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.