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.