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Psychology and Religion (The Terry Lectures Series)

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This collection of three lectures given by Carl Jung in 1937 presents an early version of his mature view on the role of the unconscious in formulating religious symbols. The three foci of this book are a case study of a neurotic man plagued by irrational fears of cancer, a natural history of the generation of religious symbols, and a consideration of the psychological consequences of the crisis of faith that was striking the heart of Europe.

Jung's case study is absolutely fascinating -- he presents and interprets a small number of the patient's dreams and relates them to the symbolic literature of the Gnostics, Hermetics, and Alchemists, three of Jung's favorite symbolic modalities. It's extraordinary to see a modern man completely disinterested in religion or esoterica unwittingly produce symbols that clearly serve the same psychological function as similar images in these somewhat obscure traditions.

His social analysis is crude and in my eyes profoundly misguided. Jung waxes nostalgic for a medieval Europe governed by the Catholic church in which the common folk could assimilate the transpersonal symbolic structures of the ecclesiastical matrix as a bulwark against the intrusion of the unconscious into their daily lives. He polemicizes in a most disagreeable fashion against the Protestant church and blasts the Utopian fantasies of Communism. In historical analysis Jung shows himself to be studiously disinterested in the material facts of history, to the severe detriment of his analysis.

Perhaps Jung can be forgiven for making a classic error of Modernism and nostalgically aggrandizing a great old Europe that never was. The tenor and focus of his occasional social critiques was dramatically different post World War II, when his primary concern rightly shifted to the conditions of nationalistic totalitarianism. But as they stand in this work his social views are repugnant and anachronistic, and lack all sense of self-awareness.

One additional quarrel I have is that Jung's protestations that he is not interested in theology and philosophy, and that he deals with religious images purely as a psychological phenomenon, are not persuasive in the face of the many metaphysical claims that he in fact makes, such as offhandedly referring to atheism as a "stupid error". Few readers will agree that he has no particular religious convictions of his own, or that they don't absolutely play a core role in shaping his scientific theories.

Despite these problems the book on the whole provides a powerful and persuasive argument that he carefully builds to a gripping crescendo. His consideration of mandala symbolism in the last lecture is absolutely riveting and offers a vital empirical glimpse at the state of the religious mind in modernity.

This is an excellent work of both psychology and religion, hence the name. There have been other books by Jung that have narrower subjects or more challenging views but this one, takes my Jungian cake. It is so general but yet is exactly what one needs to study or just explore the extremely difficult topic of Psych and Religion. A winner in my book.

The Psyche is a very important area he looks at in the whole book. I consider the whole book to be a theory on unraveling the unconscious. He argues for the existence of the psyche and he says, " the only form of existence we know of immediately is psychic." He continues that psychical dangers are much more dangerous than epidemics or earthquakes. While I accept with Jung that psychical dangers are dangerous, I believe he has overemphasized the role or place of the Psyche. This is vividly seen in the context of religion. Rather than religious faith being the deepest part of man, it is only a means aided by its symbols to understand the unconscious self.
Unlike Sigmund Freud who looks at religion as an illusion, Jung sees some usefulness in religion and holds that religion is not created by persons as escape valves but they are victims of religion. He sees religion as the collective unconscious that is present in every person's unconscious. The task of religion is to reveal what is in the unconscious and the psyche. This is the reason he validates the use of Christian symbols in uncovering the unconscious.
Jung describes archetypes as "forms or images of a collective nature which occur practically all over the earth as constituents of myths and at the same time as autochthonous, individual products of unconscious origin." Using his theory on archetypes to analyze some of his patient's dreams, he tries to return to the primordial remote times when these things existed. I find his theory on archetypes very problematic. My question is how these primordial things get into the psyche? Are these archetypes present at the time of birth of every child? His theory I believe will presuppose that if we all were helped to unravel the unconscious, we will think alike and behave alike since if we go back to a million or more years ago, we either were children of the same parents or evolved from one family of animals.
He sees in dream a means of unraveling the unconscious. Jung's book is helpful in understanding the psyche and the unconscious. It is however not helpful in understanding authentic religious experiences in people.

I liked this book (written in 1938) very much.

I laughed when I read these older reviews as it appears that each of us sees something different in this book. Reading this book is as fascinating as looking at a Gestalt image. Whatever life experiences we bring to Jung's table, is what we will see.

Jung used a patient's dreams as a convenient framework for his discussion. He tells us about dream symbolism, the importance of confession and conscience to healing, Catholic and Protestant creeds, and a bit about Eastern religions, yet the lessons I am receiving from this book center on religion, faith, and current world news.

None of the ghastly global situations that are so real to us had yet occurred when Jung wrote this book. Even the Holocaust of WW2 was far in the future,yet this book could have been drafted while watching CNN this morning.

A few quotations:

"Unfortunately there is no doubt about the fact that man is, as a whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow..."

If a man imagined that I was his arch-enemy and killed me, I should be dead on account of mere imagination. Imaginations do exist and they may be just as real and just as obnoxious as physical conditions.

"Nobody can know what the ultimate things are. We must, therefore, take them as we experience them. And if such experience helps make your life healthier, more beautiful, more complete and more satisfactory to yourself and to those you love, you may safely say: "This was the grace of God."

Kim Burdick
Stanton, DE

These are the Terry Lectures from Yale University in 1937, given in English. Unlike much of Jung's writing, theses lectures are very accessible and show the relationship between psychology and religion. Jung focuses on the religious experience itself, and how important it is to the health of the psyche. Religious experience is not an illusion as Freud stated, but Jung is more in line with William James when he talks about the varieties of religious experiences possible. Jung also makes the distinction between immediate religious experience and religious creed which is a distillation of religious experience. For anyone interested in the interface between psychology and religion this is an essential book.

This 1938 book is based on a series of lectures given at Yale University, and is divided into chapters on "The Autonomy of the Unconscious Mind," "Dogma and Natural Symbols," and "The History and Psychology of a Natural Symbol."

Here are some representative quotations from the book:

"Speaking for instance of the motive of the virgin birth, psychology is only concerned with the fact that there is such an idea, but it is not concerned with the question whether such an idea is true or false in any other sense."
"I am not at all certain whether the unconscious mind is merely MY mind, because the term 'unconscious' means that I am not even conscious of it. As a matter of fact the concept of the unconscious mind is a mere assumption for the sake of convenience."
"My psychological experience has shown time and again that certain contents issue from a psyche more complete than consciousness... Consequently I explain the voice, in the dream of the sacred house, as a product of the more complete personality to which the dreamer's conscious self belongs as a part, and I hold that this is the reason why the voice shows an intelligence and a clarity superior to the dreamer's actual consciousness."
"But the gods in our time assemble in the lap of the ordinary individual and are as powerful and as awe-inspiring as ever, in spite of their new disguise--the so-called psychical functions."
"The inherited quality, I fancy, must rather be something like a possibility of regenerating the same or at least similar ideas. I have called the possibility 'archetype,' which means a mental precondition and a characteristic of the cerebral function."

All these religions have bought the unbalance between male & female. Jung nails it totally the Divine Feminine which has been nearly lost in religions that have become so powerful these days.

This one won't change the way you see religion, but if you're curious what Jung would say, it's somewhat worth the read. At least it's shorter than Man and His Symbols.