Religion and the Cure of Souls In Jung's Psychology by Schaer Hans

Author:Schaer, Hans.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

MAN AND RELIGION

IT will have become apparent from our exposition so far that Jung does not speak of God as an idea, but that when he speaks of God at all he means something quite different. God is not thought or contrived, nor is he apprehended and exhausted by our ideas: he is experienced. And as long as what a man experiences’ of God is alive, he is influenced by it. Consequently, Jung prefers to speak of a God-symbol, and he holds that what is true of symbols in general is true also of the God-symbol. He may speak sometimes of a God-image, which is, however, not to be thought of as a metaphorical representation of God, but by the term “image” he means a psychological magnitude. We can reflect on a symbol or psychic image, yet its content can never be formulated exhaustively in terms of ideas–indeed, if it can, the symbol or image has lost its psychic efficacy: it is dead, the perished relic of a psychic state that is no more. Although the God-image must address itself to reason, it must still have something of the irrational at the back of it, something that is pregnant with meaning, that is intuited but not clearly formulated.

Jung associates the God-image with the power of imagination. Imagination is an actualization of the contents of the unconscious, which do not belong to the empirical world and are of an archetypal nature. What happens is that hitherto unconscious fantasies are made conscious through our active participation in them. The fantasies must be taken seriously–this is the active participation– and yet the conscious mind must be there at the same time to realize that the images thrown up by fantasy are not true in themselves but are only expressions of the underlying psychic process. When suicide appears in a dream or fantasy, something “like suicide” is happening in the psyche. Imagination of this sort widens personality, reduces the dominant influence of the unconscious, and brings about a modification of personality itself.1 In alchemy there were processes of a psychological order that corresponded to imagination. “The concept of imaginatio is perhaps the most important key to the understanding of the alchemistic opus. The anonymous author of the treatise De Sulphure speaks of ‘the imaginative faculty of the soul’ in that passage where he intends to do just what the ancients had failed to do–that is, put his finger on the secret of the art. The soul, he says, stands in the place of God (sui locum tenens seu vice Rex est) and dwells in the life-spirit of the pure blood. The soul functions (operatur) in the body, but has the greater part of its function (operatio) outside the body. [We may add by way of explanation: in projection.] This peculiarity is divine. For divine wisdom is only in part enclosed within the body of the world; for the greater part it is outside, and imagines far higher things than the body of the world can grasp (concipere); and these are outside nature– God's own secrets.

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