Dreaming the Myth Onwards: C.G. Jung on Christianity and on Hegel
About this volume:
The fundamental importance of Christianity for Jung is well documented in his writings and letters. For the whole of his long career the great psychologist had wrestled with what he called "…the great snake of the centuries, the burden of the human mind, the problem of Christianity." By comparison, his statements about Hegel are quite scarce. Both topics, nevertheless, have in common that they elicited from Jung radical accusations, accusations not presented in the calm tone of a psychological scholar, but fired by a deep-seated personal affect that propelled Jung to wish "to dream the myth onwards," that is, to move to a new, his own improved and corrected version of Christianity. Rather than merely portraying and elucidating Jung's views, this volume critically examines his theses and arguments by means of a series of close readings and by confronting his claims with the texts on which his interpretations are based. The guiding principle, in the spirit of which the author's investigation is conducted, is the question of the needs of the soul and the standards of true psychology. While constantly bearing these needs and standards in mind, diverse topics are discussed in depth: Jung's interpretation of a dream he had had about being unable to completely bow down before "the highest presence," his thesis concerning the patriarchal neglect of the feminine principle, his views about the alleged one-sidedness of Christianity, the "recalcitrant Fourth," and the "reality of Evil," his understanding of the Trinity and the spirit, his rejection of Hegel and of speculative thought, and his reaction to the modern "doubt that has killed" religious faith. A companion to the preceding volume, The Flight into the Unconscious, the essays collected here continue its radical critique of Jung's psychology project, yielding not only deep insights into Jung's personal religiosity and into what ultimately drove his psychology project as a whole, but granting as well a more sophisticated understanding of the psychological potential and telos of the Christian idea.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART I. CHRISTIANITY
CHAPTER ONE: Jung's Millimeter: Feigned Submission - Clandestine Defiance: Jung's Religious Psychology
Dumb fish versus human freedom?
Unrelenting submission: The soul's most natural, spontaneous reaction to "the highest presence"
The modern situation and the counterfactual insistence on having a God
The lowliness of "the highest presence" and one's submission to it as self-relation
Remodeling Christianity in order to escape its further development
Jung's religious discourse as a garb for very different psychological concerns
Jung's shortcut: "direct experience"
"God": authenticator of "direct experience"
The functionality of "Evil"
"Evil": necessary prop for the soul's form of otherness and for the innocence of consciousness
The telos of Jung's dream: negativity
Love
CHAPTER TWO: The "Patriarchal Neglect of the Feminine Principle": A Psychological Fallacy of Jung's
1. Up the Down Staircase
2. Psychological Materialism
3. The Incomplete Arrival of the Krater
4. The Metamorphosis of the Feminine Principle
5. The False Bride
6. Regression, Procrastination, Extrajection
7. Derealization
8. The Avoidance of Dialectics
9. Fraternizing With Popular Demand
10. The Signs of the Times
11. "Archetypal Positivism"
12. Incarnation
13. Trinity and quaternity
CHAPTER THREE: Materialistic Psychology: Jung's Essay on the Trinity
PART I. REALIZATION THROUGH THE "RECALCITRANT FOURTH"
Timaeus 31b-32a and the tetrad of the physical elements
1. Mathematical formulas do not transcend the sphere of "mere thought"
2. That Plato had a deep longing for concrete realization is merely an insinuation
3. Timaeus is not concerned with "realization" but with "beautiful" order
4. Derealization of the form of being-in-the-world through mathematization
Timaeus 35a and the alleged quaternity of the world soul
The missing Fourth in the opening sentence of the Timaeus
"Ever since the Timaeus the 'fourth' has signified 'realization,' i.e., entry into an essentially different condition, that of worldly materiality ..."
PART II. REJECTION OF SPIRIT
Two general observations
The worm's eye view of the Trinity
CHAPTER FOUR: God Must Not Die! C.G. Jung's Thesis of the One-Sidedness of Christianity
The inner motive force of the Christian ideas
Complexity
The charge of one-sidedness
Christ's initial meeting with the Tempter
Incarnation
Reductio in primam figuram
Regression to naturalistic thinking
Theosophy, not psychology
Spirit and Love
The New Gospel according to St. Jung
Positivism
The disregard of the historical, phenomenological evidence
The campaign for the reality of evil
Postscript 2013. The "Death of God" and the Ascension of Christ
CHAPTER FIVE: The Reality of Evil? An analysis of Jung's argument
PART II. HEGEL
CHAPTER SIX: Jung's Betrayal of His Truth. The Adoption of a Kant-Based Empiricism and the Rejection of Hegel's Speculative Thought
I. Jung's self-set life-task: Expiation for Faust's crime
II. Jung's emphatic rejection of Hegel and his adoption of the Kantian position
III. Jung's "Faustian crime."
IV. Mock atonement
V. The neurosis of psychology
VI. Psychology's bubble
VII. Psychology's betrayal of the soul
VIII. Finis
CHAPTER SEVEN: "Jung and Hegel" Revisited. Or: The Seelenproblem of Modern Man and the "Doubt-that-has-killed-it"
1. Projection
2. Ignorance
3. Hegel's language
4. The gulf between "modern" and "pre-modern." The new form
5. "Doubt" as the intrinsic form of truth in modernity
6. The resuscitation of the "soul" as the betrayal of the soul
7. The affect-driven rejection of the "thinking form"
8. Blind knowledge and thought-blindness
9. Immediate experience: the crushing of "doubt" and the subordination of the subject as dumb subject
10. Self-castration ad majorem dei gloriam. Jung's Habemus Papam
PART III. CODA TO THE FLIGHT INTO THE UNCONSCIOUS
CHAPTER EIGHT: The Problem of "Mystification" in Jung
I. The justification for the religious dimension in psychology
II. The difference between the former and the present use of the same old religious "names"
III. The claim that there is a "gold ground" behind ordinary psychic reality
IV. The modern "myth" of religious meaning as a present reality