Jung vs. a Righteous One-Sidedness?

An area of tension between Christian theology and Jungian psychology — it is the second of the five topics that Eugene C. Bianchi addresses in "Jungian Psychology and Religious Experience," an article in Carl Jung and Christian Spirituality: A Reader, edited by Robert L. Moore — is that which Bianchi labels "receptive-initiatory." (See The God of Synchronicity for my initial comments on this article and book.)

Bianchi means by this label that traditional theologians accuse Jungians of claiming that the individual who attends to the urgings of the "archetypes" in his "collective unconscious," and who thinks God is thereby calling him from within his soul, is not really hearing God. God is not, in this anti-Jungian view, an archetype such that our encounter with God is initiated from within our psyche. A Jungian-style faith is a false one, not a response to an objectively real God's freely made external offer of salvation, to which we are merely receptive.

Jungians hold, on the other hand, that there is something called the Self, and it is very real. It is (a) an archetype of the collective unconscious and (b) the image of God within every human soul. It calls each of us to psychological wholeness and completion.

The Self, which like all archetypes is not something we are consciously aware of, represents itself to us in code, as it were, through our affinity for certain symbols. The rose window of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris (right) is just such a symbol. Its fullness, roundness, unity, balance, and symmetry betoken wholeness and completion.

Another symbol that betokens wholeness and completion is the cross of Christ (left). It conveys the same balance and symmetry as the rose window — which is actually a kind of mandala — and the fact that it has exactly four peripheral compass points incorporates the symbolism always associated in the psyche with the number four. The number four is, Jung said, intrinsically a symbol of completion and wholeness.

To a Jungian, psychological wholeness/completion is the prime desideratum of a human life. It is achieved when the Self archetype is "realized" by means of a long process which Jung called "individuation." Individuation makes each of us into the particular and unique individual he/she is destined to be. In so doing, it makes each person less wedded to group or societal norms than he/she once may have been.

Self-realization comes by means of balancing the various forces within the psyche off against one another, just as the individual "rays" of Notre Dame's rose window balance each other off. This balancing act is easier said than done: typically, some of the sources of energy in the psyche are considered dangerous, antisocial, or downright evil. Those centers of energy which threaten our "nice," conscious self-image are pushed into the unconscious, where they only seem to be gotten out of the way and thereby rendered harmless.


Self-realization involves recognizing that the supposedly "evil" forces of the psyche are only evil when they are not properly in balance with the "good" forces.

There's no getting around it: this is a point of view that relativizes evil. Evil, sinfulness, transgressiveness — whatever you want to call it — is not absolute after all. If an inner urge or drive that would initially seem to be absolutely evil is brought into balance with the rest of the forces of the psyche, it is no longer (as we Catholics say) an occasion of sin.

A simple analogy would be to coffee: to many people, the taste of coffee is foul and bitter unless it is balanced off by adding cream and sugar. Likewise, a Jungian would say that certain aspects of the psyche are foul and sinful ... but only unless and until they are balanced off against other aspects of the psyche.

When the psyche is not in balance, Jung said it is "one-sided." One-sidedness is, to a Jungian, something to be overcome. Self-realization through individuation is what overcomes it.

The Self archetype is what calls us from within to perform such a balancing act. In fact, Jung called the Self the imago Dei, the image of God, within us.


But there is another point of view about what God calls us to do. This one would seem to say to us that there is in fact a righteous and holy one-sidedness which God wants us — with his help and guidance — to achieve.

We are to do, and be, naught but good. We are to spurn sin and evil. Those temptations, drives, and urges which we experience within us that would have us commit acts that are prohibited by God's law (or fail to do things we are called by God to do) simply have to be resisted.

This point of view is the one which Bianchi treats as "initiatory." An objectively real deity, namely God, initiates a relationship with us from outside our world. We then feel as if we are receiving God's word and law from a transcendent, not immanent, Being who simply tells us how (and how not) to live godly lives.


By treating God as someone to whom we are "receptive" because he comes to us through an inner archetype called the Self, Jungians supposedly risk making right and wrong into a subjective thing. How do we know that the urgings we may become aware of, stirring within our soul, are indeed coming from God, traditional Christians ask?

One way to bring the two perspectives closer together is to point out that in Jung's theory, human consciousness passes through several stages. I discussed this more fully in Quest for the Self, Part 2. Self-realization through individuation is associated with one of the "later" stages, Stage 5.

In this stage, we become skilled in interpreting the meaning of the symbols that our unconscious mind throws into the light of consciousness by way of our dreams, our fantasies, our inner preoccupations, and our myths. Seeing religious revelation à la the Bible as a work of symbols and myth changes our perspective. It opens up possibilities for interpretation which allow us to accept some of the hitherto unconscious forces of our own psyche into conscious awareness, so to achieve a more complete balance of psychic forces.

Compare that with Stage 3 consciousness. In that stage, we "project" our inner ideals out upon abstract entities such as God. That stage is all about fidelity and allegiance to God (or whatever abstract entity we are projecting our ideals onto).

Naturally, in order for this strategy of projection to work, we see the one that receives our projections as absolutely, objectively real. We resent any outlook that suggests God is anything but that.

So Bianchi's "receptive-initiatory" conflict could be seen as a Stage 5-Stage 3 contrast. People who are in Stage 5 are receptive to the Self as the ambassador of God within the soul. People who are in Stage 3 need to see God as coming into their lives from outside the subjective psyche.


All this is complicated by the fact that these stages are not strictly sequential. We can cycle "backwards" from a "later" stage to an "earlier" one.

In my own life, I seem to have entered Stage 4 consciousness, which is characterized by a seeming "end" to the erstwhile proclivity to project our inner images out onto persons and things, whether they be concrete and specific (Stage 2) or abstract and general (Stage 3). In Stage 4, we are atheists and agnostics. There simply are no external gods, no God, worthy of our projected ideals.

Stealthily, we are actually projecting our innermost ideals onto our own ego, the center of our conscious awareness, Jung said ... but never mind. We don't see that unless or until we arrive at Stage 5.

At any rate, I seem to have arrived at Stage 4 before coming to Stage 3. Then I had to double back and become a midlife convert to Christian belief. Yet, even as that was happening, I began to feel stirrings of what I would much later come to identify as Stage 5 consciousness. This stuff can get complex!