The Religious Significance of Jung's Psychology

Abstract

Endemic to Jung's understanding of the psyche is an elaborate theory of the universal psychogenesis of religion. This theory, coextensive with his psychology itself, would contend that the ground movement of the psyche is one in which the unconscious and its archetypal energies seek realization in consciousness. These energies carry with them a numinous power that, when experienced, creates the sense of the divine and so the religions. The process is a wholly self-contained dialectic whose main polarities are the conscious ego and the archetypal unconscious. This paradigm excludes agencies approaching consciousness from beyond the psyche as transcendental and particularly monotheistic religions would propose. Jung's dialogues with Buber and White failed because both realized that Jung understood divinity and humanity to be engaged in a mutually redemptive process as binary poles within an all encompassing psychic dialectic. Jung's psychology also contains a philosophy of history with religious consequence. He would argue that, since the 13th century, an examination of mystical experience reveals a process in which humanity is becoming progressively aware that divinity seeks its completion in it as the base meaning of history and of individual life. Hegel brought this developing religious sense to full consciousness philosophically and Jung psychologically.