This is the headless professor.
Today we are talking about Carl Jung
and his system of Analytical Psychology
and how it attempts to explain
religious phenomena. Jung was an early
collaborator with
Freud, but broke with him in 1913.
Now Jung took many of the same
terms that Freud had used: such as EGO,
the UNCONSCIOUS, and the LIBIDO, but he understood them to mean something
a little bit different. Freud and Jung  shared a great interest in
dream symbols, but there the similarity ends.
Freud attempted to reduce
all human behavior to the underlying
internal drives of
sex and aggression. Jung was much more humanistic,
emphasizing the potential of each human
being
to grow and be highly creative.
So, instead of viewing dream symbols
as mere representations
of repressed sexual and aggressive
drives
found in the Oedipal situation, Jung
thought that such symbols
could enable us to grow
by harnessing some of that creative
energy
of the unconscious. Here is Jung's
model of the human mind.
He said only a part of it,
the ego, was really conscious, capable of
our direct
awareness, while the vast majority of the human
mind is
unconscious, beyond our normal states of
awareness.
But, it is through the power of symbols
that we can explore the unconscious and
tap into its
vast reservoir of creative energy
and this is what he saw was the role of
dreams
giving us a great window into the
unconscious
but it is also the role of art and the
role
of religion.  Jung thought that only part
of the mind was truly personal.
The ego, our center of
consciousness, was personal
and individual, and also there was a realm of the
personal unconscious. For example there
was the
PERSONA, the internalized social roles that we have,
the SHADOW, the parts that we are most ashamed of,
most embarrassed about, that we try to
repress,
and perhaps most importantly in the
personal unconscious,
there is the contra sexual
characteristics.
If we are a male we have to repress
our female side but that doesn't go away
it goes into the personal unconscious
as the
ANIMA. If we are a female then
we have to repress the
masculine side of our personalities
but that goes into the personal
unconscious as the
ANIMUS,  It is this contrasexual
characteristic of the personal
unconscious
that forms the great bridge with the COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS.
It is the collective unconscious that
contains the inherited capacities
to form symbols. These inherited
capacities
are known as ARCHETYPES.
To get the true creative energy of the
unconscious
we have to get all the way down into
the collective unconscious. Well, Freud
said
that religion merely tried to control sex and aggression,
and it was something that mankind would
eventually outgrow.
Jung held a very different view.
Instead of viewing religion as an
imperfect solution, or even part of the problem,
as Freud did,
Jung viewed religion as
very definitely part have the solution.
Jung says that the reason modern man
needs psychotherapy
is because modern man has lost touch with religion.
In the past it was religion,
along with art, that provided man
with a symbolic contact with his unconscious.
Jung once said of his patients,
that are over age 35,
the only way that they're going to
achieve mental health
is to reconnect with their spiritual
roots.
