Philosopher’s View on Religion

Carl Jung
“The Celebration of Religion”
PHI 100
PREPARED BY: RONNEL JOHN M. ROMAGOS
Carl Jung 2
The Celebration of Religion

PHI 100 - Religions, Religious Experiences and Spirituality

Carl Gustav Jung
1875-1961
Carl Jung 3

The Celebration of Religion

PHI 100 - Religions, Religious Experiences and Spirituality

 Scope:
 Carl Gustav Jung, or C. G. Jung, began his career in psychiatry as one of Freud’s
most promising disciples. As Jung began to reflect more independently on human
psychology and its pathologies, however, he found himself increasingly
convinced that religion, far from being the chronic impediment that Freud
believed it to be, was also potentially a source of health, balance, and connection
for people; in fact, it was a necessary component of mental health. Religion, he
said, was the sense that we were connected to a reality larger than our individual
selves.
Carl Jung 4

The Celebration of Religion

PHI 100 - Religions, Religious Experiences and Spirituality

 We might call this larger reality by many names, but it represented a kind of
synchronicity, a larger web of significations, a collective unconscious that was
inbuilt into the human psyche. Its contents included archetypes, universal
symbolic representations that helped people to organize and give meaning to their
existence. In tandem with rational, discursive thought, symbols and archetypes
enabled people to approach the world in a balanced, meaningful way.
Carl Jung 5

The Celebration of Religion

PHI 100 - Religions, Religious Experiences and Spirituality

Jung’s analysis of the mind differed significantly from Freud’s, especially in the matter
of the unconscious.
 A. Jung described himself as a “phenomenologist” of the mind.
 1. Experience was fundamental, whether it had a referent in reality or not.
 2. Jung, as a clinician and therapist, was more interested in the effects and functions of mental
constructs than in their objective reality.
 B. Jung viewed the unconscious as neutral, whereas Freud saw it as a dumping-ground
for repressed contents. The unconscious was simply all things of which one was not
conscious.
 C. Jung believed that the unconscious had two parts: the personal and the collective.
 1. The personal unconscious embodied whatever was put in by one’s own individual life
experiences. Its content consisted in complexes.
 2. The collective unconscious was inherited as part of being human.
Carl Jung 6

The Celebration of Religion

PHI 100 - Religions, Religious Experiences and Spirituality

 D. Jung saw the collective unconscious as especially important to his more positive
evaluation of religion.

 1. The collective unconscious was not a mystical connection or hive mind shared
among people.
 2. The collective unconscious was simply a constant structure that came with being
human.
 3. The collective unconscious’s contents were archetypes: symbolic representations
of reality in symbolic form that would be empirically verified as universal by
observing their universal recurrence (e.g., “dual mothers” or “dual natures”).
 4. Primary access to archetypes came through dreams.
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The Celebration of Religion

PHI 100 - Religions, Religious Experiences and Spirituality

E. Jung saw the unconscious and its archetypes as instincts, which means that they
are non-rational but express basic and powerful needs.
 1. Premodern humans dealt with these needs mythologically and analogically, through
attention to dreams and other methods.
 2. Modern society has precipitated a crisis by its thorough rationalism, distrust of
myths, and discounting of dreams, forcing basic and powerful needs to fester.
 3. With this idea, Jung broke with many thinkers who took an evolutionary view of
humanity’s ascent and regarded religion as part of a “primitive childhood phase.”
 4. For Jung, attention to archetypes is a permanent need that we will never outgrow.
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The Celebration of Religion

PHI 100 - Religions, Religious Experiences and Spirituality

F. Jung felt that the unconscious, a source of creativity and coping resources, was
instrumental in supporting his views of religion.
 1. Whereas Freud believed that mental health was gained by bringing all the contents
of the unconscious to consciousness and owning them, Jung felt that this could not be
done.
 2. Though humans never outgrow the archetypes of the collective unconscious, when
specific religious forms become obsolete or inappropriate, we need to invest them in
more appropriate and effective forms.
Carl Jung 9

The Celebration of Religion

PHI 100 - Religions, Religious Experiences and Spirituality

Jung approached religion by attending to its effects rather than the reality of its referents.
He did not wonder whether the referents of religion really existed but merely noted that
people experienced the objects of religion and asked what flowed from this experience.

 A. He regarded divinities and symbols as archetypes in the mind rather than realities in
their own right.
 B. He saw religion as part of the human heritage and a valid support for the human
psyche, unlike Freud, who considered religion an illusion and an illegitimate crutch.
 C. He believed that despite the possibility of religious pathologies (when an individual
identified too closely with an archetype) there were also healthy forms of religion.
Carl Jung 10

The Celebration of Religion

PHI 100 - Religions, Religious Experiences and Spirituality

His stance on religion was pragmatic.
 1. Some symbols enable the mind to focus on its “shadow,” a negative but powerful aspect of our
instinctual nature.

 2. By having myths and rituals that deal with these shadows, an individual can own it, incorporate it into
the self, and achieve integration.

 3. By being overly rational, however, an individual dismisses the shadow as irrational, sees it as
contradictory to his or her values and tries to extinguish it, or takes it as a symbol that represents
something else and tries to interpret it in such a way as to fit into his or her rational framework. These
strategies fail to deal with the shadow as a part of the psyche, and so rationality causes it to fester.
 4. Jung was not concerned with the “reality” of the symbol for the shadow. He saw worrying over its
metaphysical status as a distraction.

 5. Jung’s phenomenological stance, which led him to dismiss questions about the reality of religious
claims, alienated him from some religious people.