Carl Gustav Jung

From Philosopedia

Carl Gustav Jung (26 July 1875 - 6 June 1961)

Jung, the famed Swiss psychiatrist, wrote about the psychology of religion in Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933), and he wrote Answer to Job (1966). In 1954, he was asked to respond to Warren Allen Smith's categorization of seven humanisms. A. Jaffe, his secretary, replying that Prof. Jung had just left for his vacation, responded:

• I should say that he most nearly belongs to the group 7 (naturalistic humanism). But in order to make your own judgment, read two of his works: Psychology and Religion and his work on Synchronicity (which will appear one of these days in the Pantheon Edition, Bollingen Series).

However, Paul Edwards in Immortality states that Jung, along with Paul Tillich and Timothy Leary, admired the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a favorite book of those believing in reincarnation, which is opposed to naturalistic humanism.

Jung also regarded unfavorably the rationalist tradition of scientific thought. Further, Jung was unafraid to speak of the soul and the spiritual. In a 1959 letter to Ruth Topping, a Chicago social worker, Jung wrote,

• . . . spiritual background has gone astray. Our Christian doctrine has lost its grip to an appalling extent, chiefly because people don’t understand it any more. Thus one of the most important instinctual activities of our mind has lost its object. As these views deal with the world as a whole, they create also a wholeness of the individual, so much so, that for instance a primitive tribe loses its vitality, when it is deprived of its specific religious outlook. People are no more rooted in their world and lose their orientation. They just drift. That is very much our condition, too. The need for a meaning of their lives remains unanswered, because the rational, biological goals are unable to express the irrational wholeness of human life. Thus life loses its meaning. That is the problem of the ‘religious outlook’ in a nutshell. The problem itself cannot be settled by a few slogans. It demands concentrated attention, much mental work and, above all, patience, the rarest thing in our restless and crazy time.

Gordon Stein similarly wrote in The American Rationalist (October 1994) that Jung was no freethinker. Quite the opposite, in fact, for Freud’s break with Jung was partly because of Jung’s occultism and views concerning organized religion. Also, Jung is said to have been anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi up to the time the Nazis were defeated, after which he modified his stand. Freud further disapproved of Jung’s having made a pass at Ms. Spielrein, one of his patients, after which she went to Freud for treatment.

A clinical psychologist, Richard Noll, wrote The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement (1994), in which he accused Jung of having falsified dates in relation to the theory of the collective unconscious. That theory holds that people share images, buried deep in their unconscious, which influence their thought and behavior. Jung cited the case known as the Solar Phallus Man, who had been a patient at the Burghölzli Mental Hospital in Zurich and claimed to have seen a vision of the sun with a phallus. Jung contended that the image came from the ancient Hellenic mystery cult of Mithras, a pagan god associated with sun worship. However, argues Noll, the person was the patient of Honegger, Jung’s assistant. After Honegger committed suicide in 1911, Jung gradually took credit for the case. Noll holds that the Solar Phallus Man may have been a regurgitating of what popular books were reporting at the time, books about mythology, Mithras, paganism, and the occult. Jung, according to Noll, changed the dates of publication to show that the man could not have read such works. Noll further charges that Jung knowingly lied about the case as well as included anti-Semitic writings that formed the basis of Nazi ideology. Although Jung was admittedly never a Nazi, Noll claims there was a secret Jewish quota for the Analytical Psychology Club, an early Jungian association founded in 1916 in Zurich by Jung’s followers.

Jung is buried in the family plot of the Village Cemetery, Küsnacht, Switzerland. On the gravestone is an epitaph:

First, the terrestrial man of the earth

Second, the celestial man of heaven

Called or not called.

God is present

(See entry for Stanley Cobb, the Harvard physician he visited and outside whose bedroom door he put his shoes European-style outside the door to be polished.

Letter

{CE; ER; TRI; WAS, 5 August 1954}