personality and then in their turn repress the other aspects); the harm that they may do is more likely to occur if we continue to repress them, and thus leave them to fester in crude, un-integrated forms in the unconscious. This of course, concerns not the integration of what really is evil, but merely of what is conventionally (and too narrowly) labelled as such. But, secondly, Jung does want us to acknowledge our propensity to real evil-doing. To become aware of that, though, is not to celebrate it, but to increase the possibility of bringing it more under conscious control. If it is left unacknowledged, we are in great danger of self-righteousness and of projecting the evil in ourselves onto another, who can then become a convenient scapegoat, an object of persecution. As Lammers puts it, “For Jung, the inclusion of evil and darkness cannot be a blind enactment of the shadow. Rather, it must be a process of becoming conscious of evil, and bearing one’s own share of it.” In God’s Shadow, 174. Lammers notes that Jung’s case against the God of Job is that His arbitrary cruelty is due precisely to His lack of awareness of His shadow. The demand to integrate – that is, to recognise as part of oneself and not project onto others – one’s capacity to do evil, is itself a moral demand, not a license to indulge ones evil tendencies: If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all these projections, then you get an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow...Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow, he has done something real for the world...[The] social problems of today...are mostly so difficult because they are poisoned by mutual projections. How can anyone see straight when he does not even see himself and the darkness he unconsciously carries with him in all his dealings? ‘Psychology and Religion’ in Psychology and Religion: West and East (op cit) p. 83. (CW 11: para. 140) This view does not, as far as I can see, include anything that would not be in principle acceptable to Kierkegaard. It is indeed a position deeply rooted in Christian (and particularly Lutheran) tradition, according to which we are all sinners and need to be deeply aware of the dangers of Phariseeism or moralistic confidence in our own power to do good. What it does lack, of course, is the Lutheran assurance that we are upheld by the grace of a good God, despite our evil. I don’t want to underestimate the importance of that belief for Kierkegaard. But however deep his ultimate divergence from Jung may be, the difference between them is not the difference that would separate Kierkegaard from a Nietzschean amoralist. 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