The Archetype of the Self: Jung and the Phenomenology of Self-Knowing

Archetype & Icon

Archetypes within clinical scientific psychology is perhaps Jung’s greatest contribution to modern thought, The broader idea of Archetypes is historically Judeo-Christian in origin, with obvious Platonic echoes, but no direct connection. The earliest known usage is in the Hellenized Jewish philosopher Philo Judaeus (Philo of Alexandria) in his work "De Opificio Mundi" (On the Creation of the World). Here Philo discusses the creation story from the book of Genesis and refers to the Imago Dei (the image of God) in humans as an "archetype." He uses the term to describe a primordial, divine form or pattern from which humanity is shaped, emphasizing the idea that humans are modeled after an eternal, pre-existing ideal found in the mind of God. In the Corpus Hermeticum, God is described as the archetypal light (τὸ ἀρχέτυπον φῶς), and Dionysius the Areopagite frequently used the term, mentioning "immaterial archetypes" in De caelesti hierarchia and an "archetypal stone" in De divinis nominibus.

The early Second-Temple Hellenized Jews, who became the first Christians, continued to use the concept of Archetype beyond the Imago Dei, yet opposed the Gnostic Cosmology of pre-existing forms that even God must abide within. Jung, as he does in Answer to Job and his infamous Aion: The Phenomenology of the Self, misquotes the Early church fathers Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria. He cites Irenaeus as saying "The creator of the world did not craft things directly from himself but shaped them based on archetypes outside of himself", yet this is a creative misusage, and this phrase is found nowhere in Irenaeus' works. In his most famous work, Against Heresies (Adversus Haereses), Irenaeus argues the exact opposite: for a Creator who made the world directly through his Word and Spirit, without needing to rely on external archetypes. He emphasized that creation was an act of divine will, completely outside of Time (Aion) and Space, with God being both the source and the pattern for creation (the doctrine of Immutability). In other words, God creates Archetypes, but does not conform to them Himself. Saint Irenaeus consistently argued against Gnostic beliefs that posited a distinction between the supreme, transcendent God and the creator of the material world (often referred to as a "Demiurge" in Gnostic thought). Gnostics believed the material world was created by an inferior being using pre-existing, imperfect archetypes, while Irenaeus defended the unity and goodness of God as both transcendent and immanent (via a proto-Energies/Essence distinction), affirming that God is the direct creator of all things- the Unmoved Mover. This belief in the Immanence and absolute transcendence of God is a clear difference between Orthodox Christian Theology and Jung's Gnostic-Manichean Philosophy, since Jung often treats the idea of God as an archetype itself, not the origin of archetypes. Jung in this article onces again makes the case for Manichaeism based off of his meta-psychological principle of the absolute existence of opposites- a distinction he gets from Continental dialectical philosophy.

In 1919, Jung used the term Archetype to describe the concept of primordial images in his self-experimentation. That quickly evolved to be one of his core topics, including a very robust philosophy of meta-archetypes mimicking Nietzsches concept of the Apollarion & Dionysian as the origin of Tragedy and art. At first glance, Jung's Anima/Animus dichotomy correlates strongly with Nietzsche's emphasis on the Greco-Roman Apollarion & Dionysian contrast he drew from Hegel and Holderlin, but I see them as essentially different. Both are psycho-spiritual male/female contrasts that are important to the emergence and creation of art, and both have a powerful, unseen influence on humanity. Left unchecked, these morally agnostic pairs can destroy the individual in tragedy or lead to a renaissance. But the Anima/Animus is a set of chthonic, abstract, vaguely anthropomorphized meta-archetypes that reside outside the individual in the collective unconscious-the raw material from which individualizations are formed into guiding archetypes-while the Apollonian/Dionysian is a pair of opposing impulses within the individual. Nietzsche's pair is obvious to the individual and resides in the emotional state; Jung's resides in the deepest recesses of the shadow self, and its form can only be seen by looking across the millennia at many millions of psyches. It's almost impossible for a single individual to perceive its motivational influence. Jung calls this yin-yang pair syzygy (Greek for marriage).

But there is much that can be correlated with Nietzsche's works: both Jung and Nietzsche prophetically predicted that the end of the Christian era, brought about by the rise of Protestantism, would be replaced by chaos, predicting the Holodomor and the Holocaust. Since Christ is the archetype of the Self, the post-Protestant disintegration of the Christian ethos plunges Western culture into hysteria and placebo religions (socio-political dogma, astrology, etc.). Jung writes: "The destruction of the image of God is followed by the annulment of the human personality. Materialistic atheism, with its utopian chimeras, forms the religion of all those rationalistic movements which delegate the freedom of personality to the masses and thereby extinguish it". Nietzsche and Jung are both concerned with the genealogy of morality and the problem of dichotomies, especially good and evil. Nietzsche's solution is to become post-human, the Übermensch. Jung's solution is to return to a ritual relationship with the ancient archetypes and re-enchant reality. Nietzsche poetically articulates the reality that parts of the mind are autonomous from conscious control, something Jung psychologically expands upon. The anima and animus are autonomous meta-patterns because "the causal factors which determine his psychic existence are largely located in unconscious processes outside of consciousness

Freud and Jung's use of Schopenhauer's "Collective Unconscious "(das kollektive Unbewusste)

Schopenhauer lives in the shadow of Nietzsche, but some of his concepts have been given universal status by the Zurich psychotherapists. The term "collective unconscious" was coined by Schopenhauer, not Jung. It was borrowed verbatim because Freud and Jung believed that these elements of the collective unconscious were the source of many of our actions and behaviours. This is obviously the source of Nietzsche's Apollarian-Dyonysian dichotomy, and the basis of Freud and Jung's psychotherapeutic theories. Freud was even more influenced by Schopenhauer than Jung, and borrowed much of his pessimistic philosophy. In his 1899 work The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud wrote: "Schopenhauer's doctrine of the will, which I have adopted as my own, has led me to the discovery of the unconscious in psychology.” Modernity uses concepts and phrases from Schopenhauer every day.

One of the key concepts Freud borrowed from Schopenhauer is the idea that the unconscious is the primary driver of human behavior. Schopenhauer believed that the will, or the unconscious drive to survive and reproduce, is the source of all human action. Freud, in turn, developed the concept of the "id", which he believed to be the unconscious source of all human desires and drives. The interplay of the dichotomy between the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious is a core antinomy of all modern psychology, thanks to the Zurich Circle's reading of Schopenhauer. In Freud, Jung and Schopenhauer (as well as in Nietzsche's Apollarian-Dyonysian dichotomy), the collective unconscious consists of the inherited symbolic and archetypal patterns shared by all humanity throughout all time, past, present and future (biological Deep-Time), simultaneously in dynamic interaction. Jung, in his conversations with Einstein, added a temporal element to the definition and expanded the field to include the fractal symbolism of archetypes, which are "living" universal patterns or themes present in the mythology, religion and stories of all cultures. Schopenhauer proposed an entelechy for all life - the will to live, very Darwinian, and Nietzsche abstracted it further into a will to power. Freud's entelechy is closer to that of Feuerbach and Schopenhauer. Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant and Hegel were already thinking archetypally (Nietzsche from his very first book), but Jung developed archetypal thinking more explicitly and gave it a scientific standing - his analysis is still the basis of all psychotherapy. Perhaps Schopenhauer is also partly where he got his Platonism from; Jung certainly didn't get it from Nietzsche.

Jung was an existentialist, like Dostoevsky, and Freud was quite anti-existentialist in his anti-Socratic materialist bent, something he could have picked up from Nietzsche, who was perhaps the most vocal and powerful anti-metaphysical anti-existentialist. Existentialism is an inherently Socratic enterprise, and Socrates Nietzsche hated almost as much as Christ. Jung's entelechy is anti-materialistic and deeply Socratic, recognizing the telos of humanity as something like a restoration of the transcendent. He has a teleological understanding of rationality which he takes from the tradition of German Idealism, a Mithraic understanding of time which he expounds most fully in Aion. We see this difference in metaphysical perspective in the interpretation of symbols; Jung, being deeply Socratic, saw the serpent as a Nous-Logos symbol, bringing both damnation and self-awareness. Whereas Freud saw it as nothing more than a representation of the libido.

The broader idea of the unconscious was not only Schopenhauer's idea: he simply intellectualized this ancient idea in clear philosophical language. Even in Schopenhauer's self-declared enemy Hegel, we see the concept of the Unconscious and Archetypes. Jung mentions he read a lot of Kant and Hegel in his youth- which explains why I noticed quite a bit of Kanto-Hegelian phraseology here. What Jung calls 'Symbolic thinking', Hegel called 'picture thinking' (Bilddenken) 200 years prior. Take this quote from his early Jena writings which describes the day/night duality of consciousness:

"Der Mensch ist diese Nacht, dies leere Nichts, das alles in ihrer Einfachheit enthält- ein Reichtum unendlich vieler Vorstellungen, Bilder, deren keines ihm gerade einfällt - , oder die nicht als gegenwärtige sind. Dies die Nacht, das Innere der Natur, das hier existiert Reines selbst,- in phantasmagorischen  Vorstellungen ist es rings um Nacht, hier schießt dann ein blutig Kopf, dort eine andere weiße Gestalt plötzlich hervor, und verschwinden ebenso. Diese Nacht erblickt man, wenn man dem Menschen ins Auge blickt in eine Nacht hinein, die furchbar wird, es hängt die Nacht der Welt hier einem entgegen. In dieser Nacht ist das Seiende zurückgegangen Aber die Bewegung dieser Macht ist ebenso gesetzt."

"Man is this night, this empty nothing, which contains everything in its simplicity - a wealth of infinite ideas, images, none of which occurs to him at the moment - or which are not present. This night, the interior of nature, which exists here as Pure Self,- in phantasmagorical imaginings it is night all around, here then a bloody head, there another white figure suddenly shoots forth, and disappears likewise. One sees this night when one looks man in the eye into a night that becomes terrible, the night of the world meets you here.  In this night the existing has receded But the movement of this power is likewise set."

Jung attributes his basic understanding of balance in the Psyche all the way back to Heraclitus, and in German Idealism the power of unconscious symbols is mentioned extensively. Kant wrote about "the immeasurable field... of obscure ideas" and Hegel of "Man is this night, this empty Nothing, which contains everything in its simplicity: wealth and an infinite number of representations, images...". Like these philosophers, Jung notes, "the Unconscious operates in and out of waking existence". And in contradiction to Freud, he notes that while he uses simplistic imagery of consciousness being the 'day' and the unconscious being the 'night'.

Jung writes "The individual is the only reality" in his 1964 Man and his Symbols, and Hegel wrote in his 1812 Wissenschaft der Logik

"individuality is precisely the actualizing of what exists only in principle... the movement of individuality is the reality of the universal."

Both understood ideology as the driver of human behavior, yet both also understood that the meta-narratives underneath these ideologies are what truly drives the path of the individual. The power of the doctrine- of the ideology- is the story it tells. This is not a novel observation- it’s something Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and a host of other thinkers have weighed in on. Hegel understood these ideas philosophically; Jung understood them technically within clinical psychology.

 Jung’s synthesis, however, is not merely a return to Schopenhauerian metaphysics but rather a reconfiguration of it within a framework that incorporates both the empirical rigor of psychoanalysis and the speculative depth of German Idealism. This reconfiguration is evident in Jung’s insistence on the symbolic nature of the unconscious, which he interprets not as a mere repository of repressed desires but as a dynamic, generative force that mediates between the individual and the collective.

The genealogical trajectory of these ideas—from Schopenhauer’s will to Freud’s id and Jung’s collective unconscious—reveals a broader epistemological shift in the understanding of human subjectivity. Schopenhauer’s will, as a metaphysical principle, operates at the level of universal ontology, transcending individual experience. Freud, by contrast, localizes the unconscious within the psyche of the individual, thereby reducing its scope to a psychological mechanism. Jung’s collective unconscious, however, represents a synthesis of these positions, situating the individual within a broader, transhistorical framework while retaining the empirical focus of psychoanalysis. This synthesis is not without its contradictions, particularly in its treatment of temporality. Schopenhauer’s will is timeless and unchanging, while Freud’s unconscious is deeply rooted in the individual’s developmental history. Jung, influenced by Einstein’s theories of relativity, introduces a temporal dimension to the collective unconscious, envisioning it as a dynamic interplay of archetypes that transcend linear time. This temporal complexity is further elaborated in Jung’s concept of synchronicity, which posits a meaningful coincidence between psychic and external events, challenging the deterministic causality that underpins both Schopenhauer’s and Freud’s theories.

The hermeneutic implications of these divergent temporalities are profound, particularly in their treatment of symbolic meaning. For Schopenhauer, symbols are ultimately illusory, mere representations of the will’s underlying reality. Freud, while acknowledging the symbolic nature of dreams and neuroses, interprets these symbols reductively, as manifestations of repressed desires. Jung, by contrast, imbues symbols with a generative power, viewing them as mediators between the conscious and unconscious realms. This shift from a reductive to a generative hermeneutics reflects a broader epistemological transformation, one that moves from a positivist model of knowledge to a more pluralistic and interpretive framework. Jung’s emphasis on the symbolic nature of the unconscious thus represents not only a departure from Freud but also a return to the speculative traditions of German Idealism, particularly Hegel’s concept of Bilddenken, or picture-thinking. This return, however, is not a mere repetition but a reconfiguration, one that integrates the empirical insights of psychoanalysis with the speculative depth of idealism.

The ontological underpinnings of these theories further illuminate their divergent approaches to the nature of reality. Schopenhauer’s will, as a blind, irrational force, posits a fundamentally chaotic and meaningless universe, a view that aligns with his pessimistic metaphysics. Freud’s materialism, while similarly deterministic, seeks to impose a rational order on this chaos through the mechanisms of the psyche. Jung’s archetypal theory, however, introduces a teleological dimension, suggesting that the unconscious is not merely a repository of repressed desires but a source of meaning and purpose. This teleology is deeply rooted in Jung’s existentialist leanings, which stand in stark contrast to Freud’s anti-existentialist materialism. Jung’s existentialism, influenced by figures such as Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard, emphasizes the individual’s quest for meaning in the face of an inherently meaningless universe. This quest is mediated through the archetypes, which serve as both psychological and metaphysical guides, bridging the gap between the individual and the collective, the temporal and the eternal.

The reception dynamics of these ideas further complicate their interpretation, particularly in their adaptation within different intellectual and cultural contexts. Schopenhauer’s pessimism, for instance, found a receptive audience in the fin-de-siècle Vienna of Freud’s early career, where it resonated with the prevailing sense of cultural decline. Freud’s psychoanalysis, in turn, was shaped by this cultural milieu, which emphasized the irrational and the unconscious as key determinants of human behavior. Jung’s archetypal theory, however, emerged in a different context, one shaped by the existential crises of the mid-20th century and the growing interest in non-Western spiritual traditions. This shift in context is reflected in Jung’s emphasis on the symbolic and the transcendent, which represents a departure from the materialist and reductionist tendencies of Freudian psychoanalysis. The reception of these ideas thus reveals not only their intrinsic philosophical content but also their adaptability to changing cultural and intellectual paradigms.

In synthesizing these diverse theoretical trajectories, it becomes evident that the legacy of Schopenhauer’s will extends far beyond its original metaphysical framework, influencing a wide range of intellectual traditions from psychoanalysis to existentialism. This legacy, however, is not static but dynamic, continually reinterpreted and reconfigured within new epistemological and ontological frameworks. The tension between Schopenhauer’s metaphysical pessimism, Freud’s psychological materialism, and Jung’s existentialist teleology reveals a deeper dialectic between determinism and freedom, chaos and order, meaning and meaninglessness.

Freud verses Jung: Dostoevskian "Demonic" Possession in Jungian Archetypal Thinking

Much of Jung's understanding of religion is a response to Freud's Schopenhauerian pessimism and understanding of religion as merely presuppositional, rational belief (the Protestant definition). Freud's critique of religion is drawn primarily from Feuerbach, Nietzsche and, perhaps more than any other, Schopenhauer. In essence, Freud argued that belief in the supernatural is a mental illness. He makes a variety of arguments in three different areas, much like Nietzsche - anthropological, ontogenetic and phylogenetic. Freud's understanding of the genealogy of morality is almost verbatim Nietzsche's historical-Darwinian and later phenomenological arguments. His last work before his death was an analysis of Moses, so despite his rejection of religion he became increasingly fixated on the psychological nature of religion. Jung, for whom Freud had great respect in his early years and who was to be his successor, broke with him on these views, and we can see his responses in Answer to Job as specifically anti-Freudian.

Jung was one of the great anti-ideologues of his century, in the same vein as Solzhenitsyn, Orwell and Dostoyevsky. Just as Dostoevsky used the metaphor of the Gerasene Demoniac in his 1871 psychological novel Demons to illustrate the "possessiveness" of socio-political ideologies, so Jung and Nietzsche described the presence of archetypes as a form of third party control over waking consciousness. The anima/animus and the dyonysian/appollarian are some of the para-temporal meta-personalities that control unconscious realities and drive religious expression. In other words, religion does not exist in axiomatic, presuppositional forms, but in symbolic psychological patterns that are impervious to superficial beliefs. From Jung's anti-Freudian psychological perspective, it is precisely agnosticism that is the neurosis, an act of self-deception:

Agnosticism maintains that it does not possess any knowledge of God of anything metaphysical, overlooking the fact that one never possesses a metaphysical belief, but is always possessed by it.

We can see how this understanding of religion led to different attitudes to the Nazis. Freud was critical of the Nazis from a psychological perspective, pointing out that the collectivist mindset was a misplacement of repressed desires. In the tradition of Feuerbach, Freud declared himself an enemy of religion "in every form and dilution". In his youth he was deeply influenced by Feuerbach, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and he later admitted that his views on religion were largely derived from them, rejecting the Judaism of his youth altogether. It was only with the rise of anti-Semitism that he dusted off his Jewish identity and began to identify as a Jew. Religiously, he was a Cartesian and materialist, not following Schopenhauer's Platonism or Nietzsche's phenomenological-teleological perspectives, but developing a worldview much closer to Feuerbach's one-world Aristotelian materialism, making him easily accessible to the Marxist tradition. His critique of Christianity is identical to Feuerbach's, assuming that Christianity is ontologically dualistic (only Protestantism is) and responding with an opposite but equal de-mystical materialism. At times, his quest for the perception of reality brought him close to Platonism, but he remained ideologically Cartesian and classically atheistic.

When the Austrian Socialists came to power in 1934, Freud remained calm, believing that Austrian Catholicism would prevent the ideology from spreading as it had in Protestant Germany. He was right for a while; the Austrian Socialist Fascists did not gain much power in Austria because of Catholicism, but by 1938 this no longer mattered as German troops invaded and began systematically eliminating religious institutions. He wrote actively against the Nazis from the outset - and expelled Nazi sympathizers from his psychoanalytical association - and was able to escape to England with the help of the US and Britain, where he eventually died. Four of his sisters died in the Holocaust

Jung condemned Nazism much more strongly and became a spy for the Allies. Jung was hyper-Socratic in all his therapeutic aims, seeing the spiritual development of the psyche as the critical factor in the prosperity of future society. War itself, Jung believed, was caused by the sum of individuals not taking the process of shadow integration seriously, and in the aftermath of the First World War he predicted an even greater calamity would befall Western civilization, warning in impressive detail of the impending conflict. He was concerned, to the point of fanaticism, with the origins of transpersonal consciousness and the damage done to the nuos by the "polished Cartesian rationality" of modernity. In step with Freud, the budding Nazi movement was what Jung called a psychological disease, a disease he actively worked against by sending psychological profiles of Hitler to Allied intelligence: "The Jewish problem is a complex one... and no responsible physician could bring himself to apply medical methods of obfuscation to it." But he also went further than Freud, calling it a religion, an inevitable secularized faith to replace Protestantism:

We don't know whether Hitler isn't just establishing a 'new Islam'. He's already there, he resembles Mohammed. The German emotional world is Islamic. They're all drunk from a raging god. That could be our future story.

A sense of foreboding lies over all of Jung's work. He believed that the psychic trauma stemming from the severance of the human mind from the supra-rational through the denial of mystical participation in the material universe would redirect psychic energy into terrifying manifestations. Here in Modern Man, he predicts the second world war: "Today, fifteen years after the war [WWI], we observe once more the same optimism, the same organization, the same political aspirations, the same phrases and catch-words at work. How can we fear that they will inevitably lead to further catastrophes?" He writes that the wave of Materialistic Rationalism would create a new religion that would make the dogma of the middle ages look tepid; "The materialist is more radical because he is more systematic than the archaic man in his belief of simplistic causality... I realize only too well that I am losing my faith in the possibility of a rational organization of the world."

After his worst fears were realized, Jung worked as a Swiss spy for the American government- sending psychoanalysis of Hitler directly to US Military intelligence. Jung was incredibly practical in his Psychology- he was always thinking about what this ivory-tower philosophizing and psychological discoveries meant for the direction of society. He criticized the Adlerian and Freudian schools for not recognizing that they are essentially clergy- the very act of trying to heal neurosis has a religious element because you are making assumptions about the Telos of human life- about meaning, purpose, and destiny.  He wanted the field of Psychology to admit that it cannot exist in pure Empiricism- the very act of analysis is preceded by philosophical tenets. He writes: "Just as the discovery of the unconscious shadow-side once forced the school of Freud to deal even with questions of religion, so the latest advance of analytical psychology makes unavoidable the ethical attitude of the doctor... this cannot be grasped by the standpoint of natural science... but the sine qua non [the essential nature] of consciousness itself." He did not merely criticize the trends of his day, but actively sought to be part of the solution.

Jung draws a line between an instinctual, life-giving religion which restores and sustains the individual’s relationship with the divine, and a “creed” which has hybridized with Western Rationalism and ceded moral authority to the State and Collective Morality:

A creed gives expression to a definitive collective belief, whereas the word religion expresses a subjective relationship to a certain metaphysical, extramundane affair, while the meaning and purpose of religion lie in the relationship of the individual to God or the path to salvation/ liberation.

Jung accused Protestantism and some parts of Catholicism of being a mere creed. He meditates on the fact that "Bible-believing" Protestants - Reformed, Evangelical, etc - joined the Third Reich wholesale and without hesitation. There were only a handful of notable exceptions. The modern Lutheran Church rightly venerates St Bonhoeffer - but he was largely condemned by his own branch at the time. The Lutheran Church maintained the greatest resistance because it was the highest church, but the less organized the denomination, the more susceptible it was to the evil malaise of the day. The few brave Protestant pastors who went against the tide stood alone. Meanwhile, the RCC and the Orthodox (the very few who existed in Poland/Germany at the time – St. Grigol Peradze of Auschwitz and Metropolitan Dionysios, for example) systematically and doctrinally opposed Nazism. Local RCC archdioceses banned participation in the Nazi party outright and denied Communion to anyone who violated the edict. The Vatican took longer to understand what was happening, but eventually issued a series of encyclicals condemning Nazi philosophies. Out of a total of 2720 religious resisters placed in the "clergy barracks" of Dachau concentration camp, 2579 were Catholic, despite the overwhelming Protestant majority in Germany.

Where the church is notoriously weak, as in Protestantism, the hope of or belief in a "communal experience" makes up for the painful lack of cohesion... but the value of a community depends on the spiritual and moral stature of the individuals composing it. For this reason, one cannot expect from the community any effect that would outweigh the suggestive influence of the environment...

Jung understands this inability of Protestantism to resist the social environment to be for the same reason that it's like pulling teeth to get Protestants to go to church, that the vast majority of Protestants cannot articulate what they believe outside of a handful of clichés, and that many are only "nominal believers by force of habit". He points to the materialistic, rationalized Protestant understanding of worship as part of the cause. The ancient rites that gave rich meaning to the universe have been replaced by imitations that only stimulate the emotions and do not provide a kinetic encounter with the sacred, with the divine. There is a difference between emotional simulation and mystical participation in the divine nature. We are no longer "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4), but rather observers of it through the rational intellectual ascent. Ritual is a critical factor that Jung emphasizes throughout - the universal must be particularized through mystical ritual or it will never be manifested in the individual. Jung's point here, that belief in the divine is not the same as a relationship with the divine, is also Kierkegaard's central objection to Western Christianity:

The unedifying result that when the intoxication has worn off… he inner man remains unchanged however much community he has… a positive environment merely strengthens the dangerous tendency to expect everything to originate from outside – even that metamorphosis which external reality cannot provide, namely, a deep-seated change of the inner man.

After criticizing atheism and scientific rationalism in general, he takes aim at Protestants who believe that faith alone provides the necessary "transcendental anchor". The insistence on returning to the 16th-century Platonic, Aristotelian medieval ideas of Faith Alone/Scripture Alone (which doctrinally commit the "Promethean sin" of seeing themselves as ahistorical and "traditionless") is like finding oneself in a muddy puddle at the bottom of a slide, and as a solution climbing back up the slide and hurling oneself down again. Jung sees the Protestant dogmatists who try to fix things by trying to be more "biblical" and faithful to "historic" evangelical ideas as driving the doctrinal unorthodoxy to which they see themselves as the antithesis. In reality, the liberal and conservative forces in Protestantism are two sides of the same coin, creating and sustaining each other, creating an infinitely divisive tautology. In Jung's time there were a few hundred Protestant denominations. Now, in 2021, there are well over 30,000 different denominations - and that's not counting the millions of hybridised belief systems within the 'non-denominational' category; so I think it's safe to say that Jung's prediction that Protestantism would continue to be politically divided was accurate.

Jung is rather suggesting here that the entire Platonized metaphysical system upon which Western Christianity rests is irreparably damaged.

The criterion here is not lip service to a creed but the psychological fact [a living relationship to a metaphysical reality] that the life of the individual is not determined solely by the ego and its opinions or by social factors, but quite as much, if not more, by a transcendent authority.

Jung on the Freudian Weltbild: "Psychology without the Psyche"

Jung's Telos was much broader than Freud's; while Freud believes that healing the neurosis that plagues the individual would fix them and enable a healthy, happy life, Jung's goal was to assist the individual to achieve the fullest reification of the Self from the dialectical process of individualization and fixing the bifurcation of the conscious and unconscious. Freud believed that life without pain and suffering was both possible and desirable- but Jung doubted both of these claims (probably, again, because he read Nietzsche).

Jung accused Freud's Cartesian, Naturalistic an Rationalistic approach as being "Psychology without the Psyche... A purely casuistic approach is too narrow to do justice to the true significance." Eugen Bleuler (who first documented and coined the terms Autistic and Schizophrenic and taught both Jung and Rorschach) made the same accusation of a personality cult against Freud, and resigned from the International Psychoanalytic Association in protest writing that "this 'all or nothing' is in my opinion necessary for religious communities and useful for political parties...but for science, I consider it harmful". Jung makes the same accusation- Freud was behaving like a religious leader, not a scientist.

Freudian orthodoxy insisted that personal development was nearly exclusively dependent on sexuality and libido- while Jung believed the unconscious was a vastly intricate and dynamic reservoir which is shaped by countless factors, chief among which are symbolic storytelling, i.e. mythical archetypes. To this day, you see the Freudian view and the Jungian view existing side-by-side in Western society. In mainstream culture, Sexuality has become Deified as the prime mover of individualization; modern society has made it an Ontologic descriptor of Being which is worshiped as a syncretic deity who manifests itself under several faces and several names- one of them being 'Diversity'. And there are strains of society that reject this self-worship because it cannot coexist with Geist- super-rational beliefs. Jung was actually banned from the Vienna psychoanalytic circle for this refusal to worship at Freud's church of Sexual identity and Freud ended his friendship over this disagreement- that's how dogmatically this Freudian belief was held by the clinical and scientific communities of his day. Anyone who disagreed with Freud was putting their career in jeopardy.

In Modern Man, Jung urges his readers to "Renounce the essentially negative" Freudian approach to the Id, which viewed the subconscious images as repressed signs from generational trauma, but not as symbols. Jung goes for Freud's jugular here. Jung locates Freud's views of sexuality as manifestations of the pre-existing moral relativism of the Victorian age until the present, not strictly as a result of psychological science; "Freud is one of the Exponents of a present-day psychic predisposition that has a special history of its own". He accuses Freud of an underdeveloped spirituality and a lack of Existential processing, which expresses itself as an obsession with sex. Like a true German, he quotes Faust; "thou art conscious only of the single urge". This is a sick burn for Germans- they usually read Goethe's Faust in school- but other cultures might not get the reference.

Contrary to Freud, Jung understood sexuality itself as a mana-symbol representing unrealized spiritual desires. While Freud adopted the European Materialist idea of sex being a sub-rational animalistic act- Jung defends the historical view that it is precisely the opposite; it is a supra-rational mystical act which constitutes a complete suspension of the rational. And as such, it belongs to the field of Religion and Sociology, not to the field of personal identity. Jung writes about the deification and odd contradictory mythicizing of Sexuality in the West through Freud: "Freud's concept of sexuality is thoroughly elastic and so vague that it can be made to include almost anything. The word itself is familiar, but what it denotes amounts to an indeterminable or variable x that stands as the physiological activity of the glands at one extreme and the highest reaches of the spirit at the other."  As sacred things are to be revered and kept in a specific context, Jung here postulates what amounts to a concept akin to 'sin' within clinical psychology. He issues this dictum against Freudian moral relativism: "It is not the children of the flesh, but the Children of God who know freedom." Which is a sentence I wasn't expecting to read in a secular writer. The deeper I walk in the Jungian universe, the more and more I realize why Secular Progressivist types hate him so much: he is challenging the metaphysics of their Faith- upon which their very purpose for living is built upon. Freud is Faust, and his Mephistopheles is the ideological pathogen of individualistic western rationalism.

Still, Jung praises Freud for his groundbreaking work and defends the discovery of the "monster within" from those who criticize Freud because they refuse to conceive evil as intrinsic to all people. The opposite fallacy was committed by Freud- who denied the goodness of humanity:

It is painful to interpret radiant things from the shadow-side, and thus in a measure reduce them to their origins in dreary firth. But it seems to me to be an imperfection in things of beauty, and a weakness in man, if an explanation from the shadow-side has a destructive effect. Or mistake would lie in supposing that what is radiant no longer exists because it has been explained from the shadow-side. This is a regrettable error into which Freud himself has fallen...I must have a dark side if I am to be whole, and inasmuch as I become conscious of my shadow I also remember that I am a human being like any other. How can I be substantial if I fail to cast a shadow? Yet the shadow belongs to the light, as the evil belongs to the good, and vice versa.

Rather, this Good-Evil duality, Jung argues, should force introspection into my own capacity to be evil, while more deeply valuing and fostering the good. He warns against displacing the 'location' of evil into any fabricated "other" category: "We still attribute to 'the other fellow' all the evil and inferior qualities that we do not like to recognize in ourselves. That is why we have to criticize and attack him... Whereas I formerly believed it to be my bounded duty to call other persons to order, I now admit that I need calling to order myself"

It is true that Jung took Evil seriously, nearly to the point of Manichaeism, but he also took Goodness seriously. Unlike Freud who viewed Goodness as a biological function for survival, Jung understood goodness as a substance- something real and worth venerating. "Calling myself to Order" is oddly similar to the Orthodox struggle towards the categorical imperative of Ontologic Goodness.

Freudianism Subconscious and the Jungianism Unconscious

When we speak of the interaction of Freudianism and Jungianism, it is not just an intellectual interaction, but a personal one. Freud and Jung were close friends who developed the field of psychology together and later diverged in their visions of its nature and development. Man and His Symbols is filled with descriptions of this personal and intellectual relationship, and Jung details exactly where he began to diverge from his teacher. Jung casually mentions a funny story about this relationship: while at a museum exhibition in Bremen in 1909 on their way to Africa, Jung was thrilled to see the mummies. Freud told him that his excitement about the mummies was a repressed wish that Jung had for Freud's early death.

Freud assumed that if you treated all the repressed desires and childhood traumas, you would get a healthy individual with no potential for malice or chaos. Impulsively, I point here to Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, who demolished this idea with powerful and artful brilliance, but I value Jung for his rejection of this Freudian fallacy through clinical psychology. He understood exactly how it developed in Freud's mind and deconstructed it with Freud's own psychoanalysis. Not only is this assumption widely condemned philosophically by phenomenologists and existentialists, but it is also technically flawed according to modern neuroscience. Jung writes: "There is no standpoint above or outside of psychology which would enable us to form an ultimate judgment of what the psyche is. We now know neurophysiologically that the psyche has an inherited archetypal structure/dynamic core; it does not and cannot operate by pure reason or logic, and nature gives us no inherent reason why it should.

This fallacy also explains Freud's and Jung's radically different approaches to the concept of evil. Freud dismissed the existence of evil as merely a neurosis caused by the misalignment of desires with the unconscious, while Jung took evil so seriously that he was accused of Manichaeism. Perhaps this is the influence of Nietzsche, who saw evil as a living being. He weaves in Nietzschean ideas a few times - he talks about the "will to power" of the communist bloc. This Nietzschean concept of the will to power is a whole area of philosophy in itself, but he keeps it simple here. Some of his phrasing will be odd to an Anglophone who isn't well-versed in German Idealism - he makes all sorts of subtle references throughout the text.

Freud had a vaguely racist conceptualization of rational human progress attached to his ‘subconscious’ paradigm. Well.. maybe 'vaguely' isn't the right word... everything Freud wrote was pretty openly racist. The Freudian subconscious was a vestigial remnant of repressed instincts and desires which needed to be addressed in clinical psychology- but had little relevance beyond this. It was merely the "trash can" of the mind. Jung kept the concept of the unconscious having a profound impact on the conscious but rejected the narrow, negative connotations. Jung's concept of the "Unconscious" is a broader, expansive, powerful, and indispensable repository of ancestral, cultural, and individual symbols and meta-cognitive narratives which subliminally shape personal identity. The unconscious is a natural part of the human mind- it is neither good nor bad, but simply is. "we" are as much our unconsciousness as our consciousness.

Freud argued that the African cultures that operate symbolically are “less evolved"- while Jung turned this on the head and argued the sickness is in the modern European, rationalized, secularized, 'progressive' society which has denied 'mystical participation' consciously, and in doing so filled society with neurosis and inadvertently created "new demons" by denying the old. Jung came to understand the integration of these two parts of the mind as critical to the very existence of the individual; to the very possibility of living a meaningful, 'fully awake' life. Freud snubbed the "primitive" societies which mystically participate in the material universe while Jung marveled at their philosophic health. Jung viewed the so-called "primitives" as his superior.

Jung recognized that there are no 'spiritual but not religious', 'post-religious' or 'non-religious' categories of humans as Europeans in the 20th century claimed, Psychologically speaking. There is only good religion and bad religion; there is no irreligion. He writes:

What psychologists call psychic identity, or "mystical participation," has been stripped from our world. But it is exactly this halo of unconscious associations that gives a colorful and fantastic aspect to the world. We have lost it to such a degree that we do not recognize it when we meet it again. Such things are kept below the threshold; when they occasionally reappear, we even insist that something is wrong... yet the emotions that affect us are just the same. In fact, the terrors that stem from our elaborate civilization may be far more threatening than those that "primitive" people attribute to demons.... [our object of veneration] has changed its name and nature for the worse... [the modern man's] gods and demons have not disappeared at all: they merely have new names.

And here we come full circle to Hegel: the mind is Geist; and for the universe to manifest itself rationally and for the consciousness to feel at home in its material trappings, it must know itself as super-rational, for only 'Geist can know Geist'.

On the secular side, belief systems like astrology and absurdism are adopted to fill this lack of "mystical involvement. But these are all cheap ways of trying to re-saturate the universe with meaning, and are often sub-rational systems that contradict the empiricism that necessitated their existence in the first place.

Jung did grow up "theistic," but it was merely a hyper-intellectualized theism, not nested in a spiritualized metacognitive framework. The Christianity of the Swiss Reformed (Zwinglian) Church that Jung knew in his youth was already imbued with an iconoclastic, rationalized, and desacralized metaphysics deeply indebted to Enlightenment humanism and already suffering from the collapse of the subject-object paradigm in the unconscious. For Jung, then, the discovery of the spiritual benefits of living in a rich supra-rational perceptual framework was novel. It wouldn't have been new to him if he had been raised in an orthodox variant of Christianity. But the Protestantism of his youth was already metaphysically identical to the European atheism it created. Jung describes how there was no real cognitive change when he abandoned Reformed theology for atheism, as was the case with all of European society, because they were already metaphysically identical perceptual frameworks to begin with. Western Christianity has abandoned the existential elements of the rich ancient faith to which it now bears little resemblance. And as Jung learned, trying to re-enchant a universe that has been desaturated with meaning is an immensely difficult task. Enchantment is a terrible thing to lose.

Jung only briefly explains this in the chapter "The Archetype in Dream Symbolism" when he notices that Protestants seek therapy at a significantly higher rate than Catholics. He thinks this is due to the liturgical richness and emphasis on individual repentance in Catholicism, which kinetically (ritualistically) integrates the unconscious into the conscious. In other words, this focus on spiritual and moral health through kinetic experience with the divine aligns the "night" with the "day" within the whole consciousness. I think he's on the right track, but I would go a little further down this rabbit hole: the noetic "therapy" of expiation (ἱλασμός) of wrongdoing in the individual's life and a zoetic "participation in the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4) through the sacraments makes this whole area irrelevant. Piety and aestheticism already provide the psychotherapeutic benefits of which Jungian dream therapy seeks to recreate a secular caricature. The chapters written by Henderson, von Franz, Jaffe, and Jacob are all extensions of the themes Jung sets forth, detailing the process of becoming an authentic self: first individualization begins with reconciliation with the shadow, then the dualistic anima, then the self can be honestly engaged. But these antinomies are already present in the liturgy.

Myth is not Fiction: Antwort auf Manichaeus

Jung's Answer to Job is his only purely exegetical work and stands in sharp contrast to the rest of his corpus in that he sees the divine drama of Job as crucial to the psychological development of Christianity. The closest thing to this is Aion, which continues his commentary on theistic dualism. It is a synergistic blend of raw intellect and raw emotion; he makes it clear in the introduction that the whole book is a visceral gut reaction and as such requires no rational response or analysis. The final chapter, however, is partly a polemic against both the Vatican's condemnation of psychologism and modernism's (especially Freud's) condemnation of panpsychism and super-rational realities, to which he responds with his Platonism: "Only what acts upon me do I consider real and actual". Defending his work against opposing ideologies was a common demand made on him, since his views are so unique that they were interpreted in radically different ways even during his lifetime. He refuses to interpret the Christian message as merely psychological, as his colleague Feud did, and once again displays a Platonic ontology, seeing myth as the realistic real and material as the epiphenomenal reality.

He mimics the esoteric-historical analysis of the Jewish-Stoic Alexandrian philosopher Philo and fuses dozens of radically different lines of thought into his own philosophical project. But I think it is an interesting return to a typological exegesis rather than a literal or metaphorical interpretation, psychologically and biologically informed and showing an advanced temporal ontology, partly borrowed from his friend Einstein. Not even Heidegger, Jung's contemporary, thought of Dasein in such a cosmogonic way. From Ezekiel and Enoch to the psychology of the Laodiceans, his exegesis is both symbolic and psychic, mixing a teleological-historical view of religion with a psychological-phenomenological view. He understands the whole canon as a divine dialectic (Hegelian, not Platonic), and the book of Job as the critical text around which the whole Bible revolves.

For Jung, the Book of Job is about the evolution of God from a pre-moralistic phenomenon to a complex personality. Before this encounter with Job, Jung argues that the proto-Jewish God was still a figure and not a personality, lacking a mythological origin and concerned only with punishing disorder, like Zeus, but not yet with injustice. This inscrutable deity was not evil or wrathful like a Gnostic demiurge, but amoral, deistic and uninvolved in his omnipotent unconsciousness, an unreconciled unity of opposites. And after the encounter with Job that triggered the appearance of the "Anamnesis of Man", Sophia, a jealous but righteous nature, emerged from the mists of the mountaintop and became passionately and incorrigibly involved in the affairs of humanity.

Job is not Holy because of his faithfulness, but his acceptance of antinomy. This “goodness” is a psychological reconciliation of opposites of a higher reality- a suspiciously Hegelian dialectic. Without this dialectical relationship between the omniscience of God and the self-awareness of the moniker of humankind, Job, there would be no synthesis into the incarnation of the Theanthropos. Jung doesn't invert the story of Job completely, but understands Job's faithfulness as a powerful Psychic leap:

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed

Deep Calls out to Deep: The Panschyist Numinosity of Pre-Cosmogonic Potentiality Resounding against Consciousness

Jung's use of 'panpsychism' differs from earlier forms in his understanding of archetypes and the psyche, and in the new theories of his friend Einstein, who was the first philosopher to process the implications of the modern iterations of both quantum mechanics and relativity. While still rooted in the continental German tradition, Jung's version is a response to this medieval Aristotelian assumption that the subject can observe the object without either being changed. He pushes back against the anti-metaphysicians and defends the subject-object split that had been attacked by Protestants and materialists (especially Schopenhauer and Nietzsche). He is not quite a Hegelian here, since he does not necessarily see the world-spirit as the fundamental pre-cosmogonic reality. Certainly there are elements of Leibniz's resurrection of Gnostic monadology, but it is a major break with Kantian idealism, and it is neither dualism nor materialism. Goethe, on whom Jung and Freud comment extensively, has a clear panpsychism, inspired by Spinoza and Schelling, and describes a world-soul that proceeds and enables qualia. For Goethe, matter is never separate from spirit, and Jung quotes Goethe extensively as an artistic reference. Jung marks a new version of panpsychism that does not clearly follow any of the versions he cites.

The concept of duality, to which Jung adheres with absolute dogma, the universality of the dichotomy that the psyche contains both positive and negative aspects, represented by the archetypes of self and shadow. Jung's argument, which has received so much backlash from Catholic academics, is that Christian theology should return to a dualistic Manichean image of the demiurge-deity in terms of theodicy. This criticism of the Privatio Boni is a continuation of the argument he started in Aion. Satan does not fit the needs of the archetype because he is only "divine darkness, only a supernatural darkness, and it is not equal in strength to the Godhead". And this is where Jung goes full Manichean.

He wants to restore a Gnostic pleroma. It is such a humorous criticism of Christianity when you consider how condemnatory he is of atheism, agnosticism and modernism in general. None of his criticisms of orthodoxy follow the arguments of Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche or Freud. For how educated and profound Jung is, I found these arguments surprisingly pedantic because of how truncated the discussion around them is. His argument is based entirely on syllogistic logic, in an almost perfect imitation of Descartes' corollary arguments from the Discourse on Method. He mentions Manichaeism, but does not identify his beliefs as Manichaean dualism. His dualistic apologetics are verbatim the same arguments made by the Manichaean religion, a dominant religion of the Near East that struggled against a budding Christianity in the first 4 centuries. His indignation at the idea of an omnipotent God is also absolutely identical. In his historical analysis he cherry-picks from thinkers who would have completely disagreed with him, such as Saint Clement of Alexandria, who was far from being a dualist.

Jung's view of Christianity is complex and impossible to summarise succinctly, which has led to a wide variety of readings. Of course, these beliefs that (a) God changes his nature (essence) and (b) God is both good and evil (Manicheanism) and (c) Christ died for the sins of God and not man and (d) the shadow should be integrated, not subsumed, are all blasphemous to orthodoxy, but Jung never claimed to be a Christian, and his insights as the founder of Analytic Psychology into the Book of Job are interesting in their nuance. Again, this is an unfiltered psychic reaction, not a statement of his explicit beliefs - it's more of a diary. His commentary on the cosmogonic genesis of self-awareness through the study of archetypes is interesting enough. Jung knew this would ruffle feathers, especially among his friends in the clergy, as this is his most explicit 'God criticism'. None of the main themes here are unique - his magnum opus Aeon contains the same Manichean, dualistic tendencies. It is also partly a refutation of Freud's views and the fallacy of "presuppositionless science".

Nietzsche makes a similar argument in his 1889 Der Antichrist, published one year before his psychotic break from reality, a work of staggering megalomania and his most complete systematic argument against Christianity. In this work, he declares himself the inversion of Jesus as the (actual) Anti-Christ. He literally believed that the book of Revelations is specifically talking about him and that he was single-handedly going to defeat Christianity once and for all time:

One understands, without needing a hint, in which moments of history the dualistic fiction of a good and an evil God becomes possible. With the same instinct with which the subjects reduce their God to the "good in itself," they eliminate the good qualities from the God of their conquerors; they take revenge on their masters by demonizing their God... Even the palest of the pale still became masters over him, the masters metaphysicians, the conceptual albinos. These spun around him until, hypnotized by their movements, he himself became a spider, himself metaphysicus. Now he again stretched the world out of himself, subspecies Spinozae, now he transfigured himself into the ever thinner and paler, became "ideal", became "pure spirit", became "absolutum", became "thing in itself".... Decay of a God: God became "thing in itself".

Jung takes aspects of this criticism of metaphysical Dualism and likewise sees a "flattening" of God through the doctrine of the ultimate Good. It is a fascinating observation that Nietzsche calls Protestant apologists "sub-species Spinozae" due to their mimicking of his Metaphysical Materialism in the inverse but identical image of Metaphysical Dualism.

Jung's summary of Augustine is a little simplistic. In his 388 book De libero arbitrio voluntatis, Augustine argues against the power of Mani from the perspective of Privatio Boni: "Everything good comes from God. There is nothing of any kind that is not of God....Reason has shown that we commit evil by the free choice of the will". This entire book, written soon after Augustine's conversion, attempts to counter the dualism of Manicheanism and its subsequent belief in predestination. It was Augustine's response to the Manichean apologetic claim against Christianity that God could not be omnipotent and omnipotent. In De Dono Perseverantiae, Augustine writes: "I have shown that God is to be praised for all things, and that there is no reason at all for their [the Manichees'] belief that there are two co-eternal natures, one good and one evil, which coexist together". When the Pelagian heresy arose, Augustine wrote De natura et Gratia to prevent the work from justifying the opposite heresy of Pelagianism. In Retractationes he writes: "Unless the will is delivered by the grace of God from the bondage by which it has become the slave of sin... mortal men cannot live rightly and piously".

Augustine, vacillating between the twin heresies of Manichaeism and Pelagianism, maintains the orthodox position throughout his works, although he naturally over-corrects when fighting each of these heresies in specific works. We see exactly the same debate raging in the 30,000+ denominations of Protestantism today, which began in Luther's day with the Antinominalists, Zwinglians and Calvinists. Reformed theology is a modern resurgence of Manichean anthropology, selectively highlighting the anti-Pelagian writings of Augustine to make it appear that he supported predestination. This is countered by the anti-nominalism (neo-Pelagianism) found in evangelicalism, which emphasises Augustine's anti-Manichean works. Jung criticises both for missing the archetypal meaning in the apparently antithetical doctrines. Both commit "symbolic heresies". He says that the "literal" reading of Romans by the Calvinist strand misses the typological context of the wider narrative in which Paul intended it to be nested; it erases the power of the antinomies which Paul exploited. Jung was brought up in Calvinist (Reformed) Switzerland, so it is not too surprising that he has a suprasessionist understanding of providence. He notes that Protestantism in particular cannot afford to ignore these deeper realities: "Given the arbitrary and protean state of its own dogmas and the precarious, schismatic condition of its church, it cannot afford to remain rigid and impervious to the spirit of the age.

Jung’s engagement with panpsychism, particularly in light of Einstein’s revolutionary theories, represents a significant departure from earlier metaphysical frameworks, while simultaneously retaining a dialogue with the continental tradition. His reinterpretation of archetypes as dynamic, psychophysical entities reflects a nuanced response to the medieval Aristotelian paradigm, which posited a strict subject-object dichotomy. Jung’s panpsychism, however, disrupts this dichotomy by asserting that the act of observation inherently alters both observer and observed, a notion that resonates with quantum mechanics’ principle of observer effect. This epistemological shift is not merely a rejection of Kantian idealism but a reimagining of it, incorporating elements of Leibnizian monadology without fully committing to its metaphysical implications. Jung’s panpsychism, therefore, occupies a liminal space between dualism and materialism, drawing on Goethe’s world-soul concept while infusing it with a modern, quasi-scientific sensibility. This synthesis is emblematic of Jung’s broader project: to reconcile the empirical rigor of psychoanalysis with the speculative depth of metaphysical inquiry, creating a framework that is both scientifically informed and philosophically expansive.

The duality inherent in Jung’s archetypal theory—most notably the tension between the self and the shadow—reveals a profound engagement with theological and philosophical traditions, particularly those of Manichaeism and Gnosticism. Jung’s insistence on the universality of this dichotomy challenges the Christian doctrine of privatio boni, which posits evil as the mere absence of good. By advocating for a dualistic understanding of the divine, Jung aligns himself with Manichaean thought, albeit without explicitly identifying as a Manichaean. This alignment is particularly evident in his critique of orthodox Christianity’s failure to adequately address the problem of evil. Jung’s argument, while rooted in syllogistic logic reminiscent of Descartes, is deeply informed by his clinical observations of the psyche, which he sees as inherently dualistic. This duality, however, is not static but dynamic, reflecting the ongoing interplay between conscious and unconscious forces. Jung’s critique of Christianity, while controversial, is not merely a rejection of orthodoxy but an attempt to restore a more nuanced, archetypally informed understanding of the divine, one that acknowledges the coexistence of light and darkness within the psyche and, by extension, the cosmos. This symbolic view of reality is fully present in the Iconographic tradition of the East, but not in the west, which erased Archtypical (Iconographic) symbollic thinking from it’s dogmatic thought.

Jung’s relationship with Christianity is further complicated by his engagement with Nietzsche, whose critique of Christian metaphysics in Der Antichrist provides a striking counterpoint to Jung’s own views. While Nietzsche’s polemic against Christianity is characterized by its vitriolic tone and megalomaniacal claims, Jung’s critique is more measured, focusing on the psychological implications of Christian doctrine rather than its metaphysical foundations. Both thinkers, however, share a concern with the “flattening” of the divine, a process they attribute to the reductive tendencies of Protestant theology. For Nietzsche, this flattening results in the transformation of God into an abstract, metaphysical concept, devoid of vitality and dynamism. Jung, while critical of this process, seeks to reinvigorate the divine by reconnecting it with the archetypal structures of the psyche. This project, however, is not without its contradictions, as Jung’s dualistic framework often seems at odds with his broader goal of integrating the shadow into the self. The tension between these two aims reflects a deeper ambiguity in Jung’s thought, one that resists easy categorization and invites ongoing interpretation.

The theological implications of Jung’s archetypal theory are further illuminated by his engagement with Augustine, whose writings on free will and the nature of evil provide a crucial counterpoint to Jung’s dualistic framework. Augustine’s rejection of Manichaean dualism in favor of the doctrine of privatio boni represents a foundational moment in Christian theology, one that Jung critiques for its failure to adequately address the psychological reality of evil. Jung’s reading of Augustine, however, is not without its limitations, as it tends to oversimplify the complexity of Augustine’s thought. Augustine’s writings, particularly De libero arbitrio voluntatis and De natura et Gratia, reveal a nuanced understanding of the relationship between free will, grace, and evil, one that resists reduction to either Manichaean or Pelagian extremes. Jung’s critique of Augustine, while insightful, often overlooks this complexity, focusing instead on the archetypal dimensions of Augustine’s theology. This selective reading reflects Jung’s broader tendency to prioritize psychological over theological concerns, a tendency that has led to both the richness and the limitations of his thought.

Finally, Jung’s engagement with Protestant theology, particularly its Calvinist and Evangelical strands, reveals a deep ambivalence toward the tradition in which he was raised. While critical of Calvinism’s emphasis on predestination, Jung also recognizes the archetypal power of its theological narratives, particularly its engagement with the problem of evil. This ambivalence is reflected in his critique of Protestantism’s “symbolic heresies,” which he sees as arising from a failure to fully engage with the archetypal dimensions of Christian doctrine. Studying Ignatius of Loya, Jung gradually move towards a respect for Catholicism’s preservation of the Jewish, Biblical liturgical forms of worship and away from the Protestant Emotions-based entertainment-worship. Eastern Orthodoxy Jung never deeply comments on. Jung’s call for a more flexible, psychologically informed approach to theology reflects his broader belief in the transformative potential of the unconscious, a belief that has profound implications for both individual and collective spiritual development.

“How does an Atom think?” Nietsche's Biological Deep-Time and Cartesius

In Jung's day, empirical science was still struggling with the mind-body problem, personified by Descartes and Newton. Emblematic of this metaphysical debate is the nature of light, which is simultaneously a wave and a particle, depending on the principles by which it is approached. Now, empirical science is comfortable with the fact that there is no local reality outside of perception, something that materialists like Voltaire, Feuerbach and Freud all denied. Descartes realised this in 1664 in The World, or Treatise of Light, and Voltaire articulated an astute restatement of the Cartesian question - "How does an atom think?" Since Voltaire's day, the discovery of the observer effect in quantum physics (predicted by the Jungian panpsychist Einstein) and the Hawthorne effect in the behavioural sciences have further contradicted the anti-metaphysical materialist (atheist) and dualist (Protestant) collapse of the subject-object dichotomy. Modern consciousness studies in artificial intelligence also demonstrate the existence of metaphysical a priori principles that precede qualia, making the materialist worldview untenable for even an exclusively empirical approach to reality.

Jung is clearly Cartesian in his understanding of consciousness as suri generis. He has a unique phraseology here, but understands speech (Sophia-consciousness), as denoted by Genesis, as cosmogonic in nature; consciousness begets reality. Consciousness meets this pre-cosmogonic energy on a subconscious level and in response finds the essence that created the energy; it is creation seeking the Creator. And 'hearing' the call of consciousness, the material universe resonates in response and beckons consciousness (speech) to bring form to it. It is a cosmological dialectic, a world-shaping call and response. Like a Byzantine icon with the Burning Bush surrounding the Theanthropos - a vision of the material world with meaning, not consumed but transformed, but a dynamic living Platonic union of material and immaterial realities in full harmony - the intersection of the material and the immaterial. Reality is 'spoken' into existence by consciousness, and no reality exists outside of this cosmogonic 'mind'. A single line stands out in the work, a statement of this cosmogonic panpsychism based on his neumena-phenomena ontology:

Loudly as His power [the pre-personality God of Job] resounds through the universe, the basis of its existence is correspondingly slender, for it needs conscious reflection in order to exist in reality. Existence is only real when it is conscious to somebody.

This is a kind of deistic reversal of a claim made by Hegel in his lectures on religion at the University of Berlin: "The concrete is the Logos. As God is the space of the universe, so 'he lives in the archetype of time', in the Aion, i.e. in the pure concept of it". Jung's exegesis finds panpsychism deeply intertwined with the Old Testament, which finds its explicit psychological expression - a call-and-response "deep calls out to deep" (Psalm 42:7) - playing out across thousands of years of civilization.

Throughout the book, Jung argues that the archetype of God, as represented in the Book of Job, is not an omnipotent one, but rather an archetype of the psyche, which can both help and hinder human development. He describes the archetype of the psyche as an innate and unconscious potential within the human mind that contains the collective wisdom of humanity. The archetype of God, as yet unconscious, resides in the collective unconscious and is the source of the creation of the universe, including the creation of the individual self. The process of individuation is a journey towards the realization of the archetype of God, which is the ultimate goal of human existence. He suggests that the universe and all its components, including non-living matter, are manifestations of the archetype of God.

Jung was one of the first thinkers to understand human psychology in terms of Biological deep-time. Taking Nietzsche's claim that "there is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy", Jung argues for a biological basis of the archetypes which control the unconscious drives. His personality analysis (characterology) is rooted in assumptions about the predetermined 'continuity of nature" of the body, which would later be confirmed by Epigenetics. We now understand that what we call 'personality' is almost completely hereditary- making it simultaneously an individual and collective phenomenon linking the individual to all human ancestors not merely biologically, but psychically as well. He writes "The truth is that the unconscious is always there beforehand as a potential system of psychic functioning handed down by generations of man."

His understanding of Phenomenology is nothing new; Jung attributes his basic understanding of balance in the Psyche to Heraclitus, and in German Idealism the power of unconscious symbols is mentioned extensively. Kant wrote about "the immeasurable field... of obscure ideas" and Hegel of "Man is this night, this empty Nothing, which contains everything in its simplicity: a wealth and an infinite number of representations, images...". Like these philosophers, Jung notes that "the Unconscious operates in and out of waking existence". And in contradiction of Freud, he notes that while he uses simplistic imagery of consciousness being the 'day' and the unconscious being the 'night' or shadow; the unconscious is not 'dark' in terms of morality- rather simply hidden. The unconscious is as neutral as conscious processes.

Historical Orthodoxy may agree with part of this through the energy-essence distinction, but he never mentions this metaphysical debate between the West and the East. While he talks about the nature and differences between the Protestant and Catholic concepts of consciousness, the Eastern Orthodox metaphysical 'world view' goes completely unmentioned. He continues to divide Christianity into a false dichotomy of "two separate camps, or rather a disunited brother-sister pair" and seems unaware of the metaphysics of Orthodoxy, although he inadvertently criticizes Western Christianity through a similar metaphysical lens to that of the Orthodox Church, including the replacement of Stoic asceticism with Epicureanism, the replacement of Platonic ontology with medieval Aristotelianism, and the replacement of symbolic/typological/archetypal exegesis with a presuppositional one. In one of the clearest articulations of his philosophical project, Jung summarizes his meandering, almost stream-of-consciousness discourse:

What is the use of a religion without a mythos, since religion means, if anything at all, precisely that function which links us back to the eternal myth?

But myth is not fiction: it consists of facts that are continually repeated and can be observed over and over again. It is something that happens to man, and men have mythical fates just as much as the Greek heroes do. The fact that the life of Christ is largely myth does absolutely nothing to disprove its factual truth -- quite the contrary. I would even go so far as to say that the mythical character of a life is just what expresses its universal human validity...It is a symbolum, a bringing together of heterogeneous natures, rather as if Job and Yahweh were combined in a single personality. Yahweh's intention to become man, which resulted from his collision with Job, is fulfilled in Christ's life and suffering.

A Polished Cartesian Rationality: Jung's Critique of the Pure Reason of Aristotelian Ontology

Synchronizität: als ein Prinzip akausaler Zusammenhänge is on the outer boundaries of academia- in Jung's time and now. As the founder of Analytic Psychology, most of his ideas have been absorbed in the philosophic background of the western world- he created the ideas of introversion/ extroversion, the Unconscious, and the Archetype to name only a few of the Jungian ideas we all use on a daily basis. But Synchronicity is a thought experiment on the fringe of these broadly accepted constructs. It was initiated at late-night boozy dinner party discussions he had with a young Einstein over to his lake-side Zurich home. Einstein introduced Jung to the idea that Time might be relative during these discussions decades before he would publish his formal work, and Einstein's ideas sparked lines of thought which would develop into Synchronicity. In a letter to Dr. Seelig dated 25 February 1953, Jung describes his relationship with Einstein:

Professor Einstein was my guest on several occasions at dinner... these were very early days when Einstein was developing his first theory of relativity. He tried to instill into us the elements of it, more or less successfully. It was above all the simplicity and directness of his genius as a thinker that impressed me mightily and exerted a lasting influence on my own intellectual work... It was Einstein who first stated me off thinking about a possible relativity of time as well as space, and their psychic conditionality.

Jung sees a wide range of philosophical and mystical systems as his philosophical ancestors. Schopenhauer's pessimistic natural determinism sought to understand meaningful a-causal chance, but Jung argues that this is undermined by his friend's discovery of relativity and quantum mechanics. Leibniz's "paraphysical parallelism" partially replaces causality with antecedent order, but this also falls short because the reciprocity of parallelism falls within the realm of empiricism, which falsifies it. Causality, taken by Enlightenment materialism to be an absolute law of nature, is now known to be only statistically true - an observed pattern of behaviour, not an unchanging reality. The I Ching and Taoism in general also describe a concordance between material experience and the eternal "patterns of being" which, when aligned with one's own life, create meaning. Goethe also attributed an elective affinity to the energy of objects, which Jung saw as an iteration of magical causality going back to Magnus and Avicenna. Superstition and magical thinking, though misguided, represent for Jung attempts at an a-causal principle of explanation beyond (but not in contradiction to) cause-and-effect. Though Swiss, he rejects the fatalistic tendencies of continental idealism, while strongly maintaining the 'oneness' of all people through the collective unconscious, a philosophical descendant of Hegel's meta-consciousness of the world spirit and a precursor of panpsychism, which is crucial in the logic of synchronicity.

Synchronicity is realised through the activation of archetype (the instinctive patterned structures that sustain the collective unconscious and through which meaning is created with symbolic power in the individual) when an extension in space (a causally explicable physical state) and intention (the critical psychic experience) synchronise and the extension becomes the bearer of the archetypal symbol through a self-subsistent reflection. This synchronous resonance is the 'acausal orderliness' of the collective unconscious colliding with the kinetic universe from which it is simultaneously born and suri generis separated. It is the causal principle taken to its opposite end: a physically conditioned relativity of space-time. He is ahead of his time in his adoption of Einsteinian physics when he postulates that space and time are conceptual coordinates that are "probably at bottom one and the same", which is now a universally accepted tenet of modern physics. Synchronous events are not easily observed or described because "their tetium comparationis is meaning", not material causality.

Synchronicity is part of Jung's new broader psychophysical ontology in the light of the breakthroughs of his personal friends - Sigmund Freud in psychology, Wolfgang Pauli in physics and Albert Einstein in quantum and temporal physics. It's part of a deliberate, conscious attempt to correct the epistemological errors of the Enlightenment and restore natural epistemology, while maintaining a reverence for empirical science.

Resurrecting Pre-Cartesian Ontology

The predictions of the continental philosophers of Jung's time about the rationalisation of culture have all failed to materialise. The scientism and logical positivism of Bertrand Russell, Karl Popper and the other modern analytic philosophers through to Harris, Hitchens and Dawkins predicted that fictional storytelling, wisdom traditions such as Stoicism and pseudo-scientific meaning frameworks such as astrology would fade away as society developed. A century later, despite continued technological and scientific progress, the exact opposite has happened. Astrology is now more popular than ever - and is often practised by scientists who criticise other types of pseudoscience. The public now consumes fictional narratives through centralised streaming services on a scale unprecedented in human history, just as Jung predicted. These narratives have consolidated into "universe" super-narratives that resemble the mythic systems of the Greeks and Romans. It's no coincidence that the heroes of the Marvel mythic system are modelled on their Greek, Norse and Roman predecessors. And the public consumes these stories just as they did thousands of years ago - wanting new stories with new variations on their favourite mythical characters. Jung sees this as inevitable because storytelling is the way humans have always communicated an ideal way of being across time and culture. Storytelling creates a meta-ethic that binds civilisations together; stories are the 'vessels' of wisdom. Those with a 'polished Cartesian rationality' still want to literally live in these mythical narratives - a psychic reality on which companies like Disney rely. Because we intuitively know that they represent meaningful patterns of being. And in a world de-saturated and de-enchanted by Cartesianism, immersion in these meta-realities is a therapeutic placebo.

Even on the religious side, post-Cartesian Catholicism and Protestantism have continued to use a bottom-up ontology and split into new varieties as they integrate with external mystical systems. The more underdeveloped the type of Christianity, the easier it is to hybridise with sub-rational mysticism. Americanised evangelicalism has developed a new type of vague synchromysticism around a quasi-fatalistic idea of "God has a plan for my life", which is actuated by trying to divine this plan from what happens in one's daily life, even if this requires opposing historical Christian orthopraxy. Jer 29:11 is taken out of context and radically reinterpreted to fit this new tradition. There are different versions of this synchromysticism, based on different assumptions about human agency and divine sovereignty, but they all attempt to attribute events, psychic states and coincidences to interpret this "plan for my life". It's now one of the defining characteristics of low church dispensationalist Protestantism.

Jung would describe this half-baked mysticism as a natural psychic reflex to re-enchant a radically de-mystified, de-sacralised, demythologised and rationalised form of Christianity that has been sanitised by Cartesian/Enlightenment epistemology. Jung isn't a pseudo-scientific mystic; he recognises that mystical symbolism is elemental to the psyche and that we need to distinguish between good and bad mysticism. For as Heidegger remarked, "You can drive nature out with a pitchfork, but it always comes roaring back in". He's challenging the flawed metaphysics of Western Enlightenment rationalism that drove out ancient forms of 'knowing', and its negative impact on both the secular and sacred spheres of life.

Jung never links his thinking on synchronicity to the ancient Greco-Judeo-Christian concept of kairos (κείρω), which is still prominent in liturgical Christian traditions today, although he was well aware of all these philosophical continuums that Christianity created between ancient Greek rationality and Mesopotamian monotheism (Logos, Sophia, etc.). But it's hard not to see the parallels here; he's trying to find a meaningful principle that brings together the meaningful events in an individual's life. And kairos is many things, but in part it is the finite intersecting the infinite at the convergence of space-time/chronos with a physical, earthly event within an individual or collective consciousness. It is a ritual that unites the All into the One and reifies the supernatural within the natural. Both kairos and synchronicity refer, at least in part, to the concordance between an earthly event and an event that exists in an omniscient, super-rational narrative. I think Jung is struggling to articulate a deeper meta-reality: that meaning exists at the intersection of the particular and the universal, and this Cosmogony is articulated primarily in the form of story.

Hegel noted this exact same objection to pure Nominalism when he argued that what is most real is not that which is most material (as Cartesian Rationality teaches), but what which is most meaningful is the most real. The material universe is mere potentiality; beauty, truth, and goodness are the reality. Jung mentioned Leibniz's attack on Cartesian Rationalism: "they took no account of perception which are not apperceived". Jung expands upon this idea in reference to the Analytical Psychology he founded:

The least of things with meaning are worth more than the greatest of things that contain no [symbolic] meaning... It is precisely the most subjective ideas which, being closest to nature and to the living being, deserve to be called the truest... It is only the meaningful which sets us free.

Consciousness as an Ontologic Prime

Einstein was a personal friend of Jung (they both spoke Swiss-German) and Jung was the first to extrapolate the implications of relativity and quantum theory for religion, sociology and philosophy. And you can see Jungian thought in Einstein's thinking - his comment that "science without religion is blind" and vice versa is Jungian. Einstein agreed that scientific rationalism is inherently amoral and that reason, cognitively speaking, cannot exist outside a religious framework. In the light of quantum and temporal relativity, Jung weaves a nascent understanding of the ontological primacy of consciousness throughout his work, and here in The Undiscovered Self he explicitly develops the idea. This was an idea that was underexplored and controversial in his day, but has since been widely accepted by philosophers and neuroscientists alike. He talked with Einstein about the nature of consciousness; in particular how quantum theory coincides with the collective unconscious.

The idea of the metaphysical ontological primacy of consciousness is this: the phenomenon of consciousness is sui generis: it is transcendent and essentially different from the material (neurochemical) context from which it arises. It cannot be explained or even described by an analysis of its constituent parts. Consciousness, then, does not exist as an individual phenomenon, but as a collective 'mind' transcending both space and time. The material universe itself exists within a field of consciousness. This idea of panpsychism that Einstein and Jung talked about has been empirically observed in the effect of the quantum observer - we now know through empirical science that consciousness changes the nature of matter. You can see that his understanding of a collective mind is nested within the Kanto-Hegelian language of the "world spirit", which Jung identifies as a precursor to his concept of the "collective unconscious". Jung used clinical psychology, Western rationalism and Buddhism, Taoism, Janism and Hinduism to articulate this idea:

The connection with the brain does not in itself prove that the psyche is an epiphenomenon, a secondary function causally dependent on biochemical processes....The relativization of space and time by psychic factions casts doubt on our naive and hasty explanation of the parallels between the psychic and the physical....Without consciousness there would practically be no world, for the world exists as such only insofar as it is consciously reflected and consciously expressed by a psyche. Consciousness is a prerequisite for being.

The German Idealists had a word for this: Gestalt. Gestalt is something like the transcendent nature of a thing which is more than the mere sum of its parts; the organic whole which is beyond the individual elements is composed of. Jung's "Gestaltist" view seems to maintain the idea of Consciousness and Relation being Ontologic Primes among its metaphysical premises. The relation of the individual to the whole and vice versa is critical to understanding both the part and the whole. Jung writes:

Psychic contents, in general, are non-spatial except in the particular realm of sensation... here we are with our immediate experiences of something that is- something that has taken root in the midst of our measurable, ponderable, three-dimensional reality, that differs bafflingly from this in every respect and in all its parts and yet reflects it. The psyche may be regarded as a mathematical point and at the same time as a universe of fixed stars…

This concept might seem high-brow, but it’s nested within his theory of the individual. Reality only exists in the field of consciousness, and collectivist thinking erases the importance of individual consciousness, which collapses the collective unconsciousness as well, and then reality itself. It may seem melodramatic to us, but to Jung, the very existence of the universe depends on society holding the individual as sovereign. Hence his vehement opposition to Socialism and Communism; he viewed them as threats to existence itself.

Jung is a sophist, not in the pre-Socratic sense of seeing truth as penultimate, but in the Judeo-Christian sense. He argues that the first image-bearer was Sophia, long before Adam, the "female nouma" of God the Father. Man is merely the anamnesis of Sophia. He at least correctly links the Old Testament Sophia to the archetype manifested in the apotheosis of the Theotokos. And it is precisely this knowing and profoundly philanthropic Sophia that makes possible the constellation of metaphysical content in the "starry sky" of consciousness. He uses a syncretic view of the Gnostic conception of Sophia as the female embodiment of divine wisdom and as an attribute of the Godhead (the historical Christian view). For Jung, Sophia is a dialectical step in the process of individualisation, reconciling the individual with higher realities. The union of anima and persona represents a synthesis of the divine and human aspects of the self and reflects the unity of Sophia and the human psyche:

The anima and the persona are the two complementary aspects of the self, and between them they contain both the divine and the human. The anima is the bridge to the unconscious, to the inner world of feeling, and to the transpersonal. The persona is the mask that we wear in the world, our social identity, and our public image. Together, they form a union of opposites that reflects the unity of the divine and the human, or, in other words, the union of the divine Sophia and the human psyche.

This version of sophism is not as developed as in the historic Christian traditions (sophism is one of the many areas of theology that Protestantism simply lacks) - he sees Sacred Wisdom as a cosmogonic pneuma, an archetype in which the Trinity dwells. Jung understands the dichotomy of spirit and matter as archetypal and ultimately conscious transcendent through the presence of Sophia. Sophism is thus given a cosmogonic role in the perception or experience of reality. 

Absolute Good in the Jungian Categorical Imperative

Jung's opposition to totalitarianism naturally led him to the underlying theme of ontological goodness. The question he poses is this: we all insist that we would never be Nazis if we lived in those times - but how can we know with any certainty that we would not be caught up in the "ideological pathogens" of the day? How can we call ourselves "good" in any real or absolute sense? How are we any less the products of our environment than, say, any particular Nazi? Jung, as the founder of Analytic Psychology, and having predicted and fought against the Nazis (providing Allied Intelligence with psychological profiles of Hitler), is perhaps better placed than anyone else in history to answer this question.

For Jung, Western society's response to the reality of fascism was inadequate. Reason alone, an allegiance to love or progress, "trying to live a good life" is not enough to resist the "force of circumstance". He accuses the West of trying to solve the problems caused by amoral scientific rationalism with more amoral scientific rationalism, and the problems caused by Platonised, rationalised Protestantism with more Platonised, rationalised Protestantism:

Mere intellectual or even moral insight into the stupefaction and moral irresponsibility of the mass of humanity is only a negative recognition, and amounts to little more than wavering on the road to the atomisation of the individual. It lacks the driving force of religious conviction because it is merely rational.

Jung mimics the Kierkegaardian question in his plea to the individual:

[what is required is a] living relationship and direct confrontation with their extramundane point of reference… the incontrovertible experience of an intensely personal, reciprocal relationship between man and an extramundane authority which acts as a counterpoise to the "world" and it's the reason"... Here we must ask: Have I any religious experience [metaphysically encountering the supernatural through holy ritual] and immediate relation to God [through denial of genetic and environmental inclinations], and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving in the crowd?

In Modern Man, Jung lays out the philosophic and scientific foundation of his 'Analytic Psychology' (Komplexe Pyschologie), which remains the basis of modern psychology writ large. The Myers-Briggs framework, the concepts of neurosis and complexes, extraversion and introversion, the Unconscious, and a range of other broadly utilized ideas in everyday life all originate here in Jung's analytic psychology. He diatribes about Mysticism, Religion, Characterology, Consciousness, Individualization, and identity but I think the most interesting part of this book is the careful delineation of his thinking in contrast to that of his frenemy, Freud. This is a brilliant analysis of Freudian thinking from someone who intimately knew Freud as a person and intellectual and can speak to the motives that drove Freud's ideology. Jung clearly articulates Freud's fallacies while defending his brilliant contributions to Psychology from his detractors. Dividing the good from the malicious in Freudian thought is still critically relevant for today's world, because Freudian philosophy is the water we swim in.

Jung's essays are not nested in in a logical hierarchy and when combined into a book like this they flow even less logically. He weaves together a dizzying number of concepts throughout the chapters. A single concept will be introduced, partially deconstructed, and then expanded upon in bits and pieces throughout later chapters. He casually introduces intense topics right next to personal musings on life that resemble journal entries, alongside logical theorems and scientific explanations of neuroscientific functions. I read this book twice because he introduces concepts later in the book that is critical to understanding elements in the beginning. Jung's writing style would give Kant a heart attack.

In the aftermath of WWII, The Undiscovered Self meditates on the development of a Weltanschauung which can provide a transcendental anchor outside of biological, environmental, and cultural factors that is sufficiently powerful to resist a state of “collective possession”. Jung is explicit in repeating his pre-WWII warning of replacing super-rational belief systems that encourage introspection and acceptance of moral responsibility with sub-rational, amoral Socio-Economic movements and ideologies. He makes important Geopolitical warnings- strongly arguing against military intervention into the USSR- detailing exactly how Communism would pull the rug out from under its own feet through the spiritual decay brought on by collectivist thinking. He did not believe the West had learned the danger of “blithely organizing and believing in the sovereign remedy of mass action… and the cheapest of slogans.” Scientific Rationalism failed to protect the individual from becoming amoral and caught up in the collective since religion cannot be replaced with “rationalistic and so-called enlightened criticism. Religion... reappears -evilly distorted- in the deification of the state".

Musing on the Ontologic nature of Consciousness after discussions with Einstein, he details the current Psychological status of the West, and predicts the continued resurgence of collectivist mentalities if the individual does not restore a transcendental, intuitive connection to the life-sustaining Archytypes upon which the Unconscious Geist is built. He did not believe the West had learned the danger of “blithely organizing and believing in the sovereign remedy of mass action… and the cheapest of slogans.

Pseudoscience and Jungian Epistemology: Meaning and Causality

His experiment, recorded in Synchronicity, was half-baked. His method is not scientific; it doesn't use random sampling and it mixes epistemological types of data. But I would argue that claims of pseudoscience are a misunderstanding of his a priori metaphysical assumptions. I suspect that the tendency to accuse Jung of pseudoscience here is due to the misapplication of synchronicity by actual pseudoscientific sub-rational "bad" mystics who misread Jung just as much as the rational scientist. Jung is clear and explicit that this is an exploration of meaning and not the narrow domain of empirical scientific observation that can be verified or falsified. It's in the title: "akausaler". By Jung's own definition, synchronicity is an attempt to answer the body-soul question and the problem of the observer. Jung notes that it is "neither materialism nor metaphysics", but that it "satisfies the postulates of modern physics". It's a bit silly to accuse the founder of analytic psychology, which brought empiricism to psychology and paved the way for neuroscience, of pseudoscience. It is precisely for this reason that he is opposed to transcendental, magical and parapsychological causal explanations of the phenomenon of coincidence. Synchronicity is postulated as an explanatory principle on an equal footing with causality, not in opposition to it, since causality is not a science but a philosophical explanatory principle. His attack here is not on empirical science, but on the Cartesian presuppositional version of knowledge used in the West. In his own thinking, Jung oscillates between the Aristotelianism of his environment and the Platonism of the ancient symbolic systems, but he seeks to revive the ancient epistemology in which the subject cannot know the object without a transformation taking place. In Piagetian thought, as in the ancient systems, the mind takes the form of the subject it seeks to understand. Jung fought against the tide of the generally accepted pure empiricism (scientism) of analytic philosophy and brought back the admonitions of pure rationalism built up by the continental philosophers, this time with clinical-psychological evidence. The attempted pejorative of "mystic" (which Jung would wear as a badge of honour) shows a misunderstanding of Jungian thought:

For example, when the vision of a fire in Stockholm arose in Swedenborg's mind, there was a real fire raging there at the same time, with no demonstrable or even conceivable connection between the two... the fire in Stockholm was, in a sense, also burning in him. For the unconscious psyche, space and time seem to be relative; that is, knowledge is in a space-time continuum in which space is no longer space and time is no longer time. Thus, if the unconscious were to develop or maintain a potential in the direction of consciousness, it would be possible to perceive or "know" parallel events... The causal explanation, which is the only one possible from the standpoint of [Cartesian] natural science, breaks down because of the psychic relativisation of space and time, which together form indispensable premises for the relationship of cause and effect.

Jung's obsession with astrology is not a mystical interest in pseudo-scientific systems; it's just the opposite; it's a scientific exploration that attempts to bring empiricism into psychology. He agrees with the basic, common-sense epistemology that astrology is demonstrably false and anti-scientific, and he goes further to suggest that a belief in or practice of astrology is a sign of deep psychological and spiritual underdevelopment (truncated individualisation). But however absurd and infantile a belief in astrology may be, Jung sees it as a symptom of the disease, not the problem itself. He is fascinated by astrology because it is a crystal-clear example of the human mind perceiving teleologically, orienting itself to the universe symbolically, and needing a ritual interface with the material universe in order to survive. Astrology unconsciously contains 'intuitional knowledge' as it is the literal constellation of symbols into the psyche; a cumulative fantasy from the deep unconscious projected onto the night sky like a canvas for the unspoken symbols of the mind. What is highest above us tautologically reflects what is lowest within us. For Jung, it is a golden case study that provides clear insights into the structure of the mind, as it is the manifestation of the subliminal processes of millennia of participants in astrological thought. Numerology is also another example of a pseudo-scientific "bad" mystical system that contains psychological patterns useful to analytical psychology and psychotherapy. Astrology, numerology, manifesting and the like are not true in any presuppositional sense, but they are windows into the pathologies of the mind. For astrology is not the product of a single mind, but of countless minds, and as such is a flawless manifestation of the symbolic character of the mind.

The Psychological Origins of the Secularist Religion

Jung's point here is not so much that a mystical, religious life is better than a nonreligious life, but rather that one cannot really live a truly nonreligious life. A secular life requires as much faith as a traditionally religious one, and the human mind will always find an object of worship. He writes: "People assume that these ideas [religious motifs] are "not true. I would rather say that they are not true enough, for these ideas are of a kind that have accompanied human life from prehistoric times, and that still break through into consciousness at any provocation.... The denial is as impossible to "prove" as the assertion of religious belief. The only thing we refuse to admit is that we are dependent on 'forces' beyond our control".

The accusations of Jungianism as psychologism or scientism seem odd to me. I don't see anything in Jung that I haven't read in sources like Seneca, Nietzsche, and Kant, or that contradicts modern psychology. His dream analysis is, by definition, nested in non-linear dialectical logic, but that field was in its infancy in his day, so it's bound to be a bit shaky. Certainly some of his narrative dialogues are simplistic to the point of being false. But it seems that the militant rationalist secular approach is keyed to something else here. He's accused of "opening the door" to religious belief, but I think he's actually doing something that threatens the secularist perspective far more deeply: he's recognizing that all humans are inherently religious and inherently mystical - the only thing that changes between the militant atheist and the dedicated churchgoer is the object of worship. Even strictly speaking, the human mind is always in a state of worship, no matter how rational the day-ego believes itself to be. No matter how dogmatically rationalistic the ideological superstructure, the substructure is always essentially religious.

But even coming from a secular source like Jung, this reality is a threat to secularist/progressivist religion (of which Freud was a devoted follower) because it negates the very basis of what irreligion claims to be. To be outwardly religious is not to be "backward" or "unevolved" in Jungian phenomenology, but simply to merge the whole of the mind, and to be secular is to deny the reality of the unconscious to the point of pathology. This explains the backlash against Jung from these types (which, ironically, tends to be non-technical and philosophical in nature). Jung is calling the kettle black and "blaspheming" the secular deities; it makes sense that there would be a backlash consisting of religious dogma. Rather, it proves Jung's point.

Phenomenology is the scientific, technical, clinical-psychological study of something that is by definition not scientific, technical, or encapsulated by pure clinical psychology, because that field is inherently individualistic. Psychology itself is tautological, and phenomenology is a tautology nested within a tautology. Jung embodies this irony of phenomenology.

Aion: Temporal Symbolism of the Modern World

Aion/ Αἰών, for Plato and Aristotle, is the concept of order and time of the universe; the infinite telos of the heavens. In Zoroastrianism this is hypostatized into a knowable deity, and in Gnosticism the Aeons are the dialectical emanations of the supreme deities. In the Mithraic religion, it is the deity of cyclical time, as opposed to Chronos, the god of linear time. Aion became a syncretic, dualistic uber-deity with both male and female manifestations: Aion and Aeternitas, closely associated with the Phoenix to represent temporal death and rebirth. His power is absolute and impersonal; he walks alongside the gods but is beyond them, even Gaia. He is a vague concept-deity in the background of the Dionysian, Orphic, and Eleusinian mysteries, but took a sharper form in the Roman era through the adoption of Zoroastrianism through Mithraism. In the Roman religions, Aion was the guarantor of the Pax Romana - it is the eternal element of the Eternal City.

In the original koine of the New Testament, αἰών is used 123 times, and as an adjective (αἰώνιος or αἰδιóς) 72 times. Historically, most of these instances were understood in the Mithraic sense of Αἰών as the concept of unlimited time, as understood by the New Testament writers who lived in the Roman era. In the ancient Christian liturgy, for example, the phrase "αἰώνας τῶν αἰώνων" refers to God's transcendence of finite time. In several places in his German translation from medieval Latin, Luther translated aevum as "world" because he was confused by its meaning, since a "period of time" didn't fit the logic of the sentence. English translations sometimes translate it as "forever and ever [amen]" to reflect this, but often just "aeon" (British) or "eon" (American/Australian). This then shifted the semantics of the common word; Goethe and other writers began to use eon in the plural, relying on this mistranslation of αἰών as a segment of time instead of infinity. This inability to translate the ancient Mithraic background of Αἰών into a suitable word in Western languages has had tremendous theological ramifications; it built the medieval astrology and alchemy of celestial epochs and enabled the development of covenant theology, which then gave birth to the dispensationalism that dominates "non-denominational" Protestantism. Dispensationalism has influenced every corner of the globe, including geopolitics; its anachronistic reinterpretation of the Apocalypse led to the deification of the nation-state of Israel by evangelical Zionism. Now geological science uses this meaning of the word as epoch, and the ancient meaning found in the Roman mystery religions has been washed out. In modern American English, Eon can't be used for anything other than "a really long time. All of this is due, at least in part, to a mistranslation of a four-letter Koine word.

In Aion , Jung has a hybridized view of these two antithetical definitions of eons - he nests them within each other. He bends the eons of astrology into an infinite cycle. When personified in Gnosticism and Mithraism, the Eon is usually surrounded by Jung's favorite symbol: the Ouroboros, the snake devouring itself, an image central to Jung's psychology and cosmogony. Jung sees the same psychic patterns playing out over and over again, in contrast to the linear chronological time that German Idealism overlaid with a progressive dialectical model. These may be divided into 500 or 1000 year epochs, but the process itself, like the Mithraic deity, is timeless.

The Ego, the Shadow, the Self and the Anima & Animus are excellent descriptions of these basic Jungian concepts. The Self is what you are in its totality; the Ego, the Shadow and its archetypes. The ego is the manifestation of the totality of the field of consciousness, while the psychic nature is the sum of the unconscious contents. The ego is subordinate to and shaped by the unconscious. The self is even broader than the psychic nature - it includes the unconscious contents not only of the shadow but of the collective unconscious. But Jung quickly expands into an intricate discussion of specific neurological processes and how they relate to cosmological patterns. The hierarchical patterns of being exhibited in storytelling are also cosmogenic truths that have long preceded and will outlive humans; "Psychological truths are not metaphysical insights: they are habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving which experience has shown to be appropriate and useful... the psychic phenomenon cannot be grasped in its totality by the intellect, for it consists not only of meaning but also of value...". Religion, then, is not only psychologically valuable, but inevitable, for humanity cannot exist apart from value judgments, i.e., wisdom. And in Jungian thought, collectivized wisdom is synonymous with religious belief.

Jung's work has a sense of urgency- he correctly detailed WWII and wants to reinforce how critical it is that we understand our Psychic origins because "anamnesis of the origins is a matter of life and death". He is not making Teleological claims, but therapeutic ones. Jung writes here not with dogma, but with a concerned tone towards the "I write as a physician, with a physician's sense of responsibility, and not as a proselyte."

In his deductive analysis of the content of the Collective Unconscious, he moves through from ancient philosophy to Astrology, Gnosticism, Alchemy and into complex religious stories and identifies the patterns found in all cultures throughout all time. He has a particular focus on the alchemical symbol of the fish, integrated into the 1st-century Greco-Judeo-Christian symbolism, which he ascribes critical importance to as 'fishing' is a primordial symbol of metabolizing the unconscious nature. Ichthys-symbol is an archetype of the integration of the Self within Christian tradition, like the Phoenix. The fish is a symbol of the Adam Secundus, who is an apotheosis of all Self-Images preceding it, for "Christ is the Archetype of the Self". This understanding of Christ as the Archetype of the Self is not explicitly Jungian- Hegel wrote "Christ has reality as self-consciousness."

He sees a critical development from the self-less unreflected God-image in Judaism through Clement of Alexandria, who understood the Self as a God-image with a Psychological and reflective Spirit. Clement of Alexandria wrote, "the greatest of all disciplines is to know oneself, for to know oneself is to know God". To Jung, this reality of the Self as a God-image is only realized in the individual consciousness ritualistically and in living communion and relationship.

Everything hangs together with everything else. By definition, only absolute totality contains everything in itself, and neither need nor compulsion attaches it to anything outside... Which of us can improve himself in total isolation? Even the holy anchorite who lives three days' journey off in the desert not only needs to eat and drink but finds himself utterly and terribly dependent on the ceaseless presence of God. Only absolute totality can renew itself out of itself and generate itself anew. Through this teaching the One and All, the Greatest in the guise of the Smallest, God himself in his everlasting fires [Isaiah 33:14], may be caught like a fish in the deep sea... and that by a eucharistic act of integration (call Teoqualo, 'God-eating' by the Aztecs), and incorporated into the human body.

Apollarion & Dionysian, Anima & Animus

At first glance, Jung's Anima/Animus dichotomy correlates strongly with Nietzsche's emphasis on the Greco-Roman Apollarion & Dionysian contrast he drew from Hegel and Holderlin, but I see them as essentially different. Both are psycho-spiritual male/female contrasts that are important to the emergence and creation of art, and both have a powerful, unseen influence on humanity. Left unchecked, these morally agnostic pairs can destroy the individual in tragedy or lead to a renaissance. But the Anima/Animus is a set of chthonic, abstract, vaguely anthropomorphized meta-archetypes that reside outside the individual in the collective unconscious-the raw material from which individualizations are formed into guiding archetypes-while the Apollonian/Dionysian is a pair of opposing impulses within the individual. Nietzsche's pair is obvious to the individual and resides in the emotional state; Jung's resides in the deepest recesses of the shadow self, and its form can only be seen by looking across the millennia at many millions of psyches. It's almost impossible for a single individual to perceive its motivational influence. Jung calls this yin-yang pair syzygy (Greek for marriage).
But there is much that can be correlated with Nietzsche's works: both Jung and Nietzsche prophetically predicted that the end of the Christian era, brought about by the rise of Protestantism, would be replaced by chaos, predicting the Holodomor and the Holocaust. Since Christ is the archetype of the Self, the post-Protestant disintegration of the Christian ethos plunges Western culture into hysteria and placebo religions (socio-political dogma, astrology, etc.). Jung writes: "The destruction of the image of God is followed by the annulment of the human personality. Materialistic atheism, with its utopian chimeras, forms the religion of all those rationalistic movements which delegate the freedom of personality to the masses and thereby extinguish it". Nietzsche and Jung are both concerned with the genealogy of morality and the problem of dichotomies, especially good and evil. Nietzsche's solution is to become post-human, the Übermensch. Jung's solution is to return to a ritual relationship with the ancient archetypes and re-enchant reality. Nietzsche poetically articulates the reality that parts of the mind are autonomous from conscious control, something Jung psychologically expands upon. The anima and animus are autonomous metapatterns because "the causal factors which determine his psychic existence are largely located in unconscious processes outside of consciousness

The False Dichotomy of Reason and Religion within Psychology: Deep calls out to Deep

Jung takes aim at Secular Material Rationalism (containing within itself Atheism, Agnosticism, and the 'spiritual but not religious' cop-out) and designates it as a modern religion itself:

It is a religion, or even more- a creed which has absolutely no connection with reason, but whose significance lies in the unpleasant fact that it is taken as the absolute measure of all truth and is supposed always to have common sense on its side. Just as formerly the assumption was unquestionable that everything that exists takes its rise from the creative will of God who is spirit, so the nineteenth century discovered the equally unquestionable truth that everything arises from material causes... but Matter is as inscrutable as Mind..

Chesterton in 1904 puts this exact same thought this way:

I apologize to the rationalists even for calling them rationalists. There are no rationalists. We all believe fairy tales and live in them. Some, with a sumptuous literary turn, believe in the existence of the lady clothed with the sun. Some, with a more rustic, elvish instinct, like Mr. McCabe, believe merely in the impossible sun itself. Some hold the undemonstrable dogma of the existence of God; some the equally undemonstrable dogma of the existence of the man next door.

As Dostoevsky details through intimate psychological portraiture, the Material Rationalist mind replaces the Idea of God (the transcendent point of reference and, in Christ, the Archetype of the Self) with socio-political presuppositions. This replacement of That-Which-Is-Highest. with socio-political dogma results in a "possession" of the Anima or Animus, which eradicates the individual's consciousness.

He argued that Freudian Psychotherapy was an important step, but lacks a relationship with something transcendent that can actually heal the νοῦς, not simply mend it enough to function:

No amount of explaining will make the ill-formed tree grow straight... Your picture of God or your idea of Immortality is atrophied; consequently, your psychic metabolism is out of gear... experience shows that many neuroses are caused by the fact that people blind themselves to their own religious promptings because of a childish passion for rational enlightenment... A religious attitude is an element in psychic life whose importance can hardly be overrated. And it is precisely for the religious outlook that the sense of historical continuity is indispensable... what we are pleased to call [an illusion] maybe for the psyche a most important factor of life- something as indispensable as oxygen for the organism- a psychic actuality of prime importance... everything that acts is actual.

He is not asserting the simplistic idea that believing in God is better than being an atheist; his point is actually the inverse. He is pointing out the neurological reality that the nominally "non-religious" people replace transcendent belief in the divine with an alternative system of belief which is just as much as a religion as the 'traditional' or 'formal' ones- usually with progressivist political dogmatism or sub-rational meaning-making systems like Astrology: "the end-result is a true antimimon pneuma, a false spirit of arrogance hysteria, criminal amorality, doctrinaire fanaticism, spurious art, philosophical stutterings, and Utopian humbug, fit only to be fed wholesale to the mass man of today. That is what the post-Christian spirit looks like."

Jung is not saying that practicing religion is better than being irreligious. Rather he is saying we all have religion, whether we like to admit it or not. The idea that you can be truly and completely non-religious is an ideological pathogen- a 'philosophic disease' if you will, that is unique to European Rationalism. It is itself a religious dogma that is far more dangerous than traditional religious dogma because it refuses to understand itself as religion. Engagement with the world on any level requires either an explicit or implicit answer to the basic questions of meaning and purpose. Unconsciously or consciously, every individual holds to dogmas (predicated upon unconscious mythical symbols), which are by definition religious beliefs. To Jung, the difference between the ‘religious’ and ‘non-religious' is only a matter of conscious denial.

Jung challenges the default Western Rationalist view towards 'traditional' religious belief dominating Europe. Thomas Paine put this idea succinctly as: "the Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the Sun, in which they put a man whom they call Christ, in the place of the Sun, and pay him the same adoration which was originally paid to the Sun." This is the default view of the Modernists (Paine, Hobbs, et) and today's standard Liberal post-moderns, both of whom are deeply Cartesian in their Epistemology. Part of the fallacy committed here is the assumption that Christianity claims to be a Futuristic religion- while it very dogmatically claims to be the exact opposite of Futuristic (with the exception of some newer varieties of fundamentalist Evangelicalism). The Way has always claimed to be the Apotheosis, the fulfillment, of all that came before it- not ontologically sui generis. Jung challenges this half-baked idea that because an idea has biologically driven symbolic roots and has ideological precursors in history does not make it 'not true'; rather, exactly the opposite.

Perhaps the clearest passage where he challenges this idea is found in Man and his Symbols:

People assume that these [religious motifs] ideas are "not true". I would rather say that they are not true enough, for these conceptions are of a kind that has accompanied human life from prehistoric times, and that still break through into consciousness at any provocation... The denial is as impossible to 'prove' as the assertion of religious belief. The one thing that we refuse to admit is that we are dependent upon 'powers' that are beyond our control.

We have not replaced ignorant, backward religion with enlightened, progressive Reason here in the West; we have replaced good religion with bad religion. As Tolstoy wrote in 1879: "It is impossible for there to be a person with no religion as it is for there to be a person without a heart. He may not know that he has a religion, just as a person may not know that he has a heart, but it is no more possible for a person to exist without a religion than without a heart." Tolstoy was reiterating the etymological origin of the word religion- Religio- "to bind together". A religion is the relationship of the consciousness to reality. You can't be religionless. And within a creed, you can't be "Non-Denominational" or Traditionless. There is no such thing as being "simply Christian". All submit themselves to some form of church tradition, at the very least by omission. Negative dogma is as categorical as positive dogma.

This Externality comes to us, like a bolt from the blue, and our own consciousness resounds with this echo from the material composition it is composed of: "Indeed, it took the intervention of God himself to deliver humanity from the curse of evil, for without his intervention man would have been lost." 'Deep calls out to Deep': pre-cosmogonic potentiality calls out to be shaped into Being by Meaning emanated by the Self. This kinetic resonance manifests Meaning as Phenomenon to the Consciousness, and shared, habitable reality can be experienced.