Revisiting Jung's dialogue with yoga: observations from transpersonal psychology

Abstract

In spite of the considerable body of scholarly literature on Jung's ambivalent relationship to Indian mystical traditions and his misreading of their canonical materials during the last three decades, Jung's persistent warnings against the practice of yoga by Europeans deserve more systematic examination by Jung scholars than they have so far received. At a time of increasing globalization inconsistent with Jung's East/West psychological relativism, Jung scholarship needs to engage with the considerable body of literature of transpersonal psychology addressing issues central to Jung's dialogue with yoga in the 1930s and 1940s. In this article, drawing upon the materials of transpersonal psychology, I examine two such issues: (1) Jung's claim that the European practice of yoga leads either to repression of unconscious contents by consciousness or to psychotic states in which consciousness is overwhelmed by the unconscious; (2) Jung's objection to the claim of Indian non-dualist traditions that the ego can be completely dissolved in, or absorbed by, the transcendental self. The purpose of this article is twofold: first, to catalogue challenges by transpersonal psychologists to Jung's model of psychological and spiritual development; second, to consider whether, because of Jung's defensive distancing from Indian spirituality, he exaggerated differences between the individuation process and the Indian mystical traditions he engaged with.