Mysterium Coniunctionis, Part 5

In Jung's Treatment of Christianity: The Psychotherapy of a Religious Tradition, Murray Stein shows how the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961) applied his theory of the unconscious to healing the contemporary Christian church. This is installment five in my Mysterium Coniunctionis series about this subject.

Jung, though Protestant, felt the Roman Catholic dogma of Assumptio Mariae, the bodily-assumption-into-heaven of Mary, the mother of Jesus, augured a healing of the modern Christian church. This dogma was declared in 1950, near the end of Jung's lifetime (and the beginning of mine).

Symbolically, Jung identified Mary's bodily entry into the holy presence of the Three-in-One as the answer to something medieval alchemists had looked for in their philosophy of the mysterium coniunctionis. This phrase referred to the mystical conjunction which alchemists believed could unite seemingly disparate base elements into noble and incorruptible material such as gold. This coniunctio or conjunction as it applied to physical substances patterned with a spiritual/psychological transformation that occurred in three stages:

• First, each individual soul would cleave to a universal spiritual principle (e.g., the Holy Spirit)
  
• Second, the resulting spiritual union would be joined back to the original body
  
• Third, the mind/soul/spirit/body unit would be reunited with the unus mundus ("one world") representing the "ground and origin" from which every body-soul emerges
  

The first conjunction is symbolized in Christianity by the coming of the Holy Spirit. The second, by the sacred marriage between Christ and the church — representing a corporeal body — in the Book of Revelation ... and also by the bodily Assumption of Mary. Moreover, the very identity of Christ as God and Man is symbolic of the union of the spiritual and the material.

The third and final conjunction is not one for which it is easy to find symbols within Christian faith. According to Stein (p. 175), "Jung compares the experience of this third conjunction with 'the ineffable mystery of the unio mystica, or tao, or the content of samadhi, or the experience of satori in Zen ... '."


Each of the three stages of alchemical conjunction, Jung said, accords with a key event in the development of the psyche as it evolves toward its final goal of wholeness.

The first alchemical stage "brings about a secured ego standpoint on which the integration of unconscious shadow and animus or anima aspects can take place in the second conjunction." Translation: the ego as the center of individual conscious awareness needs to be shored up by a spiritual transformation before it can withstand the rigors of the second and third stages.

The second alchemical stage "results in a stable and relatively inclusive state of ego-consciousness that is quite broadly representative of psychic wholeness." Translation: at great risk, key portions of the unconscious psyche (the "shadow" and also the "animus" or "anima" — see below) are successfully incorporated into conscious awareness.

The third alchemical stage at last unites, or replaces, ego-consciousness with "the basic psychic structure common to all souls." Translation: all of the unconscious psyche has been integrated into conscious awareness. Put another way, the conscious ego cedes pride of place as the center of the psyche to the self, the archetype representing psychic wholeness. (Personally, I am visualizing this stage as a sort of "Zen awakening" such as happened to the famous Trappist monk Thomas Merton — see Enchantment, Zen, and Spiritual Dialogue.)


To Jung, the "ego" or "ego-consciousness" meant the "I" at the center of our conscious awareness. The "I" is characterized initially by its failure to include in overt awareness all of the promptings of the psyche. Some of our inborn bundles of psychic energy — our numerous packets of "libido" — are blocked from conscious representation.

"Stored" libido is present in the psyche in and through our "archetypes." Archetypes are energy sources that power ancient "images" we all carry with us in our "collective unconscious."

Each ancient archetypal image surrounds an archetype per se, in the way that every galaxy in the universe surrounds an invisible black hole. For example, the archetype of the self, representing wholeness, powers the mandala image commonly found in sacred Buddhist and Hindu art, an example of which appears at right.

Jung also referred to archetypal images as "imagoes" (singular "imago"), "inner objects," or simply the inborn "contents" of the collective unconscious.

Many of the archetypal images are personifications. For example, we each carry in our psyche a preexisting image of a Redeemer. In Christianity, Christ himself symbolizes this inbuilt Redeemer image.

Some archetypal images represent polar opposites, e.g., light and dark, male and female, hard and soft, divine and human, good and evil. Sometimes, one of each pair of polar-opposite archetypes is held in the unconscious realm, in a hidden complex associated with the ego's "shadow." The "shadow" itself is an archetype. Deprecated archetypes that are connected to the shadow as a result of being repressed are often represented in dreams and myths in coded, symbolic form.

Yet these repressed archetypes can and should be integrated into consciousness, Jung held, yielding a "stable and relatively inclusive state of ego-consciousness that is quite broadly representative of psychic wholeness." Apparently, or so I'm guessing, this can happen safely during the second conjunction only after the "spiritual" first conjunction has been established.

My guess is that the first conjunction is what happens when a person's faith catches fire. For Evangelical Protestants, this is the "born again" experience. One must be "born again" (or its spiritual equivalent in other faith traditions) before it is safe to even contemplate undergoing the second conjunction, much less the third.


Also integrated into ego-consciousness during the second conjunction is the "anima" (for men) or the "animus" (for women). The anima or animus centers on the deprecated archetype for, respectively, femininity or masculinity. For a man, for example, the archetype for femininity is typically deprecated as inappropriate for expression in his outward personality or, in Jung's lexicon, his "persona." It remains in the unconscious as the anima. Likewise, a woman's deprecated masculine archetype constitutes the animus in her unconscious mind.

Apparently, when the ultimate goal of individuation or self-realization is reached, the anima/us is "depotentiated," or reduced in power. Having been integrated into conscious awareness, it loses its power to thrust its way unbidden into the realm of the ego, upsetting all apple carts. Likewise, once the anima/us has been depotentiated, the persona, the mask we wear to hide from others what's really going on in our psyche, loses its power to dominate the ego. The conscious ego and its unconscious shadow remain, but now they work together, having been joined into a harmonious whole by the restoration of the self.

Again, I am supposing that this integration/depotentiation of anima or animus can happen safely during the second conjunction only if the "spiritual" first conjunction has happened. This is why Murray Stein speaks of the result of the first conjunction as "a secured ego standpoint on which the integration of unconscious shadow and animus or anima aspects can take place in the second conjunction."


Following the second conjunction, an expanded and integrated ego-consciousness ideally exists, one that is inclusive of the shadow and the animus/anima by virtue of the unifying aspects of the self. Stein calls this result "a difficult and remarkable achievement on the part of an individual, requiring much taxing and often repetitious effort to stabilize" (p. 175). On a personal note, I feel that I am presently going through that sort of "taxing and repetitious effort" myself ... and I am making these blog posts as a part of that effort!

This I think is why I respond strongly to the notion of "reinventing the sacred" expressed by Stuart A. Kauffman in his new book, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion. It was with this book that I began this Reinventing the Sacred series of posts. The idea of reinventing the sacred symbolizes, for me, the "repetitious effort" I am making!

Mysterium Coniunctionis, Part 4

Jung's Treatment of Christianity: The Psychotherapy of a Religious Tradition, Murray Stein's book on how the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961) applied his theory of the unconscious to healing the "mind" of the Christian church, shows that Jung (though Protestant) felt the Roman Catholic dogma of the bodily assumption-into-heaven of Mary, the mother of Jesus, augured a healing of the modern Christian church.

This is installment four in my Mysterium Coniunctionis series about this subject.

When, in 1950, Pope Pius XII promulgated the new Catholic dogma of Assumptio Mariae, the Assumption of Mary — that the Blessed Mother of God, as Mary is known, has entered heaven bodily as the first and of all humankind to do so — Jung took notice. To him, it signaled the coming true of prophetic if mystical beliefs held by alchemists in the Middle Ages.

Medieval alchemists, in trying (and failing) to conjoin base metals like lead to make higher substances like gold, believed in the mysterium coniunctionis, the mystical conjunction out of which arose everything whole and complete and noble. In their philosophy, there needed to be three stages of coniunctio or conjoining:

• First, a conjunction of the individual human soul with a universal spiritual principle ... in Christian terms, the Holy Spirit. This necessarily involves a preliminary (symbolic or psychological, not actual) dissociation of the soul from the physical matter making up the body.
  
• Second, a rejoining of the body to the unified mind/soul/spirit which the alchemists spoke of as unio mentalis. This stage, Jung said, had finally begun in Christian history with the Assumptio Mariae declaration.
  
• Third, the eventual unification of the mind/soul/spirit/body unit with the still-missing "fourth": the unus mundus, meaning "the inherent unity of the world" (Stein p. 175). This third coniunctio will be the topic of the current discussion and that in the next installment of this series as well.
  

There was in Jung's time (and still exists today) a resistance to integrating into Church belief and practice what Jung called the "missing fourth."

This "missing fourth" referred in medieval times (and still does) to the fact that Church symbolism had, by virtue of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, already proceeded from the primordial unity of the archetypal umber One, through the implicit antithesis implied by the archetypal number Two, to the healing power of the archetypal number Three. Father: Number One --> Son (and potential rival): Number Two --> Holy Ghost (and healer of the implicit rift): Number Three.

But the Christian God-in-Three-Persons outlook still left unbridged the symbolic chasm between Trinitarian Heaven and Fallen Earth, with the Earth seen as presently in the clutches of the Prince of This World, Satan.

Jung had it that the religious images of Satan and the forces of darkness at his command were (still are) ways we Christians have of projecting our internal shadow contents out upon someone or something external to us ... thus allowing us to deny personal responsibility for the evil that might be thought to attach to our bodily desires, first, and secondly to the physical stuff of the world of which our bodies are made.

In the alchemical theory of the mysterium coniunctionis there was yet a third stage of coniunctio, one which followed the unio mentalis and the subsequent rejoining of the mind/soul/spirit with the physical body. It was the conjunction of the mind/soul/spirit/body with the whole earth from which it had sprung. It was this third stage of conjunction by which the "missing fourth" might be joined to the Holy Trinity to form a Four-in-One Quaternity.


Medieval religious doctrine had it that the earth was the devil's playground. Hell was thought to be located in the bowels of the earth — far down below us, since the earth was not yet known to be round. Though God had originally created the earth without physical taint or moral blemish, the Fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden had given the world over to Enemy control.

This myth of the Fall of Man spoke to Jung. He attributed it to the psychic forces of "splitting" by means of which the unwanted aspects of our human nature are repressed into the unconscious mind. From there they are projected out onto our real-world enemies ... or onto one immaterial, imaginary Enemy, writ large.

According to the psychologist Timothy R. O'Neill in the 1979 book The Individuated Hobbit: Jung, Tolkien and the Archetypes of Middle-earth, the psychic energy source which Jung called "libido" — which for Sigmund Freud was just a sex drive — actually

provides the impetus for all thoughts and intentions, and it operates on the principle of opposites. For every "good" thought there is a corresponding "bad" one. The former may be expressed consciously, the latter triggering an opposite reaction in the unconscious that is repressed (p. 30).

The "bad" promptings, though repressed, still have their intrinsic energy that needs to be expressed somehow. This happens, if at all, through symbols. But the Christian symbol for these "bad" promptings of the human psyche, Satan, encourages continued splitting of the psyche, with splitting's attendant "one-sidedness."

To Jung, one-sidedness sooner or later makes for problems, maladies whose symptoms may "begin as a feeling of nothingness, boredom, malaise, not unlike the 'alienation' of existential neurosis" (p. 32). These symptoms may eventually grow in intensity to the point where they result in "a loss of purpose or evasive tactics, [or] expression of urges in other, sometimes violent, ways" (p. 33). Mass murder can often be traced back to archetypal promptings that lack symbols to connect them into conscious awareness.

The integration of the alchemical symbol of the "missing fourth" can be the antidote to such woe, for only when the archetypal Three turns to Four and Trinity evolves into Quaternity is the Jungian archetype of the "self" finally represented in the Christian symbol system.


Jung had it that the first of the three conjunctive stages, the one in which soul (temporarily and symbolically) is severed from body so that it might cleave to spirit, "brings about a secured ego standpoint on which the integration of unconscious shadow and animus or anima aspects can take place in the second conjunction" (Stein p. 175). The repressed promptings in the unconscious mind — the shadow contents and the animus or anima — will later be integrated with the conscious ego, but before that can happen, the ego must first be "spiritualized," shall we say. It must own up to a power higher than itself.

Next comes the second conjunctive step, which "results in a stable and relatively inclusive state of ego-consciousness that is quite broadly representative of psychic wholeness" (p. 175). At this stage, the bodily aspects of our human nature are no longer held apart from mind/soul/spirit. This conjunction corresponds with the inclusion of the shadow contents and also of the animus/anima in the field of consciousness.

The shadow contents are, broadly speaking, the split-off halves of the numerous archetypal pairs in the human repertoire, one of which has been admitted to consciousness and been acknowledged by the outward persona, and the other of which has been kept under wraps in the unconscious mind.

For example, a person may flaunt his or her love for law and order, which has its appropriate archetypal representation in the psyche and which will thus constitute part of the individual's persona or outward façade. But order's opposite idea, chaos, is also an archetype, and it can thrust itself into the person's life situation at the most inopportune times.

Most of the time, however, the archetype for chaos remains dormant in the unconscious shadow of the person's ego-consciousness. Ultimately, the chaos archetype and all the other "bad" promptings of the individual's psyche ought to be, Jung said, integrated into conscious awareness, where they can serve their own legitimate purposes and, along with their paired partners (in this case, the archetype for order), foster "a stable and relatively inclusive state of ego-consciousness that is quite broadly representative of psychic wholeness."

Thus, the integration of the shadow contents. As for the animus/anima, these are structures in the unconscious that represent the archetype for the gender opposite to the ostensible gender of the individual in question. A man has an archetypal woman, so to speak, lurking somewhere within and serving as the nucleus of his unconscious "anima." For a woman, the unconscious "animus" serves as the focal point for her archetypal inner man. These "other-gender" complexes — a "complex" is simply a clustering of ideas and experiences around an archetype — need to be integrated into ego-consciousness at some point, Jung said, en route to psychic wholeness.

So the second of the three conjunctions Jung spoke of has to do with achieving a stable, well-integrated state of ego-consciousness in which the shadow contents and either the animus or the anima (depending on the sex of the individual) have been rescued from their erstwhile unconscious obscurity.

That sets the stage for the third conjunction, more about which is to be found in the next installment in this series, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Part 5.

Mysterium Coniunctionis, Part 3

Jung's Treatment of Christianity: The Psychotherapy of a Religious Tradition, Murray Stein's book on how the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961) applied his theory of the unconscious to healing the "mind" of the Christian church, shows that Jung (though he was a Protestant) felt the Roman Catholic dogma of the bodily assumption into heaven of Mary, the mother of Jesus, augured a healing of the contemporary church.

This is installment three in my Mysterium Coniunctionis series about this subject.

In 1950, Pope Pius XII issued a papal bull, Assumptio Mariae, the Assumption of Mary, declaring that the "Mother of God," the Virgin Mary, has not only gone to heaven in soul and spirit, but also in body as well. For a physical body to enter heaven, even the body of the most holy human personage ever born, represented earth-shaking news among Catholics ... even if the idea of the bodily assumption of Mary had been talked about behind theological hands for decades. The general thrust of Christian doctrine had for centuries been opposed to the notion that anything as base and corrupt as physical matter had no place in heaven, and Mary's body was made of physical matter like everyone else's.

To Jung, the relegation of physical matter to the dustbin of reality was a sign of the traditional church's having split life into two ostensibly severable parts, the spiritual and the physical, and then relegated one of the parts to nothingness. The spiritual half had its real home with the Trinitarian God-in-Three-Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The physical half was identified with all that is potentially base and corrupt, sinful and evil, and was thus to be left behind and discarded.

In medieval times the pseudoscience of alchemy — whose stated aim was to achieve the mysterium coniunctionis that would conjoin various base elements such as the metal lead into a "higher" substance such as gold — was a philosophical stand-in, said Jung, for what the Church was carefully leaving out of its belief system. By deprecating the material and physical in favor of the spiritual, taken by itself, Christianity was failing to come to grips with its own "shadow."

In Jung's theory of the mind, the shadow represents those very real aspects of the psyche that contradict what we normally hold dear. For instance, if a man holds the idea of his own masculinity most dear, he carries the mind's intrinsic model for masculinity in his conscious "persona." The mind's equally intrinsic model for femininity is still there in the psyche, but the typical man buries it in his unconscious mind as the "anima." It lurks in the "shadow" of the psychological structure at the center of the field of his conscious awareness. Jung called the center of consciousness the "ego."

The human mind's intrinsic models for various crucial life experiences were, to Jung, the "archetypes" of the psyche's "collective unconscious." These reside deep in the psyche of every human being. Because they come complete with their own intrinsic stores of psychic energy, called the "numen," they are capable of pushing themselves forward into consciousness via coded symbols present in dreams and myths, in imaginings and philosophies, and occasionally in a newly declared Church doctrine.

The new doctrine of the Assumption of Mary was the latter-day realization of one key symbol in the alchemists' vast repertoire of symbols from many centuries before, that of the coniunctio. The coniunctio was the notion of a (successive) rejoining of (multiple) formerly split entities. When lead and other base elements were combined to form gold, that would be an example of the philosophical coniunctio made tangible and complete.

According to the alchemical doctrine of the coniunctio, the first step would be seemingly in the opposite direction: the severing of soul from body, such that soul might then be conjoined with spirit. This was in fact the situation already achieved in the medieval church, Jung noted. According to the church's understanding, we are each born into this world with a soul which is joined in some way to our body. But only by means of holy baptism, faith, works, and other church sacraments besides baptism does the soul part from the physical substrate and cleave to the Holy Spirit of God.

The fact that Protestantism quarrels with Rome about the efficacy of works and of many of the sacraments other than baptism makes no difference to this discussion. In effect, said Jung, the traditional model of the Christian life accomplishes the first stage of the coniunctio, in that it conjoins soul with spirit. That is as true of Protestant Christianity as it is of Catholic faith.


This first stage of the coniunctio, unfortunately, splits off the soul/spirit from the base and merely physical substance of the body which is potentially under the power of Satan, and it shows us no way by which the body as such can be saved. True, some conceptions of the afterlife feature the notion of a "resurrection body," a new house for the soul to live in, free of corruption. But our present body cannot be redeemed.

To Jung, this splitting strategy was one by which the church put aspects of human experience into the shadow and repressed them. Jung took it as an article of faith that split off and repressed aspects of the psyche, including those related to our manifest bodiliness, would one day find their way back into Christian acceptance. This is exactly what Assumptio Mariae represented to Jung. It was the first time that an actual body that had trod this earth was admitted into heaven.

The Assumption of Mary therefore made real the second stage in the alchemists' process of the coniunctio. If the first stage was the conjoining of the soul to the Spirit of God (after severing it symbolically from the body), then the second stage would be the rejoining of the resulting unit — called by the alchemists unio mentalis, or "union of the mind" — with the physical body.

The conjunction of the reintegrated mind/soul/spirit with the the bodily basis of life was to Jung a necessary step toward wholeness, for the church. The thought of the medieval alchemists, which Jung took to represent the unconscious strivings of Christendom in their day, was simply for Jung a prefiguring of what would actually become accepted Christian belief centuries later. First, unio mentalis, which had already been achieved via church practice in the Middle Ages; then, eventually, conjunction of the mind with the physical body as the vessel for salvation of the soul ... as ushered into Christian doctrine by the promulgation of Assumptio Mariae in 1950.

But there was yet a third stage of the coniunctio in alchemical lore. That stage will be the subject of my next post in this series, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Part 4.

Mysterium Coniunctionis, Part 2

This is installment two in my Mysterium Coniunctionis series about Jung's Treatment of Christianity: The Psychotherapy of a Religious Tradition, Murray Stein's book on how the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961) applied his theory of the unconscious to healing the "mind" of the Christian Church. Jung felt the Church needed therapy as badly as any single patient on the psychoanalyst's couch.

Jung knew that the unconscious, whether of an individual or of a human institution such as the Church, places symbols into our dreams, myths, and imaginings, symbols that the conscious mind has then to interpret. Symbols were of primary importance to Jung. He described them as ways the mind formulates ideas whose referents cannot be clearly stated in plain language, and as psychological "tendencies whose goal is as yet unknown." Symbols are, in religious terms, prophetic.

Symbols populate human philosophies, too, not just dreams and myths. The associated philosophy of the medieval art of alchemy was shot through with symbols. One of these philosophical symbols was, in Latin, the mysterium coniunctionis, the mystery of conjunction.

Medieval alchemists sought to unite various material substances in ways that modern chemistry now knows to be impossible. Matter that was "low," such as lead and other base constituents, might be turned into a "higher" metal such as gold if the proper constituents could be mysteriously conjoined in just the right way.

Jung interpreted this alchemists' dream to turn lead into gold as symbolizing the overarching hidden goal of the human psyche: to have its unconscious parts brought fully and harmoniously into conscious awareness.


Bringing the unconscious mind into the field of conscious awareness was for Jung the way to God. He identified Yahweh, the God of the Holy Bible, with the archetypal "self."

To Jung, the archetypes of the "collective unconscious" — a hidden realm of the psyche whose contents are common to us all, both individually and in every one of our cultural institutions — served as the templates for symbols. For instance, if in a myth a mother appears, such as Leda in the classical tale of Leda and the Swan, it derives from our "mother" archetype. This archetype tells the human unconscious what to expect of a mother, either real or mythical. It is our inbuilt template for the idea of a mother.

Likewise, God/Yahweh is the symbol, in Jung's theory, of the inbuilt "self" archetype: the uniquely human idea of what a self is. Since it ultimately makes no sense to speak of any part of a person as "other," this source of all the other archetypes, the self archetype, represents our innate sense of wholeness or completeness.

Specifically, the "self" is the true center of the psyche. The conscious ego only pretends to be the center. When the psyche is centered on the ego, not the self, various pairs of archetypal opposites get split such that one of the opposites is fully present to conscious awareness, while the other is shoved into the ego's "shadow" and remains in the unconscious mind outside the field of consciousness.

For example, the male/female antinomy — an antinomy is a contradiction between two ideas that are in themselves equally valid — splits such that (in males) the male archetype reigns in the field of consciousness while the female archetype is relegated to the "anima," a structure hidden in the unconscious mind. For women, the female archetype is consciously in charge, while the male archetype feeds the unconscious "animus."

Splitting of this sort serves its purpose — it would be confusing for a young boy to try to come to grips early in life with his feminine side, for example — but ultimately it leaves the conscious mind less than whole. It is the principal goal of religion, Jung said, to take us past the splitting of our mind into favored vs. rejected pairs of opposites, one of which is relegated to the shadow. To Jung, the coniunctio or rejoining of the pairs of opposites is what must happen on our way back to God.


Jung saw the contemporary Christian Church as split in several ways. One obvious way was the schism of Western Christendom into Protestant and Catholic faith traditions some five centuries ago. The Church as a whole, while officially promulgating a doctrine of love thy neighbor, has been squabbling over theological differences ever since, often bloodily.

For any member of any group to hate any members of any other group, the hater must, Jung said, be identifying with the enemy's characteristics and attitudes certain capacities of the human mind which are really features in the hater's own unconscious shadow. This ability we all have of projecting our own shadow contents out onto others is responsible for most feuds and wars.

For Christianity's wounds to heal, Jung knew there would first have to be a coniunctio — a joining, a re-integration — between what was in effect the Church's traditional ego-consciousness and the contents of the collective unconscious that were present in its doctrinal shadow. These latter contents he was able to retrieve from the symbols of medieval alchemy, for he knew that the alchemical philosophy had been as if a dream telling of the early Church's repressions and splittings, and therefore foretelling the Church's future healing.

To a significant extent, Jung felt, that particular dream began to come true in 1950 when the head of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Pius XII, issued a papal bull called Assumptio Mariae, the Assumption of Mary, declaring that the mother of Jesus has entered heaven intact, body and soul.

What possible connection did the dogma of the bodily assumption of Mary have with the alchemists' dream? For the answer to that, see my next installment in this series, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Part 3.

Mysterium Coniunctionis, Part 1

I continue to pore over Jung's Treatment of Christianity: The Psychotherapy of a Religious Tradition, Murray Stein's book on how the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961) aimed to heal the Christian church as Jung found it in his day. As I mentioned in posts in my earlier Jungian Wholeness series, Jung created an elaborate theory of the human psyche. It was this theory and the psychotherapy that went alone with it that Jung applied to the healing of the church.

In Jung's theory, key parts of the mind are necessarily hidden from conscious awareness. Why necessarily? Well, we all have supposedly "bad" tendencies that go against the supposedly "good" traits we would like to have. Those desirable traits are upheld by that facet of the psyche which Jung called the "persona": the personality-mask we consciously or unconsciously assume for others' benefit.

Our more inappropriate tendencies, on the other hand, get locked into the "shadow" of what Jung called our "ego-consciousness," which amounts to the aspects of our mind that we are consciously aware of. We are for the most part unconscious of having what might be considered our more or less antisocial or immoral drives, while we are typically conscious of the impulses we have toward the "good."

There's nothing intrinsically evil about our shadow proclivities, though, Jung held, any more than there's anything intrinsically evil about a cat catching and killing a mouse. But expressing these baser, less-evolved tendencies in ways that do not violate the social adaptations embodied in the mask Jung called the persona is tricky. Most people are never able to — never even try to — integrate their unconscious drives into the Jungian "ego" which is at the center of consciousness.

Yet Jung felt the shadow's contents could be integrated into ego-consciousness, by a process called "individuation," which he deemed the ultimate spiritual goal of a well-lived life ... and of Jungian therapy, for those who need it. People who are neurotic or psychically unstable — and I'm one of them — can benefit from healing the split between the conscious mind and the unconscious shadow. Jung used the technical term "integration" to describe the healing of a rift of any sort between conscious and unconscious portions of the mind.


Integration of the shadow's contents was also, Jung held, a desideratum for Christianity as a whole. As with a typical human individual, the Church as an institution was (Jung said) suffering from an internal split between its conscious doctrines/beliefs and the hidden contents of its "collective unconscious."

By the Christian Church, Jung meant the Roman Catholic faith and the Protestant denominations ... along with the Orthodox churches, for all I know. Jung himself was a Protestant, raised as a member of the Swiss Reformed Church during his boyhood by his minister father, but he had a great interest in developments in the Catholic Church, in particular, as a philosopher and as a clinical psychologist.


By the "collective unconscious" Jung meant something that he himself had discovered: at an unconscious level within every individual human mind there exists a repository of "archetypes." These archetypes consist of images, ideas, and motifs. They are the inborn forms or molds which the unconscious uses to generate "symbols" which present themselves to the conscious mind as key ingredients in our daytime imaginings, our dreams, our myths, and so forth.

Symbols were of primary importance to Jung. He described them as ways the mind has to formulate ideas whose referent cannot be clearly stated in everyday language. They are "tendencies whose goal is as yet unknown," he wrote. Despite their intrinsic ambiguity, however, it is possible to come to a meaningful interpretation of the symbols thrown from the unconscious into the conscious mind.

The collective unconscious is, as it were, a foundry for the symbols that appear in dream and myth. For example, in the classical myth of Leda and the Swan, the swan that impregnates Leda, the human woman who is the queen of Sparta, is the god Zeus in disguise. According to the myth, Zeus came to Leda disguised as a swan, raping her or seducing her. That same night, Leda slept with her husband, Tyndareus. In due course, she gave birth to Helen (of Troy) and Polydeuces, the children of Zeus, while at the same time bearing Castor and Clytemnestra, children of her husband Menelaus (or Tyndareus).

Through interpreting these symbols, we can see that Zeus or the Swan represents (among other archetypes) the father archetype, as does Menelaus, while Leda represents the mother archetype. Jung would also say, I believe, that the scenario by which Leda's offspring have two separate fathers symbolically represents the psyche's innate motif of splitting or bifurcation of the archetypal One into the archetypal Two.


Each of us has the same set of archetypes. For example, each of us has an archetype for "mother," one for "father," and even one for "self." In serving as the mold for symbols which make their way out of unconsciousness and into our dreams and myths, an archetype acts as a seed for a cluster of experiences that we have had in our lifetimes and have stored in our memory bank. Most of these clusters, called "complexes," disappear into the unconscious mind either wholly or partially, but they can be "constellated" by certain triggering events and reappear in consciousness. Who has not seen a movie about a loving mother, somewhat like our own, and felt impelled to call his or her own mom and say "I love you"?

That's what the constellating of an archetypally-based complex feels like. Although the term "complex" as it applies to the human psyche has taken on overtones of being in some way harmful — we sometimes hear things said like, "Poor boy, he has a terrible mother complex" — in reality Jung felt the complexes are neither intrinsically good nor intrinsically bad. In fact, we all have mother complexes.


Since we all share the same archetypes and all of us play host to the same complexes — though a given complex will be stronger in one person than in the next — Jung inferred that an organized group of human beings such as the Christian Church or any particular society or culture or civilization will in effect have both a conscious mind and an unconscious one, just as human individuals do.

Just as individuals can benefit from healing the rift between the conscious and unconscious forces of the psyche, so too can an organized group or institution such as the Church gain by integrating the contents of its collective unconscious into its conscious awareness.

The integration of shadow material with conscious content which Jung called upon Christianity to accomplish, Jung said, patterns with any process in the psyche by which archetypal symbols representing seeming opposites — solar/lunar, male/female, spirit/matter, yang/yin, etc. — are reconciled. Typically, one of each pair of opposed archetypes is preferred by the persona, while the other lurks in the shadow. But the shadow half of the archetypal pair can, and should, eventually be integrated into consciousness.

For example, the male principle may be preferred in our social adaptations, with the female principle taking a back seat. A man who acts "womanish" is, after all, thought odd. Yet all men (and all women) have both archetypes. So a man who doesn't want to be thought odd will tend to relegate his feminine side to his unconscious shadow.


In fact, Jung went further than this. He singled out he feminine side of a male human being as a privileged part of a man's unconscious mind, called by Jung the "anima." Women likewise have an "animus," an analogously privileged structure within the female unconscious mind associated with the male archetype. The anima/animus turns out to be, per Jung, the gateway to the conscious integration of the most important archetype of all, the "self."

The archetypal self is the entity in the collective unconscious which is the form or mold for symbols of wholeness. It represents the wholeness of the undivided psyche.

So, en route to the ultimate goal of the integration of the archetypal self into ego-consciousness, the anima (for a man) or the animus (for a woman) must first be conjoined with the conscious ego. Only then can the self finally be united with the conscious ego and the psyche be made completely whole.


In the next installment in this series, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Part 2, I'll go into what exactly the "mysterium coniunctionis" is. Stay tuned.

Follow Your Bliss (Jungian Wholeness, Part 6)

In this ongoing Power of Myth series of posts I've been considering how the thought of the late ambassador of myth Joseph Campbell jibes with that of the very-much-still-alive scientist Stuart Kauffman in his latest book, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion.

Kauffman talks of the ceaseless and unpredictable creativity of the cosmos as "God enough" to command our devotion and awe. This creativity can be esteemed as sacred when science stops insisting that nothing is real but the meaningless dances of subatomic particles, out of which, as ghostly metaphysical illusions, arise all higher things: form, function, life, agency, value, meaning, consciousness.

Kauffman argues that these higher things are not just illusory emanations of particle dances. Real in and of themselves, they're emergent entities taking their own rightful place in the roster of items composing the "furniture of the universe."


As I have hinted at in my Jungian Wholeness series, in the light of Kauffman's investigations it makes sense to count as emergent items in the list of all the real things in our universe the aspects of the human psyche mapped by Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist who took the button of Freud's insights into the human unconscious and sewed on it a coat of many colors.

Jung found that our minds come with certain pre-fabricated images and patterns by which we organize our mental experiences. These are the "archetypes," which number in the dozens or hundreds. There is an archetype for the mother, the father, the hero figure of myth and legend ... and one for the self.

That last is the central source of all the archetypal images, the ground of all our innate psychic tendencies toward structure, order, and integration. It lies at the core of the ego — it is the seed of the "I" at the center of our consciousness.

Yet, as an archetype, the self is not itself something we are conscious of (until a brilliant scientist like Jung comes along and "discovers" it, that is).

Every unconscious archetype is instead a sort of template for how we may best organize our experiences. There are abstract archetypes for (for instance) order, for chaos, and for dualities qua dualities ... such as the order/chaos duality.

So when Jung detects the archetype-of-archetypes by virtue of which we can come into possession of a transcendent sense of our very own self, taken as a whole, what he means is that when our experience resonates with this particular pattern or image it tends to be amplified and confirmed in a uniquely potent way.


Joseph Campbell tells us of a non-intellectual, spiritual reason to take myth seriously. It's not to help us create an intellectual map, scientific or otherwise, of reality and truth, which is Stuart Kauffman's main pursuit as a scientist.

And perhaps surprisingly, it's not to find the so-called meaning of life, a desideratum of a great many philosophers and theologians. There is something of great value beyond meaning. "I think," Campbell tells Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth,

what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. That's what it's all finally about, and that's what these clues help us to find within ourselves. (p. 5)

Campbell famously spoke of "following your bliss":

If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track which as been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are — if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time. (p. 91)

To know the rapture of being alive: this admirably expresses the "wholeness" which Jung identified with the affirmation of the archetype he called the self. When we manage to restore our archetypal self-image to its original place at the center of our ego-consciousness, we come alive to bliss and rapture.


This, I think, is what Stuart Kauffman's reinventing the sacred has to bring about, if it is to succeed.

Kauffman himself, it is clear from reading his books, has followed his own bliss in carving out a whole new scientific territory. Kauffman's task has been to find out the deep truths of all incessantly co-constructing, co-evolving, complex systems, including: the evolution of the earth's biosphere; human economic growth and technological progress; the development of the world's legal systems such as English common law; and the natural emergence of the functions of the human mind and consciousness.

So it looks to me as if Kauffman has successfully reinvented the sacred for himself by following his bliss. He has undoubtedly, in so doing, experienced the rapture of being alive that goes along with achieving some measure of Jungian wholeness within himself. He has fulfilled the destiny of a mythic hero, plumbed the depths from which emerge all life and all worlds, and brought to the rest of us an elixir of scientific understanding by dint of which we, too, can reinvent the sacred. Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell would be proud of him.

Jungian Wholeness, Part 5

My personal search for a spirit of Christian solidarity, the ongoing theme of this blog, has led me in the direction of the pursuit of Jungian Wholeness. In this continuing series of posts on that subject, I have recently been exploring Murray Stein's book Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction.

The human mind unfailingly organizes its activity with respect to patterns and images, some of which come pre-fabricated within the psyche. These pre-existing patterns are the Jungian archetypes: the archetypal mother and father; the hero image we all respond to; the archetype for wholeness, called the self; and many others.

The self archetype is key. It is the central source of all the archetypal images, the ground of our innate psychic tendencies toward structure, order, and integration. It lies (alongside much individual, personal content) at the core of the ego — the ego is the "I" structure at the center of our consciousness:

The ego's core is archetypal as well as individual and personal. This is the still, small point of reflection, the center of the "I." The archetypal side of the ego's core is pure "I am," a manifestation of the self. It is simply "I-am-ness" ... .

On the personal side, however, the ego is permeable to influence from external forces. Such influence makes its way into the ego and pushes aside this pure "I-ness" as the ego identifies with the new content. This is the ego "learning." (p. 114)

One of the sets of things the ego learns to identify with, early in life, is the bundle of traits Jung called the persona. The persona is a sort of actor's mask which represents how we want others to see us. For instance, I want everybody to think of me as being a normal, upstanding, moral sort of guy — which means that the sexual kinkiness I have come to realize that I have must not appear in my persona. Instead, it appears in the "shadow" cast by my ego upon the rest of my psyche, as the ego identifies with my persona. This perhaps deleterious split in my sexual personality is something my ego has learned is advisable.

By no means is the learning done by one's ego necessarily deleterious. But it does tend to be one-sided:

We learn our names. After that we become our names, we identify with the sounds of them. When the ego is identified with the persona, it feels identical to it. Then I am my name; I am the son of my father and mother, the brother of my sister. Once this identification is made, I am no longer simply "I am that I am," but instead, I am Murray Stein, born on such-and-such a date, with this particular personal history. This is who I am now. I identify with memories, with a construction of my history, with some of my qualities. In this way the pure "I-ness" — the archetypal piece — can get obscured and go into hiding or disappear from the conscious altogether. Then one is truly dependent upon the persona for one's entire identity and sense of reality, not to mention one's sense of self-worth and belonging. (p. 114)

Of course, no one who has read the Book of Genesis' story of Moses' encounter with God behind a burning bush will fail to recognize where phrases like "I am that I am" come from. "I am that I am" is how the Lord God identified himself to Moses; the initial letters, transliterated from Hebrew to English, are "YHWH," which is why the unnameable God of Moses and the Jews is referred to as Yahweh.

When God identifies himself to Moses thus cryptically as "I am that I am," Jung takes this cue to mean that the archetypal self in the human psyche represents, in Stein's words (p. 102), "Jung's God term." That is to say, our search for God is identical with our quest to restore our simple, original "I-am-ness" to the center of our consciousness.

Jungian Wholeness, Part 4

In this, my ongoing Jungian Wholeness series of posts, I have been exploring what is also the subject of Murray Stein's book Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction.

The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung plumbed the depths of the personal unconscious each one of us harbors, hidden away out of sight. He found beneath that seeming bottom level of the psyche ... yet more depths. He discovered the collective unconscious, populated by images shared by every human being.

These images or patterns of experience he called "archetypes." They come built in; they don't have to be learned. They correspond to stock life experiences. Thus there is a father archetype, a mother archetype, an archetype for life and one for death, and on and on.

Some of the archetypes have a human face, such as the archetype of the hero.

Other archetypes are quite abstract, such as the archetype for wholeness — a super-important one, since it represents what we are all ultimately after, psychologically speaking. In the very final analysis we will all, sooner or later, come to nurture the impossible dream of integrating every archetype, every "complex" of learned mental images that become related to the individual archetypes in the unconscious, into one grand vision of our consciousness, a sort of "theory of everything" that (no matter how unsavory) represents part of our psyche's content.


This is the ultimate goal of what Jung called "individuation" or "self-actualization." We start out life, at least in concept, in a paradisal state with everything in the psyche accessible to consciousness, but soon our nominally sinful, antisocial urges get repressed, in order that we may gain acceptance in our family, peer group, tribe, or whatever. The "bad" parts of us get moved into the unconscious, where they are not totally forgotten. Instead, they hook up with preexisting archetypal images in ways that can, under certain circumstances, make for deep, high-energy structural units of the psyche. These energetic complexes are often capable of charging back into consciousness and usurping the privileged position of the ego.

Images, ideas, archetypes ... whatever you call them, each have a quantum of psychic energy or libido. How much energy/libido each has depends on, among other things, how much repressed psychic content it bonds with in the unconscious. If a lot, the complex can totally upend the ego when it, the complex, gets "constellated." That's exactly what happens when, as we say today, someone "pushes our buttons."

The ego is also a complex. It is is the special, one-of-a-kind complex at the center, or focal point, of consciousness — which means that it is not like most of our complexes, most of the time. We are uniquely aware of the images the ego "sees" from its vantage point at the center of consciousness.

Among these visible images are representations of the external, sensory world — e.g., a rose, a cloud, the face of our infant daughter — and likewise mental representations of our conscious internal states, such as the state of being hungry. When we dream, images come up from the unconscious depths and appear at the focal point of consciousness. These dream images are coded in the form of symbols. Properly decoded, these symbols are capable of transforming us in small ways or radically, such that our ego grows ever stronger, more resilient, and better adapted to life.


For instance, if I am an alcoholic or abuser of habit-forming substances, then I need, Stein writes, "a powerful symbol ... to bring about ... a major transformation ... [through] a conversion experience. Symbols emerge out of the archetypal base of the personality, the collective unconscious. They are not artificially invented by the ego but rather appear spontaneously from the unconscious especially during times of great need. Symbols are the great organizers of libido ... " (pp. 81-82).

But, before their power to attract energy, organize libido, and transform consciousness can come into play, symbols first need interpreting. To Jung, a symbol is not identical to an unconscious archetype, which basically is nothing more than a what-you-see-is-what-you-get image, no matter how abstract in nature. Rather, a symbol is a coded pointer to an archetype, or to a complex having that archetype at its core.

Basically, a Jungian symbol is

the best possible statement or expression for something that is either essentially unknowable or not yet knowable given the present state of consciousness. Interpretations of symbols are attempts to translate the symbol's meaning into a more understandable vocabulary and set of terms, but the symbol remains the best present expression of the meaning it communicates. (p. 82)

If an alcoholic is to reform, a symbol must come along to sufficiently perturb his consciousness: one that, when decoded aright, will constellate a complex that is able to overwhelm the one his ego is presently in thrall to. If he is in thrall to his "mother complex" — the complex centered on the universal mother archetype — the "bottle" he can't stop swigging symbolizes, very likely, his mother's breast. It accordingly is the hero archetype to which he may need to look for his transformative symbol:

The hero is a basic human pattern — characteristic of women equally as of men — that demands sacrificing the "mother," meaning a passive childish attitude, and assuming the responsibilities of life and meeting reality in a grown up way. (p. 91)

To Jung, clearly, libido is not just sexual energy, not just the mental energy devoted to base desires and tricked by means of the defense mechanism of repression into powering the better angels of our nature, as Freud had it. It is also the energy that informs symbols and thus can transform (not just constrain) our consciousness into a form that is higher, larger, and more noble.

Every symbol, Jung showed, necessarily weds the base to the ideal:

Symbols open one up to mystery ... [and] combine elements of spirit [which represents that which is ideal] and instinctuality [base], of image [ideal] and drive [base]. For that reason, descriptions of exalted spiritual states and mystical experiences frequently refer to physical and instinctual gratifications like nourishment and sexuality. Mystics talk about the ecstasy of uniting with God as an orgasmic experience ... . The experience of the symbol unites body and soul in a powerful, convincing feeling of wholeness. For Jung the symbol holds so much importance because of its ability to transform natural energy into cultural and spiritual forms. (p. 82)

It is by this almost mystical wedding of the ideal-and-noble to the base-and-corrupting that the mind is able to create "analogues to instinctual goals and activities. Such analogues function as symbols ... [to] channel libido in new directions" (p. 80).

By diverting libido away from self-preservation's mandates — to eat and eliminate waste; to have sex and procreate so as to propagate our individual bloodlines and our species; and to attack our enemies and engage in other human exercises of the will to power — these near-mystical symbols empower us to pursue our pure and noble life's work. The result, aggregated over huge swaths of time and countless human individuals, is civilized culture, religion, morality, ethics, aesthetics — everything we take pride in accomplishing or creating.

Thus, this paradox: the notion which is the meaning of a symbol invariably has one foot in the realm of the base-and-tempting, the other in the realm of the noble-and-inspiring. For example, symbols which evoke, by coded references to the breast, the archetypal idea of motherhood combine the salacious (the breast as capable of arousing male lust) with the holy (images of the Madonna and Child).

And phallic symbols which naughtily represent penises also represent male generative power in the abstract, without which all progress would stall.

Jungian wholeness is intrinsically the possession of every symbol in the psyche of every human being. The symbol falls flat without a mystical parity between its base-and-corrupt half and its noble-and-uplifting side. Honoring this paradoxical reality, leveraging it, can bring Jungian wholeness to the psyche itself, such that nothing of which the psyche is made needs to be consigned to oblivion.

Jungian Wholeness, Part 3

I have been, in my Jungian Wholeness series of posts recently, exploring the thought of Carl Jung. Jung, who followed Freud in mapping the human psyche and discovered the potent patterns he dubbed archetypes in the collective unconscious, wanted to apply his insights to the Christian religion.

Specifically, he felt that the Christian emphasis on the trinitarian archetype, expressed in the Holy Trinity, needs to give way to quaternity, based on the archetype for wholeness. The God-symbol of three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, admirably led us in the direction of psychological wholeness in the past, but then got us stuck on a quest for spiritual purity instead of finishing the task of bringing the whole structure of the self out of the unconscious depths.

A quest for spiritual purity had its place, Jung said, according to Jung's Treatment of Christianity: The Psychotherapy of a Religious Tradition, Murray Stein's book on how Jung wanted to heal the Christian church. But Jung felt that modern Christianity was coming in for a crash landing due to its failure to allow for the redemption of our bodies in their gross, even sinful material reality.

So the Trinity as a God-symbol set us up for splitting our psyche into what about it could be admitted into conscious awareness and what had to be pushed into the unconscious depths to become part of the Jungian "shadow": the dark döppelganger to the persona that we gladly expose to outward and inward scrutiny. In the shadow we would keep our knowledge of our carnal, animal, lustful, aggressive characteristics, at times conveniently projecting them outward onto people we identify as being "other" than our own kind — justifying holy wars, crusades, inquisitions, witch burnings, and the like.

Meanwhile, we would pursue a vision of our own spiritual purification, blessed by God. This was a valid strategy for constructing the civilization we called Christendom, Jung said, but the Renaissance and the Enlightenment drove a wedge between the erstwhile power of the Trinity God-symbol and the way we live our lives in the modern world today.

Jung's prescription for bringing the power back to our God-symbol was to evolve it into a quaternity in which the supposedly wicked physical part of our nature could also be redeemed.


It occurs to me that the transition from Trinity to quaternity patterns with the Dark Night of the Soul spoken of by the Jesuit Thomas M. King in his book Enchantments, which I dealt with at length in my Enchantments series of posts.

King meditates on the repeated pattern in human experience in which we undergo a "Night of the Senses" that baptizes us by immersion in water, as it were. The immersion in effect kills off our naive belief that the physical world alone can save us. At that point we begin a quest for spiritual elevation and purification which involves an "enchantment" by the Word of God. We do our utmost to hark to God's Word alone and leave the claims of the physical world behind.

At some point, though, we inevitably come crashing back to earth. The enchantment turns to disenchantment. We are crushed by the weight of a "Dark Night of the Soul." God's Word has turned to ashes in our mouth.

Suddenly, then, we can receive a "Zen enlightenment," similar to the one told of by the great Trappist monk Thomas Merton. The formerly distasteful physical world takes on its own aura of sanctity. We realize we have undergone a second baptism, by fire and Spirit this time, and we enter upon a new kind of spiritual quest entirely: one that in no way tries to deny the stuff of our physical bodies with its cravings and its supposedly unholy agenda.

This new spiritual orientation that follows the second baptism by fire and Spirit would seem to correspond to the bringing of the full Jungian structure of the self up out of the unconscious shadow to the level of conscious awareness.

King shows that the Dark Night of the Soul and the second baptism by fire and Spirit are fully consistent with Jesus' teachings and with longstanding Christian practice, such as that found in the Spiritual Exercises of the founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius Loyola. They are also consistent with the evolution of the philosophy of Plato, the subtexts of Cervantes' Don Quixote and the numerous Faust narratives, etc., etc., etc. We have many, many authorities that can be cited for the validity of the pattern ... and King, as I recall, does not even mention Jung.

Jungian Wholeness, Part 2

I've been blogging about the Jungian concept of psychic integration and wholeness — see Jung's Treatment of Christianity: The Psychotherapy of a Religious Tradition, Murray Stein's book on how the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung wanted to heal the Christian church. Jung felt that modern Christianity was coming in for a crash landing due to its failure to allow for the redemption of our bodies in their gross material reality.

Jung said our main Judeo-Christian religion in Europe and the West had become too bent on seeking spiritual perfection. Its version of God could not relate to the shadow-side of human nature, the carnal, aggressive, animal instincts which evolution has left us saddled with. According to our religion, our lusts, sexual and otherwise, could only be redeemed by abandoning them in our quest for spiritual purity.

But, Jung said, they cannot really be abandoned, only repressed into the structure within the unconscious mind which he named the shadow. Our baser drives must accordingly be split off from conscious awareness, if we are to satisfy the traditional Christian mandates.

A better strategy, said Jung, is to bring all the structures and dynamics of the psyche into the field of consciousness in a balanced way. A new vision of God as a four-person quaternity, rather than a three-person Trinity, is needed. The goal of religion would be psychic wholeness, beyond spiritual purity.

It is my belief that our culture is off-kilter today because we have yet to heed Jung's call for an evolved Christianity that promotes psychic wholeness beyond spiritual purity.

My reasoning runs like this: When we encourage traditional views of the human condition as "fallen" and therefore requiring us to rededicate ourselves to a lost spiritual purity, we build a split into the psyche. Psychic splitting in one area results in splitting in other areas, and we start seeing the world as an "us" versus "them" thing: "they," the aliens among us, are not like "we" are, in that "they" suffer from some irremediable defect of humanity, while "we," whatever our flaws, are capable of being redeemed.


Notice how that type of thinking crops up in our debates over immigration. Robert Samuelson's opinion piece in today's Washington Post gives the impression that we're headed for deep trouble because of the heavy influx of Hispanic immigrants who, in their third and fourth generations, remain way behind ordinary Americans in terms of education and economic status.

Though the second generation makes big gains in terms of learning English and assimilating to American culture, that generation's children and grandchildren do not. Samuelson points out how Hispanics' shortfalls in these areas threaten to exacerbate our looming problems with Social Security and Medicare, which may go bust in an increasingly gray America, come the middle of this century. If we wind up with a large dollop of poorly educated, low-productivity Mexican-Americans in our labor markets, they won't have big enough paychecks to help Social Security and Medicare stay solvent.

He chides the presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama, for failing to acknowledge these two intertwined problems. But Samuelson himself fails to address the question of why third- and fourth-generation Hispanic immigrants fall so far behind the economic curve that they won't be productive enough to keep our seniors' entitlement programs afloat.

The problem is really that third- and fourth-generation Hispanic immigrants are still treated as aliens by the rest of us. They are told in a thousand ways that they are and evermore shall be "other."


Joseph Campbell tells Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth that:

In India there is a beautiful greeting, in which the palms are placed together and you bow to the other person ... That is a greeting which says that the god which is in you recognizes the god in the other. (p. 53)

In Jungian terms, the palms-together bow symbolizes the recognition of the same whole human self in the greeter as in the one being greeted. There is no "us"; there is no "them." In a line from a Joan Baez song, "And the stars in your sky are the stars in mine and both prisoners of this life are we."

If our present mindset is one that is prone to splitting off our "bad" side, repressing it into our unconscious, and projecting it outward upon the "other" — the descendants of Hispanic immigrants, in this case — the lack of integration of the "other" into our world becomes a foregone conclusion.

On the other hand, if we let our Judeo-Christian tradition evolve into one which affirms a psychological wholeness beyond spiritual purity, the problems associated with Jungian splitting, repression, projection, and alienation of the "other" may simply evaporate.

Here, then, is an excellent reason why our society should give Jung and his pronouncements a second look.

Jungian Wholeness, Part 1

In Jung's Treatment of Christianity: The Psychotherapy of a Religious Tradition, Murray Stein shows how Christianity, in Jung's view, has difficulty integrating the shadow into its image of God, Christ, and man. That is what I said in Spiritual Stances and Sexual Libido, in which I first brought up the subject of Jungian wholeness.

The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961) followed Sigmund Freud is his explorations into the hitherto uncharted territory of the unconscious minds of human beings. In this, Jung went farther than Freud. Where Freud identified the contents of an individual's unconscious mind with repressed personal experiences, Jung said there is a collective unconscious that contains universal archetypes: patterns or images around which congregate our myths, religions, and our individual repressed experiences, and which furnish symbols-in-disguise to our dreams, visions, mythic rituals, and religious experiences, not only individually but communally.

Stein shows how Jung said this works with respect to Christendom. The central symbol of that community's devotion is the Christ-symbol, depicted as Christ on the cross and given flesh by the stories of Jesus in the Gospels, the elaborations of the gospels in the other books in the New Testament, and later by the writings of the Church Fathers.

The Christ-symbol was motivated originally, Jung said, as a manifestation of the archetype of the self. The most important archetype of all in the human unconscious mind, the self represents a vision of the human psyche as, eventually, a fully conscious whole in which no aspect remains hidden in the unconscious.

We are, none of us, fully conscious ... but it is not unimaginable that Christ was. Thus the Christ-symbol as, ultimately, a symbol of the wholeness of the self.


The problem is that early on in Christian history, Jung said, the Christ-symbol got shifted to represent instead yet another desideratum of the human psyche: the search for spiritual perfection.

This perfection of the spirit implied a split between the spiritual person and the earthy, heavy dross of our physical substance, and along with that split, a concomitant split between good and evil, light and darkness, upward striving and instinct, and other similar pairs of opposites. God became identified with the Summum Bonum, the highest good, and evil was (when it wasn't being blamed on fallen man or on the Antichrist/Satan) thought of as privatio boni, the absence of good.

In denying evil's ontological status as even existing in its own right, the Church Fathers in effect pushed it into the Christian collective unconscious as an act of psychological repression. It fell into the province of the Jungian unconscious "shadow," constellating all the aspects of the self and experiences of the soul that have been excluded from consciousness.

Jung wanted to rescue the situation by restoring the Christ-symbol to its original function as an image of the wholeness of the self, shadow-side included.

Still and all, Jung admitted that the strategy adopted by the Early Church of shifting the Christ-symbol to one of spiritual perfection made sense at the time. In opposing the pagan culture of classical Rome in which the Church took root, the shift performed a vital psychological function, that of compensating for the extreme one-sidedness of that carnal culture, which had downplayed (repressed) the upward striving of the spirit.

Jung observed that the Renaissance in Europe, which gave birth to the Enlightenment, represented yet another compensation, this time to the overweening emphasis on upward striving symbolized by late-Medieval Gothic spires.

But in modern times in Europe at least, Jung said, the Christ-symbol had lost its efficacy, either as representing upward spiritual striving, or as symbolizing its original function, that of the integration of the whole self, warts and all, into consciousness.


It seems to be my fate to have an intensely felt personal need to accomplish what Jung said was the highest goal of all, higher even than spiritual perfection: self-actualization, also called individuation. This is the goal of a psychological wholeness that cannot sidestep the existence of the shadow-side. The shadow, no matter how "evil," is part of me, and of all of us.

The Jungian shadow is the basis for the Christian symbol of the Antichrist, which Christian prophets have long said will inevitably have its day. Jung said every repressed, shadow-identified aspect of the whole soul must have its day.

I now begin to see that the "solidarity" referred to in the name of this blog — "In Search of Solidarity" — is just another word for the Jungian wholeness I seek.

It has long been clear to me that the thrust of this blog is one that is disagreeable to many Christians, including many of my fellow Catholics. I have not hewed to Catholic doctrine on such matters as abortion, homosexuality, and the like. I have offended Christians of whatever stripe who resent or are at least suspicious of science, and especially of the theory of evolution (also see my companion blog, Beyond Darwin).

By virtue of this reawakening of my interest in things Jungian — in abeyance for perhaps a decade — I now see that there is, and has ever been, a move afoot in my own psyche to bring about the reunion of my shadow-side with my ego-consciousness.

The latter became identified with my upward spiritual striving some two decades ago, when I first found Christ. But even in those early days of spiritual striving, I found occasion to raise respectful disagreement with my church rector — I was then an Episcopalian, not yet a Catholic — about whether homosexuality was really the abomination spoken of in the Old Testament.

Mind you, I am not gay. I just felt in my gut an abhorrence for a Christian doctrine that so sharply divides humans from other humans ... so I found a book in the public library which supports a reading of the Bible as not as anti-gay as we suppose today. I wrote my rector a letter about the book, and he called me in for a discussion of these ideas, which he (unfortunately, in my mind) rejected.

My point here is not these ideas per se, but the testimony of this episode to the fact that, even in my early days as a traditional Christian, I wanted to heal all divides.

Today, I find myself unable to muster any enthusiasm for going to church. The heal-all-divides motif, though, has reasserted itself like gangbusters ... just as Jung said it must, eventually, in all of us, and in Christianity as well.

Spiritual Stances and Sexual Libido

One of my ongoing concerns in this blog is the question of where each of gets our worldview.

Each one of us has a worldview, and, furthermore, I think each of us has a spiritual worldview. At some level, every worldview is a spiritual stance. True, in the case of many people the spiritual stance they take is couched in negative terms, as in "I don't believe in any of that spiritual claptrap that other people waste their time pursuing. Nor do I believe in God or religion."

But what these people don't do, when you ask them about their religion or spiritual life, is say, "I really haven't given it any thought." They say instead, "I don't have a religion, and don't much care to." Which means they have thought about it and opted for atheism, agnosticism, or what some people call "apatheism," which is an intentional apathy toward religion.

Apatheists may or may not believe in God. When asked why they are apathetic about religion, apatheists may just tell you they think religion teaches the wrong values: intolerance, bigotry, even hatred.

Or, their response may be more nuanced — see "Let It Be" by Jonathan Rauch in the May 2003 Atlantic Monthly. Rauch calls apatheism "nothing less than a major civilizational advance." He says it is "the product of a determined cultural effort to discipline the religious mindset, and often of an equally determined personal effort to master the spiritual passions. It is not a lapse. It is an achievement."

The world needs "people who feel at ease with religion even if they are irreligious; people who may themselves be members of religious communities, but who are neither controlled by godly passions nor concerned about the (nonviolent, noncoercive) religious beliefs of others." It needs them to offset the countervailing "fanatical religiosity (al Qaeda) and tyrannical secularism (China)" that today imperils world peace and harmony.

This is, I claim, a spiritual stance. So is atheism. So is agnosticism. So is secular humanism. If a practitioner of any of these irreligious positions were forced by a cruel dictator to act contrary to its dictates, the person would die a spiritual death.

If a devout Catholic were forced repeatedly to desecrate a crucifix, spiritual death would ensue. If a devout atheist were forced over and over to kiss a rosary, again the expected result would be his or her inward death.

On the other hand, our inner beings can survive being forced to do stuff that does not immediately contradict our spiritual stance, whatever that stance happens to be. If I am an observant Jew but don't normally keep kosher, being forced by my oppressor to eat pork is spiritually survivable. Being forced to spit on the Torah daily might not be.

Our spiritual stance is crucial to us, whether or not we're pious or atheistic, observant or apatheistic. We'd die inside if we were forced repeatedly an flagrantly to go against our spiritual stance.

So, where do our spiritual stances come from? Why is this person an apatheist and that person a pious Baptist? Why is one Muslim a fundamentalist and another a modernist? Why do some Catholics consider a politician who supports a woman's right to choose an abortion to have sacrificed his eligibility to receive communion, while other Catholics vigorously oppose such politicization of the sacrament?

To be sure, most or all of us can defend our spiritual stance with rational arguments that tend to make some sense. But the arguments tend to make best sense to those who share the same core beliefs. To those whose core beliefs are slightly different, the arguments fall flat.

For instance, it is one of my core beliefs that women should be in control of their own fertility, take charge of their own reproductive lives. Unsurprisingly, I'm radically opposed to the doctrine that an embryo has a human soul from the moment of conception on, for then abortion would be murder. But abortion opponents equally unsurprisingly believe in "early hominization," the doctrine that a just-fertilized human egg cell has a soul.

Even deeper core beliefs are often at work. One of mine is that the true nature of womanhood is not as represented in the Bible and in Judeo-Christian tradition. Her fertility is not the sacred possession of (depending on her particular life situation) her husband, her father, her brothers, or her God. That axiom affects my spiritual stance as to the true nature of manhood, heterosexual sex, marriage, procreation, homosexuality, birth control, and on down the line.

Thus the question for me becomes, why do I feel so committed to a spiritual stance that depends on a belief that so fundamentally flies in the face of the outlook of my Church?

The answer has to do with sex.

Speaking as a lifelong, dyed-in-the-wool sexual repressive, I have become a true believer, at the bottom of my "stack" of deep core beliefs, that what represses the sex drive is wrong.

And my Judeo-Christian religion definitely represses the sex drive.

Having said that right out loud, I might possibly be expected next to go into a long dissertation justifying my saying it. That would take more time than I have. Rather, I'm just going to mention briefly some of the things I feel go along with the proposition that my Judeo-Christian religion gets sex wrong. My idea is that if you go along with me on any or all of these, you may want to think about agreeing with me that Judeo-Christian religion is too sexually repressive.

One of my main arguments is that our culture today is schizophrenic about sex. We uphold chastity, monogamy, heterosexuality, and fidelity, and we readily castigate anyone who doesn't practice all the above, and gets in trouble for it — unless they're film stars or celebrities, in which case we eat up all their exploits and gossip about them endlessly. We lap up raunchy, crude TV shows and movies like they're going out of style, while we discipline our teenage kids if they emulate them. We claim to aspire to higher things, but there never seems to be time for them — yet there's plenty of time for getting those tummy tucks and boob jobs that increase our sexual allure.


Why I think our religion promotes all that schizophrenia about sex, and why it matters to me (independently of whether I am objectively correct about it or not), I learn from the theory of the unconscious that Swiss psychologist Carl Jung had.

Jung extended Freud by discovering in the unconscious certain preexisting images which he called archetypes. Images that occur in our dreams, visions, myths, and religions — not to mention our popular culture — make the archetypes visible. For example, when there is a fish symbol in mythology or religion, it expresses an archetype. The underlying content picks up on the fish's ability to survive in water, thus thwarting death. Hence the fish as a Christian symbol.

Some archetypes are yet more abstract. One of the most abstract is "wholeness," which expresses itself in images such as a circle or a cross. A circle represents entirety. A cross divides a circle into four quadrants, à la the four points of the compass or the four corners of the earth. Four seems to be the number that crops up in dreams when we are trying to symbolize wholeness.

There is an archetype for the number four, in fact, which ties in with the archetype Jung pointed to most often: the Self. The Self, to Jung, "signifies the coherent whole, unified consciousness and unconscious of a person," according to this Wikipedia article.

Unless and until the psyche becomes fully "individuated" or "self-actualized," the Self does not function as it should as the center of consciousness. Rather, it remains largely unconscious, while the conscious ego functions as the center. This is the experience most people have and continue to have throughout life.

Not only is the archetype of the Self unconscious. So, too, are a great many other archetypes that presumably would function at a more consciously accessible level if self-actualization occurred.

Bringing all the unconscious archetypes, including the Self, to consciousness is threatening to the ego's status quo, for many reasons. One reason is that full integration of the psyche implies a reunification of potent opposites: light/dark, masculine/feminine, good/evil, etc.

The second terms exist in the unconscious as the Jungian "shadow" of the first terms, which the ego is proud to trumpet as belonging exclusively to it. (That the feminine is the "dark side" or "shadow side" of masculinity may simply reveal Jung's sexism, or it may reveal something deep about the human soul.)

In Jung's Treatment of Christianity: The Psychotherapy of a Religious Tradition, Murray Stein shows how Christianity, in Jung's view, has difficulty integrating the shadow into its image of God, Christ, and man. This is why its God-image is a Trinity, based on the archetype for three, rather than a quaternity, enshrining the archetype for four.

But the soul ultimately wants four-ness, not three-ness. The shadow side, "dark," "evil," and "feminine," must be reconciled with the light/good/masculine side.

For me personally, this seems to augur a reunion with my libido. Now, libido is a vexed term, since Freud and Jung seemed to identify it with the sex drive per se and then go on to say that all of our creative energies are at base libido. I'm thinking of it now in that former sense: the urge to have sex.

In that sense, libido is one of three categories of "lower" drives that spirituality at first seems to abandon as dross or slag. We hear of the soul or spirit leaving the body behind, along with its baser needs: eating and elimination; sex; aggression. These three, to the extent that they can each overwhelm us with pleasure, tend to get relegated to the Jungian shadow or the Freudian id, at least as far as our spiritual lives are concerned.

Of the three, the one that is most relegated to the shadow side, in my case, is the sex urge or libido.

Which I think explains why, in my search for integration, wholeness, and self, I have hit upon the Jungian "one-sidedness" of the Church's views on sex as Exhibit #1.