Psychology & The Cross

(0:03) Jakob Lusensky: Well, it’s great to have you all here, Paul, Ann, and Murray. Now we get this chance to sit together around some sort of virtual table to discuss and have a conversation about Jung’s wrestle with Christianity. Exactly a year ago, I reached out to Murray to ask him if he would be open to having a conversation with me about these matters. And it’s been a great year, and it’s been a great pleasure, and I’ve learned a lot. And it also seems like there is not only me who is wrestling or struggling or engaging with these questions, because the following of the podcast has been growing significantly episode by episode. So it seems like there is something in the collective as well that speaks for [the fact] that what we’re talking about is of value, and is of interest, also for individuals not living in the 1950s or ‘60s, but living in 2022, with all the complexities of collective life and individuation.

(1:07) I would like to introduce all of you, and I’d like to start with Murray Stein. I met Murray as my teacher down in Zürich when I studied at ISAP. I always think of Murray and speak of him as one of the greatest storytellers, also of the Jungian ethos and the Jungian tradition. Murray left us with a lot of stories that now I carry on and tell to some of the people that I work with. Besides that, Murray’s also one of the most renowned scholars of Jung and Christianity: a book that I will also reference in the notes, Jung’s Treatment of Christianity, is a very important book for me in trying to understand these matters, so I’m very happy and pleased to have you here, Murray.

(1:54) I will continue and introduce Ann Conrad Lammers. And I’m really happy to have gotten to know you a little bit, and that’s also thanks to Murray, who told me [that] as our first conversation, “You should also speak to Ann.” Then, a little bit later on, we had a chance to have a conversation about the letters between C.G. Jung and Victor White. We had a great, very inspiring conversation last year, and I know many people who have listened to that conversation who have been very touched by it. I think you brought a lot of nuance to understanding these matters. So I’m very grateful to have you here.

(2:24) And then Paul, also in my world, he was just a name of someone I very much respected. I was sort of a fan of his work—I’d read a lot. You’re not only a scholar on Jung, but you’ve written very important books on Nietzsche, the book The Dionysian Self: C.G. Jung’s Reception of Friedrich Nietzsche—that was very important for me—but also, I think for this conversation, a very important book that you and I haven’t yet had time to discuss is Jung’s Answer to Job: A Commentary, which is a great work of scholarship, and I hope that we will have a chance to have a separate conversation about that as well, because last time we spoke, we spoke more about Goethe and the question of a secular redemption, as you used that phrase, and how Jung is offering ways of speaking of redemption in the secular context.

So thank you all for being with me.

(3:27) I would start with the first question: A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with a Jungian analyst. His name is Jason Smith, and he released a book called Religious But Not Religious: Living the Symbolic Life. He said something to me that I think could work a little bit like a leitmotif and help us introduce this topic of Jung’s wrestle with Christianity. He said the following: “I think so much of Jung’s work is his wrestling with Christianity. I think if you want to understand Jung, you need to have some understanding and engagement with Christianity. You certainly need to read the bible. In understanding Christianity, I think it helps to know Jung, because he gives some perspectives that cannot be had in other disciplines. At the same time, it is also necessary for me to be able to try to engage Christianity on its own terms, not on Jungian terms, to try to meet it in terms of what it says it is, and not what Jung says it is. And so there’s a tension in that. In wrestling with Christianity, I’m also wrestling with Jung.” So from there also the title of this roundtable.

And I would like to start to go the full round, and ask each of you for your personal reflections on the statement, but also if you could share something short about your own—if it’s wrestle or engagement—with Jung in regard to the question of Christianity. And how you view Jung as a guide into Christianity. And I would like to ask if Murray would start us off.

(5:11) Murry Stein: Well, I would like to begin by saying I don’t find Jung as an entry point to Christianity. I start with Christianity, and then I found Jung. I grew up as a Christian. My father was a Christian minister. I grew up with a bible. The bible was more familiar to me geographically than the places we lived. We moved around from parish to parish. So I did not come to Jung either looking for answers to questions I had about Christianity, or trying to find an entry into Christianity. I was a Christian. I still am a Christian. So I read Jung’s writings on Christianity with a little distance. I’m trained theologically, like Ann is—Ann and I actually shared a teacher, a professor, Hans Frei at Yale, who was a wonderful theologian and scholar, philosopher—so my background is strongly biblical and theological and literary. So when I read Jung, I read him with a background, a theological background, that’s quite different from his views. That said, I do appreciate Jung’s views on Christianity. I wrote my dissertation at the University of Chicago that became the book Jung’s Treatment of Christianity, and I asked the question, “What was Jung trying to do with Christianity?”

From about 1938 onward he wrote a lot about Christianity. It’s like he really wanted to do something with Christianity and the Christian tradition. And so I answered that question in the book by saying that he was treating Christianity as he would a patient. He saw that Christianity had gotten stuck in its individuation process and needed to take another step in the direction of integrating two things that he felt were left out of Christianity, evil and the feminine, and so he was proposing a quaternitarian God-image as opposed to the trinitarian [God-image] that we have in Christianity. So I found that a satisfying answer to the question, “What was Jung trying to do?”

And whether I agree with that—in part I do. I think Christianity has come a long ways (also in Jung’s time), particularly in the respect of integrating the feminine into its theological and liturgical life. When I went to divinity school at Yale, there were almost no women studying to become ministers. One or two—there was an MA art program. These were women who would become workers in the church, in education—Christian education. Today about half the students at Yale Divinity School are women. And they’re preparing for the ministry, because there’s a place for them in the ministry, in the Protestant ministry at least, to the very top levels. So I think there’s been a tremendous shift in also attitude toward the question of the feminine in the biblical text: finding, lifting out the images of the feminine, emphasizing them more, seeing their relevance to the whole story of the bible. So I think Christianity has moved and is continuing to move in the [inaudible] along that line. With regard to the problem of evil, I think we need to discuss that separately. But I think I’ve probably said enough for now, and I’d like to hear what the others will say to this question.

(8:40) Jakob Lusensky: Thank you, Murray. Ann, would you be fine to go next?

(8:45) Ann Conrad Lammers: I’ll give it a go. Yeah, like Murray, I was raised in a clerical family. My stepfather, who was my father for, you know, most of my growing up time, starting age four, was an episcopal priest and a holy man, which is difficult to live with in the family, because his vocation was so powerful and his commitments were so demanding. But it was, and as I age—I’ve lived a lot longer in my life than he lived in his (he died in his fifties)—I appreciate more and more of what he taught me by example and by actual verbal teaching.

I came to Jung in my thirties, maybe around age thirty. How did I land there? I wanted to—I’d gone through a divorce, which is always a painful thing, and I had a sense of vocation to a healing profession, and I knew somehow I had the instinct that it needed to be based on both psychology and theology. And I began looking for seminary teaching, a seminary course that I could take, and the very first thing that struck me was a course on Christian theology and schools of depth psychology.

And there I was, plunked down into Freud, Jung, Sullivan, and the existentialists. And it was Jung that really grabbed me. And I began reading, independent of anything that was assigned, and whether or not I was able to understand it. I started just absorbing. I was reading Psychology and Religion, his Terry lectures. I was reading Answer to Job long before I had the tools to grapple with it, and a lot of his writings on Eastern religion, too. I just plunged in. And what Jung did for me first off, almost before anything else, was he showed me a way back into the Episcopal Church, which I had left for twenty years in my marriage, as a Quaker. I was a full-fledged member of [name of city] Friends Meeting, and marching against the war. And I would still march against the war—that’s not an issue. But I had been living in a non-structured, non-ritualistic—except insofar as silence is a ritual—a different form of religious community. And I just really missed scripture, hymn singing, the colors and seasons of the church year. I missed theology. I missed peaching, actual, scripture-based preaching. Quakerism didn’t have a solid center for me anymore.

And I needed to get back into the church of my childhood, but how to do it without being a child again? I’m thirty, I’m an adult, I’ve moved beyond where I was when I was a teenager. What do I do? How do I get back into this church of my—of the ancient rituals and dogmas and teachings. Well, Jung gave me the path. He gave me an intellectual—a respectable—way to embrace what I’d grown up with through a new lens, looking at it differently. Because he respected the ancient rituals and the ancient teachings. He may have taken them all apart and looked at them from a different angle than any of my childhood teachers would have looked at them. That didn’t matter. He told me how to get back.

So, there I am, entering seminary with a deep appreciation of Jung and also thirst for theology. And I’ve been kind of working both sides of that street ever since. I carried it on, that tension and that dialogue, I carried it on through my seminary education, and then into my doctoral work at Yale, which is where Hans Frei is the common denominator for you and me, Murray. By the way, as a Barthian, Hans had very little patience with Jung. He tolerated my insistence on doing a dissertation that was devoted to Jung. That was all right. He said, “I appreciate your approach to Jung saying ‘well, yes and no,’” which is what I needed to do in the study of Victor White’s relationship with him, because I could not write about Victor White and C. G. Jung unless I respected both of them equally, and shared both of their basic assumptions, to the degree that one can share both of their basic assumptions and not fall apart inside. I struggled not to fall apart inside while I was doing that dissertation. But anyway, I got it accepted, I got the doctorate, and it’s been with me in some fashion ever since and here it is again today.

As I’ve remained a Christian and a worshipping member of an Episcopal parish, I’m more and more aware that we didn’t need Jung—we Christians didn’t need Jung to tell us about the problem of evil. We’ve got the Hebrew prophets. And some of what Jesus is reported to have said is consistent with the blessings and curses. Blessings and curses: on the one hand, and on the other hand, which is the Hebrew rhetoric. We’ve got this and we’ve got that. Reading Isaiah—some of the passages that don’t get used in church very much—he ricochets between God’s voice telling the people that they are his beloved and he will never abandon them, and they are a polluted rag and they deserve to be burned in the fire. And it’s just—well, it’s all there, and it’s kind of horrifying. And then we have Jesus in the Gospel of Luke—the beatitudes that are in Luke alternate between blessings and curses. There is woe: “woe unto you.” Jesus happened to love Isaiah. It’s all there in our tradition, actually.

Jung underlines the gospel of fear, to such an extent that it really took me a very long time, in my loyalty to Jung, it took me a long time to realize that the gospel of love is there. It’s there. It’s real. Compassion towards ones fellow beings is a reality that we need more of. And I’m finally at the place where I can say that I’m consciously choosing to believe the gospel of love. I know about the gospel of fear. I’ve seen the darkness. I’ve seen enough of it. But this is my choice now. And I think that—I’ll shut up now because I’ve talked enough. But I think that it’s not likely we’re going to see Jung rewriting Christian doctrine in a way that the church will adopt institutionally. But I think, on an individual level, what people get out of Jung may help them in their adult, in their mature, in their conflicted faith. And anybody who’s lived a long life has a complex faith, not a simple one. And Jung can be there with you while you’re doing that.

(18:09) Jakob Lusensky: Paul, would you . . . ?

(18:12) Paul Bishop: Yeah, thank you very much, Jakob, for inviting me. I should just say that I’m particularly pleased to be talking with Murray and Anne, because Murray, your book Jung’s Treatment of Christianity, I think was the first bit of secondary literature that I read on Jung, when I was kicking off in my studies with it. And Anne, when I had the great opportunity to go to Küsnacht and work in Jung’s library, and [name of librarian] was very good, he was very helpful, and he kept on recommending me, he kept on saying, he said, “[insert Deutsch],” he said, “Frau Lammers’ book is coming”—wouldn’t say anything more to me. But it’s a pleasure to be discussing these topics with you both, because you’ve helped me formulate my own thoughts on Jung over the years.

Coming back to the question about, you know, what does Jung do for me, as it were? Well, in relation to religion, I think I put it, Jakob, into the framework of Jung as being such a great pedagogue, and the Collected Works really being a little form of education in themselves, to all kinds of areas—world literature, German literature, French anthropology, and religion as well, obviously, as a very important part of that—and I think the term that I would use, that I think Jung gives one a sense for, which is perhaps missing today, which is the sense of the sacred. And that Jung is very, very helpful as a thinker who has kept, as it were, the torch of the light of the sacred going, in a period where otherwise it’s very difficult. I would associate it, I think, with a term which I find particularly interesting with Jung, which is where he talks about the archaic. Jung’s insistence on the archaic dimension of life: I would see [it] as being his formulation of a term which is more widely known as the sacred. And after all, he wasn’t the only one who was interested in that: Otto Rank’s work on the hero; Freud in Totem and Taboo is very Jungian or proto-Jungian, if you like, in parts. So I think that’s undoubtedly one of Jung’s major contributions today.

Of course it also makes it difficult for his reception, because precisely the sacred and archaic—and we might have an opportunity to come back and talk about that: I take your point in particular, Ann, about the significance of ritual and symbol as something that Jung had a very, very fine, keen appreciation of, and that reading Jung helps sharpens one’s own in the sense of the aesthetics of the sacred, if you like. And I think that’s more powerful now that we have access to the Red Book as well.

Where I’d like to ever so gently part company, perhaps, with you is on the question of dogma. And whether Jung is doing something—I’m sure it’s compatible with Christianity—and it might even be parallel with it—but it seems to me there’s an important aspect of it which is not Christian at all because it’s about Jung’s lack of faith. Lack of faith also makes it sound like a kind of, you know, its [inaudible]. But the way I have received it is he is someone [who] says, and very frankly deals with the problem of not being able to—with all the caveats around Memories, Dreams, Reflections—they have a function as a parable, if you like—is that account of Jung going to his first communion. And this profound sense of disappointment. And I think what I find so interesting about Jung is that on the one hand, he’s coming out of this Nietzschean tradition, which says, “God is dead”—in other words, he thinks it’s impossible for us to believe anymore. He comes out of that tradition. He has the experience of that. But, at the same time, he’s wrestling with God, he’s wrestling with religious issues. He doesn’t chuck it all out. He doesn’t go down the nihilist line. Instead he’s doing something which is—well, I don’t know: sui generis. That’s Jung. He’s doing his own thing.

And I suppose that on the question of dogma, I suppose that the question I’d want to put in is, isn’t it always the case that when Jung gets involved in a discussion with religion, that the religious people back off? And that being the case with the correspondence with Fr. White: They share an awful lot of common interests, but at the end of the day, there is a sort of bifurcation that’s there. And I suppose it’s teasing out at what point that bifurcation . . . takes place (which I would see as one of the things that still needs to be done in terms of research, which is to understand what is the process that Jung goes through in coming to terms with this lack of faith, and then at the same time, constructing something which can hold that emptiness, hold that lack, and turn it into something which is positive).

(22:49) Jakob Lusensky: Well, I think this connects to another question I’m sitting with here, but I would like to ask first if there’s anyone of you, Anne or Murray, who wants to respond to anything that’s been said?

(23:01) Ann Conrad Lammers: I do.

(23:02) Jakob Lusensky: Please.

(23:03) Ann Conrad Lammers: The word dogma slipped out of my mouth. It was not a serious assertion of Jung’s position vis-à-vis dogma because I know, as you do, he hates this stuff, he hates that kind of hierarchical top-down authority. He hates being told what to believe. He respects the history. He studies it closely. It has his attention, but not his uncritical acceptance.

(23:42) Paul Bishop: That’s why I think dogma’s a great word (chuckles). Because I think that’s exactly the point where, if one’s talking about a theological dogma—take the one that Jung is so fascinated with because of the announcement that happens in 1950, and I think [inaudible], I think the dogma of the assumption of the virgin. Jung gets totally excited about that. But surely his understanding of it, as he discusses it, is something which is parallel to, compatible with, but surely not identical with, what a practicing Roman Catholic would understand by.

(24:19) Murry Stein: I think it has to do with his understanding of symbols. One thing that Ann said that struck me: that Jung helped her back to the church of her childhood, but in a different way. I think I had that same experience, because if you relate to the church doctrines—call them doctrines or dogmas—as symbols, you could take them in a different way. And I think that’s the way Jung took it in Psychology and Religion. In the Terry lectures, for instance, he talks quite a bit about dogma and his appreciation of dogma as being archaic, archetypal. The dogmas speak of archetypes, and they represent archetypes, so he can appreciate it in that way, in a symbolic way. But when it becomes literalized, no; he’s not there anymore.

Did Jesus rise from the dead? Yes or no? If you were there on Sunday morning with a camera, would you have been able to capture it? He would say, no, but it’s a great symbol. The theologians I know would say something like that. But they would say, something happened that day. Something happened. What happened? And they transformed the disciples into the apostles. Something important happened. Well, they were caught by a symbol. What is the symbol? Well, it’s a projection of an archetypal content or image. The historical Jesus became the supernatural divine Christ. That was the transformation that happened on Easter Sunday, a transformation from the literal historical into the symbolic. I think Jung was very appreciative, and could relate to all the religions at that level.

He says to Victor White in one letter, “I was reading a paper of yours, and I had to ask myself, do I have faith or a faith, or do I not? And I had to answer, I do not. But I have respect. I have respect for all the religions and all the symbols.” And so that’s the way he would relate to Christianity, as this symbolic expression of something archetypal. And I think, if you push him far enough, he would have to say, if you take the whole story, the whole story, what Ann says about the opposites being included, if you put all that together, it is a symbolic representation of the self, which for him is the ultimate. It includes everything. It includes the masculine, feminine, good and evil. It’s all there. And you have to accept it all because God is reality and reality is complex. And this is a representation of that reality, an approach.

(27:03) Jakob Lusensky: I mean, Murray, isn’t that also sometimes where Jung is criticized? Yes, there is something about bringing the symbols alive again, and seeing the symbolic in what happened, but there’s also, which often has been expressed, that Jung psychologizes. He psychologizes and turns religion or Christianity, in this case, into something of a psychological or subjective process.

(27:27) Murray Stein: I would say yes and no. He does psychologize in the sense that he takes religious doctrine and turns it into a psychological concept. He makes a translation or an interpretation—on the hand. On the other hand, when he talks about archetypes and the trangressivity of archetypes, he’d say, I don’t know. They may be representations of something ontologically real beyond what we can know. It’s beyond our capacity to understand or know. So he leaves that possibility open, and so there’s a door into the metaphysical, but he isn’t going to step through it very far. But he does see the door and he does open it. I mean, synchronicity . . .

(28:09) Ann Conrad Lammers: Murray, I think in what you said about symbols, you might have slipped into discussing metaphors. A symbol can be actually the real flower, as well as what it represents. And the actual physical resurrection, of course we weren’t there to see it, but Jung doesn’t actually rule it out by saying that it’s symbolic. He can’t.

(28:39) Murray Stein: I don’t think he would rule it out. But what do you think, Ann?

(28:44): Ann Conrad Lammers: What do I think?

(28:46): Murray Stein: About the resurrection?

(28:48): Ann Conrad Lammers: I don’t take it precisely as Jung took it, because what I read in Jung is that we can win through to a resurrected body—it has something to do with individuation, it has something to do with the interior struggle with the opposites. And I think that that’s reductive. (I’m sorry, Jung, but I think it’s reductive, and self-serving.) There is something irreducible about that event, and I can’t see inside it. It’s like a light that blinds me. And I don’t attempt to say that it was physical, but I can’t rule out that it was. I don’t know.

(29:36): Murray Stein: Well, I don’t think that that’s different from what Jung might say. He doesn’t know either. And his definition of symbol is it’s the best possible representation of something that we can’t speak any better than that.

(29:49): Ann Conrad Lammers: Yeah.

(29:50): Murray Stein: I agree with you. Symbols are not metaphors. Metaphors are much, what should I say, a much more rational, a comparison of one thing to another or—

(29:58): Ann Conrad Lammers: Yeah.

(29:59): Murray Stein: But symbols do have this mystical quality, or numinous quality, to them. He says very early on in the [Zofingia] lectures, “that our religion without mysticism is dead,” when he’s discussing ritual. And ritual is rather rational, nineteenth-century theology. “Without the mystics, religion would die.” So Jung certainly appreciates that mystical sense which he later would call the numinous, after Otto, and he doesn’t reduce the numinous. I think he leaves it at the symbolic level and says we don’t know what the symbols really represent. It’s beyond our knowing.

(30:52) Jakob Lusensky: I feel like we could go deeper on this and follow this stream, but one of my roles would be to keep the time, so that’s why I actually would like us to move on to the next question, and then come back to this, because I can see that these things will tie into each other. And the second question I would like to ask of you connects to something you also said in the introduction, Murray, what your research on Jung and Christianity, Jung’s treatment of Christianity, you said, what did he want to do with Christianity. What did Jung want to do? And you gave an answer to that. But I think part of my own wrestle, and maybe a few others’, is to try to, sort of, reconcile this question. At times when you read Jung, maybe the younger version of Jung, you have a sense that maybe he wants to reform Christianity, or analytical psychology, or, in the early days, with the conversation with Freud, he says psychoanalysis has a role to sort of vivify and rejuvenate Christianity. We have of course the early vision of the Basel Cathedral, and some of the old being destroyed but also a question of rejuvenation, of bringing in the new life into Christianity. So is he a reformer, or does he then try to transcend Christianity? And is analytical psychology an attempt by Jung to dream the myth onward, as he said? The Christian myth onward? Or is it actually a break with Christianity?

(32:21) Paul Bishop: I’ll go first, only because, as I always say to my students, if you go first, then you don’t have to worry about having to go in at a later stage, then. (Chuckling) I’m going to try to follow my own advice, but the question you put, if I may, to our previous discussion about symbolism, because it seems to me that this is really key to Jung’s role. And I think, Murray, that you’re absolutely right to talk about the importance of mysticism for Jung, and Jung was a great appreciator, particularly of German mysticism; Meister Eckhart is the figure that comes to mind there as significant. And then, of course, that’s a good case study of saying, well, what on earth is Meister Eckhart about, and it shows maybe just how complex these questions are that Jung is struggling with. It seems to me that he’s doing, that Jung is doing a number of things in relation to religion and the symbol. First of all, going back to Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, he says, “The symbol, considered from the standpoint of actual truth is misleading indeed. But it is psychologically true.” That’s the point, isn’t it, because it was and is the bridge to all the greatest achievements of humanity. So we have a kind of cultural thing that Jung is proposing here. The symbol is not literally true, but it has this function which enables us to be creative. It’s the bridge to the greatest achievements of humanity.

The second movement, it seems to me, is, but does the symbolism still work? Because he then goes on to say, this will be the cause of moral autonomy or perfect freedom. When the human being could, without compulsion, that which they must do, and from this knowledge, without delusion through belief in symbols. So it seems to me a different take on the symbol, because belief in religious symbols is seen to be a delusion in some way, albeit a creative one. Then, and I think this ties in directly to your question, then, Jakob, which is what Jung thinks about the symbolism of Christianity. And this idea of can we believe it anymore is very much there in the lecture that he gives to the Guild of Pastoral Psychology—a movement, organization still going in London—in 1939. Well he says this: “We can’t turn the wheel backwards. We can’t go back to the symbolism that is gone. No sooner do you know that this thing is symbolic that you say, ‘oh well, presumably it’s something else.’ Doubt has killed it. Has devoured it. So, you cannot go back. I cannot go back to the Catholic church. I cannot experience the miracle of the mass. I know too much about it. I know it is the truth, but it is the truth in a form in which I cannot accept it anymore. I cannot say this is the sacrifice of Christ, and see him anymore. I cannot. It is no more true to me. It does not express my psychological condition. My psychological condition wants something else. I must have a situation in which that thing becomes true once more. I need a new form.” And that’s the call of a reformer, isn’t it? “I need a new form.” That’s what it seems to be Jung is doing with Christianity.

(35:49) Murray Stein: I think he says to Victor White, the new wine needs new bottles, or new wineskins or something. So, I think for Jung, he did create his own myth. He went on a search for, What is my myth? And he wrote Liber Novus. Liber Novus is his bible. He discovered his myth through his dreams, through his active imagination, and that’s what he stood on, that for him was numinous experience. That was his grail. And he interpreted everything else more or less out of it. His writings on alchemy and so on you can read. Now that we have The Red Book in front of us, we can see passages in [specific reference in Liber Novus]: direct references act to his experience. I think he did create a religion for himself that is not so different from Christianity, but it is his religion.

I remember Peter Homans, who was my dissertation advisor and main professor at the University of Chicago, who taught Jung at the divinity school at the University of Chicago, saying to me one time, when I asked him, “Well, you know, are you doing what Jung did? Are you creating a myth for your own life?” He said, “No, I don’t think I’m capable of creating a religion for myself. I’m just not up to it.” Now, he was a very intelligent man. He was an Episcopal minister, priest, ordained in the Episcopal church, and I think he continued to function in that role. He wasn’t particularly [pious], but he recognized the difficulty and enormous effort that it would take. When you look at what Jung did to create his Liber Novus, who’s going to do that? How many people in the world are going to ever be able to do something like that? Very limited.

(37:38) Ann Conrad Lammers: Murray, in creating Liber Novus, Jung was not evangelizing. He was creating it for himself, sharing it with a very limited, very limited group of people. And it’s not until decades after his death that, with a certain amount of misgiving, it was finally published. Well, wonderful that it was. But it wasn’t his idea to create a religion and gather a community around him to worship with him.

(38:16) Murray Stein: No, absolutely not.

(38:18) Ann Conrad Lammers: In fact, one of the things that I think Jung fails to grasp, and doesn’t even try to grapple with in his dialogue with Victor White, is the meaning of the body of Christ as a social community. For Victor White, that was essential. And he tried so hard to get Jung to see. At certain points in their correspondence you see him try to show this to Jung. Jung had no patience with it. That was not what he was going for. And because he didn’t appreciate that aspect of Catholicism, in any of its forms (it doesn’t have to be Roman Catholicism; there’s the English version, too, and other forms), he was not inside. He had one foot in, one foot out. But you’re right, Murray, that that was a therapeutic stance for him. He needed to have one foot in, one foot out in order to take a therapeutic approach to—what does it mean, actually—Jakob, what does it mean to dream the Christian myth onward? Who’s doing the dreaming? And which part of the Christian church are we talking about? It’s a church that’s undergone enormous splittings, and it matters whose dream it is. I’ve known senior Jungian analysts, teachers in their own right, who had such a hostile projection onto everything Christian, that it was quite chilling.

Who’s doing the dreaming? I’m really stumped. I really don’t know. You know, when I set out to do my dissertation, I wanted to do something on the relationship between psychology and theology. Well, that was going to mean Jung’s psychology. So I had my psychologist picked out. But theology? That’s huge. Who was going to represent theology? Which theology? And it was a Jungian analyst in the area of New Haven who said, “Have you read Jung’s letters to Victor White?” And that got me started. And then it was a case study of Jung and White. But we’ve got to have individuals in mind. Whose voices are we invoking with this broad question of dreaming the Christian myth onward? Which myth?

(41:19) Jakob Lusensky: Well, that’s a quote from Jung, you know? I mean, Jung’s expression of “dreaming the Christian myth onwards.” And to me, what’s striking living in this time in Europe is how in this part of the world the Christian church is absolutely lacking a dream. The music doesn’t seem to be in the church, or it seems like the church is not where the energy is moving, where the dream is happening. Why? In parallel to that, the practice of being a Jungian analyst working here: the queues are long; Jung is sort of in vogue again. There’s something in Jungian psychology that holds a certain energy, and to me these two things, Jungian analysis and what it offers, and Christianity, [are] deeply tied together. It doesn’t have to be. Jungian psychology works very well for someone who is Muslim, or from another religion as well. It can work perfectly well as a therapeutic technique. But at times, Jung is expressing that, the hope to reform Christianity, or the hope to dream the myth, the Christian myth, onward. I’m fantasizing, and it might be childish, but I fantasize at times about, what would have happened, if Jung owned his Christian faith? Or if—maybe if Jung had kneeled to the ground, or if Jung would have expressed himself as a Christian? I think you would agree: the church needs Jung, that Jungian psychology has something to offer the church. But I also do believe that Jungian psychology needs the church. Or, I think there is something there, you know? As we’ve been touching upon in the question of lack of community or the difficulty that Jung might have had with aspects of Christianity that had to do with a social aspect of it. So I think that there’s a tension here.

(43:19) Murray Stein: Well, to Ann’s question, dreaming the myth onward, who’s dreaming the myth onward? A number of thoughts come to my mind. I mean, one would typically look to the theologians to dream the myth onward. They’re in the tradition. Their dreams would provide the impetus for evolving the doctrines further, applying them further, enlivening them with some new libido, some new symbolism, and so on. I think we’re rather bereft today. I mean, Barth was a great theologian and he brought a lot of life to theology. His dialectical theology was very alive. I remember studying Barth, and all those footnotes were very exciting. And as you say, Hans Frei was a Barthian. So Barth really captured the theological imagination in his time. But since then, I don’t know of any theologians who have done that.

Now can we look to psychologists to do that? Psychologically-minded theologians or theologically-minded psychologists, but people who are not necessarily in the role of the theologian to dream that myth onward and what that would mean. I mean, dreaming a myth onward means (some Jungian terminology) taking seriously the dream that you have had, that you have a symbolic dream, which in Christianity would be the mythos of Christ, and you take that seriously, and you put it to work, you apply it, in your life, and you do active imagination with it. You know, you take the dream and you keep working with the dream. You work with it in active imagination. You work with it in, how do you apply this dream? How does it change your life? What difference does it make?

Christianity is a universal religion, and it has to capture the universal mind. It has to capture the global mind. It somehow has to transcend—it’s provincial in a very subtle way, not by overcoming it, the other religions, but by offering something that is so exciting and so convincing and so beyond what others offer, that it would be the new vision, on a global level. It has to go global—not Catholic, but global. And I think there are some thinkers who have tried to do that—Teilhard probably. But this idea that it has to evolve—I think that was Jung’s. Like, individuals have to evolve. They have to keep on growing. If you stop, and just look to the past, it becomes stagnant. And that’s what he says: you can’t go backward; it has to go forward. And that means dreaming the dream live, taking the mythos and working it in a new and exciting, different way. That would be my thought on that question.

(46:18) Ann Conrad Lammers: It’s really inspiring, Murray, what you say. And then I’m thinking of what happened to Teilhard, that the Catholic, the hierarchical, the pontifical rulings of the 1950s flattened him.

(46:39) Murray Stein: They were so afraid of modernism, weren’t they, I mean—

(46:42) Ann Conrad Lammers: So afraid. So afraid of modernism. That was one of the things that flattened out Victor White’s career also.

(46:49) Murray Stein: Yeah. Exactly.

(46:55) Ann Conrad Lammers: And then I’m thinking of our current pope, and how he seems to be working within the system as well as possible, to evolve—

(47:06) Murray Stein: I think so, yeah.

(47:08) Ann Conrad Lammers: Evolve the realities of the Roman Catholic church, and frankly, I don’t know if he will survive.

(47:15) Murray Stein: Yeah. It’s so bogged down in bureaucracy and parties . . .

(47:22) Ann Conrad Lammers: Yeah.

(47:23) Murray Stein: Interest groups and . . .

(47:25) Ann Conrad Lammers: Well, he’s surrounded by a power structure that he disagrees with . . .

(47:31) Murray Stein: Yeah.

(47:32) Ann Conrad Lammers: And they will—I don’t know about stop at nothing, but they’re very dangerous to him.

(47:43) Paul Bishop: But I just wanted to come back to this sense of urgency and worry, which I find there in Jung when he talks about, for example, in his paper, “Psychology and the Unconscious,” when he talks about Nietzsche. He says “the case of Nietzsche shows, on the one hand, the consequences of neurotic one-sidedness”—let’s leave that on one side for now—“and on the other hand, the dangers that lurk in this leap beyond Christianity.”

(48:11) Murray Stein: Yeah.

(48:12) Paul Bishop: “Nietzsche undoubtedly felt the Christian denial of animal nature very deeply indeed, and therefore he sought a higher human wholeness beyond good and evil. But he who seriously criticizes the basic attitudes of Christianity also forfeits the protection which those bestow upon him. He delivers himself up unresistingly to the animal psyche. That is the moment of Dionysian frenzy.” And that’s a very early paper, isn’t it? I think it’s about [1917], but again, in that paper to the Guild of Psychology, he makes very much a similar point, where he talks about the dangers that are involved. He says, “To be extra ecclesiam,” he says, “is very, very dangerous. You are no more protected. You’re no more in the consensus gentium, no more in the lap of the old compassionate mother. You are alone. And you are confronted with all the demons of hell. That is what people don’t know.” So there there seems to me a sense of great worry, urgency, anxiety, a sense of danger that’s involved with giving up of Christianity as well.

(49:19) Jakob Lusensky: Well, I also think it’s important, maybe, to stress reformation, although Jung said, you’re looking for the new, I would think, as a Jungian analyst as well, that he thinks about going back in order to go forward. Or that there’s a sort of sort of renaissance—

(49:32) Paul Bishop: . . . Absolutely.

(49:35) Jakob Lusensky: And there is a voice. I would say there is a voice out there, actually, that is doing a lot of good for Jungians and for Christians. And that doesn’t mean that I fully support what he says, but that is the Canadian Jordan B. Peterson, which some of you may be aware of, who’s a psychologist who is very fond of Jung, and he has x millions of followers on YouTube, and he has high-level conversations with leading theologians and people from the church, about Christianity and Jung, and in a sense, you know, this man in himself, in the last ten years, many people find to Christ and Christianity through Jordan B. Peterson into Jung back to Christianity. So he’s a voice. He’s not a theologian, but he’s a very powerful voice in the culture right now. There’s a lot of discussion happening around Christianity, and around Jung, but it’s in the public discourse. Maybe it’s also happening within the Jungian field, within the church.

(50:37) Paul Bishop: I just wanted to mention as well, in terms of voices, the one who has contributed to the debate, someone who I have found very useful, is Eugen Drewermann, and Eugen Drewermann seems to be a good example of someone coming out of the Catholic church who engages very, very deeply with Jung, and then of course, in turn, Drewermann leaves the church. And that’s why I see it more as a tension between Jungianism and Christianity, albeit a very, very fruitful one. I suppose I’d put it like this: Are they, at the end of the day, Christianity on the one hand, Catholicism, the church, on one hand, Jung and analytical psychology on the other, are they actually playing the same game? Do they actually want the same outcomes? And that’s not to judge either of them as positive or negative. It’s simply to say, are they actually doing the same sort of thing?

(51:33) Murray Stein: It’s similar to the question that I’ve been dealing with, and with some colleagues. Is the goal of individuation the same as the goal of Eastern meditation? Is the final result the same, if you get fully individuated Jungian, and put him beside the enlightened Zen Buddhist, do they look alike? Or are they very different? Oh, these are interesting comparisons, and you always find differences; you find some similarities. But I think they, all of these share something, a glimpse of something beyond, certainly beyond the rational. Everybody, all the religious traditions, will say that thinking can’t get you—the Buddhists will say that. It has to come from somewhere else: you have to have a moment of enlightenment. Christianity will say, philosophy will take you so far, but then you need revelation. You need something beyond the rational. And how does that come to you? Well, Jung offers an answer to that.

How does it come to you? Look at your dreams. Look at your imagination. Let your mind enter into this other realm, or use this other faculty called imagination, and don’t question it, just go with it, and interact with it, as he does in Liber Novus, and you will come upon something. The claim in Christianity is that the revelation has come to us. The revelation is finished. And now, what do we do with it? Okay, so, that is a bit of a problem. Once you say it’s all dead, and then it’s a matter of just repeating, it gets rather stale. You know, and that’s why the churches are empty. They’re repeating something that’s been said and said and said, and people aren’t getting it at the right level, perhaps, but certainly the churches in Switzerland are empty on Sunday morning. I think throughout Europe and the United States it’s a bit different.

(53:25) Jakob Lusensky: I think this connects, Murray, to a question, and it might even be one of the last questions that we have time for today, because time flies, and that is again a question about community. It’s been brought up in many of the conversations I had with different scholars and analysts and also with you, Murray, when you said, what can we learn from Christians. Yeah, you said something also about community, about faith, and Jungians, at times, struggle with the question of community. There is a critique that’s often raised, also, about Jungians as a little bit of a group of esoteric elitists, or disconnected a little bit from reality. Psychology for the wealthy. Also if we look at the people who came to Jung, I mean, there was also people who [came]—from a pretty wealthy background. It wasn’t maybe the poorest that showed up in [city], which is fine, but to me, there is also, it relates to this question of Jesus Christ, actually, and Jung’s ambivalent relationship to Christ, if I can say so.

Because, I think, we discussed, all of us individually, in our conversation the question of imitatio Christi, and Jung’s rendering of that. And he is sort of clear on imitating Christ: No, no, no, don’t imitate Christ. Find yourself, become who you are. But isn’t there also a risk, somehow, in this? Isn’t there something that—if Christ is not somehow a part of individuation, isn’t Christ the community? Isn’t Christ sort of what connects my individuation with others? Isn’t there something in the image of Christ which is not only a symbol for my own self or potential wholeness, but actually more a symbol of our shared wounds and our shared difficulties in living a limited life here on earth? And I wonder, you know, if there’s a risk, if you see there could be a risk sometimes in that Jungian psychology [reduces] the social cause of Jesus Christ and the loyalty to the kingdom of God, to some sort of ideal of individual self-actualization.

(55:36) Murray Stein: Um, I would start by Ann’s touching on this point of community, because it is so central to the Christian world, whether it’s Protestant or Catholic: the community, and worshipping together, praying together, is absolutely central to the practice of Christianity. And that is not in the Jungian world. Jungians do get together, they listen to lectures together and have discussions, but there is nothing like the sense of the numinous in a community. One doesn’t look for it there. One looks for it in the inner world. One doesn’t look for it in the extroverted world. But I think the word community is abused and overused and misused to refer to any kind of gathering or group of people. That isn’t what Christians mean by community. They mean where two or three are gathered and the Holy Spirit is with them. That’s community. It’s a qualitative difference. And we don’t have that in the Jungian associations. It’s that we don’t look for it there.

(56:47) Ann Conrad Lammers: The other thing that is meant, in most Christian denominations, by community, or at least by the body of Christ, is those who share participation in Christ through baptism and through the eucharist, at least those two sacraments. And that also does not play into Jungian—that Jungian world.

(57:20) Jakob Lusensky: And would you say, is there a risk of moral and religious reductionism in Jungian psychology?

(57:29) Ann Conrad Lammers: How do you mean, Jakob?

(57:31) Jakob Lusensky: I mean leaving out anything related to community, too much emphasizing your inner work on your themes, yourself, not speaking of God or Christ or shared images of—not what differentiates us from the other but what holds us together, what puts us in the same boat.

(57:54) Ann Conrad Lammers: I think Jung was rightly afraid of the collective. He saw it as inferior, tending towards unconsciousness, mass-think, collective-think. And his fear of the collective has transmitted down through the generations.

(58:20) Murray Stein: Well, I think what you say, Jakob, it’s a “both–and.” I don’t think Ann would favor one exclusively over the other, but you have the communal activities, which are centered and grounded in the symbols. And then you have the active out of the meeting of those symbols and community activities and so on, outside social-justice movements, that sort of thing. That’s where I was introduced to Jung. It was Elizabeth O’Connor, who wrote this book Journey Inward, Journey Outward. And it was at the Church of the Savior in Washington, D.C. She was on the staff there, and everybody who belonged to that church had to belong to a mission. And the mission was active in various different ways in the community, but they would all gather together for services, worship services. They had a very charismatic leader, preacher. And the rituals there are very powerful, so, it was both, really. And I think it takes both to bring a community to life, and give it a sense of mission and purpose. It isn’t just for the benefit of the individual members and their spiritual life, but it has to move out into the world.

(59:39) Ann Conrad Lammers: Isn’t the transforming of the world part of the Christian mission?

(59:50) Murray Stein: Absolutely, yeah. But you have to be careful about that transforming because then it becomes, as soon as you get into politics, I’m very leery of politics. They can be, of course, very powerful and positive, but usually, when it becomes political, power takes over and love disappears. You said you choose love. Politicians choose power, and they’ll do anything to get it or—

(1:00:21) Ann Conrad Lammers: Yeah.

(1:00:23) Murray Stein: And the political is a very corrupting element, but you still need it. You need power to transform things. But if you get lost in politics, it all becomes all power. And that’s the problem. Jung said, “where there’s power, there’s no love.” And you reminded me of Dante’s journey, Ann, when you said that you choose love. That’s what Dante discovered in Paradiso.

(1:00:47) Ann Conrad Lammers: Mm-hmm.

(1:00:48) Murray Stein: Well what actually moves the sun and all the other stars? It’s love. And it infected him. And he became transformed by that. So that was the Dante—Dante’s journey. And then he would have lived that if he had lived longer, I guess, for the rest of his life. But it does take a vision. You can say, “I choose love,” but you have to be gripped by a vision somehow, don’t you? That’s where the psyche comes into play. It doesn’t just value an idea, but it has to be powerfully psychologically motivated by, we would say, a powerful archetypal energy that you experience that motivates and keeps you, sustains you. Christians would call it the Holy Spirit.

(1:02:08) Ann Conrad Lammers: Jakob, you were bringing us back to the question of imitatio Christi, and the aspect of the imitation of Christ which involve brother and sisterhood with the poor and suffering. That is an essential part, I think, of the ministry of the church, when it can remember that that is its life.

(1:02:45) Murray Stein: That’s Francis.

(1:02:46) Ann Conrad Lammers: Yeah, it’s Francis.

(1:02:48) Murray Stein: Absolutely.

(1:02:49) Ann Conrad Lammers: Yeah. And how much of that can be lived? And where do we see examples of it being lived, anywhere, either in the church, which tends to get seduced by the world anyway, or in the Jungian world? Do we see that identification with the poor and preferential placement of the poor anywhere in the Jungian community now? Is that part of our vision?

(1:03:31) Murray Stein: Well, Jakob, you did something like that in Berlin, didn’t you? Therapy on the street.

(1:03:37) Jakob Lusensky: We were trying to at least—maybe not build a bridge—but trying to keep a relationship to that side of community, yeah? And for me it’s been strikingly a lack of that in—you correct me if I’m wrong—but in reading Jung, I do not hear much about the poor. And, you know, that’s maybe fine. But I feel that there is a lack of that discourse. And again, I feel like Jungian psychology. Yeah, this what I do. This is what I sit with every work day. It’s so extremely deeply valuable. But I think there is also a danger if it’s not connected to, if this journey inward is not connected to what’s actually just in front of us, yeah? What’s just out there. On a practical level I can say, at times we speak about someone dreaming about the beggar, and I think an immediate interpretation could be, from my fantasy Jungian analyst, that this is the beggar in you, this is your inner poverty, and there’s something to that. There is something to that. But sometimes a beggar is just a beggar. Sometimes there’s also something about you have to look at what’s in front of you. And I think that’s also where I have had a lot of help of Freud, actually, and Freud’s emphasis on reality. Freud’s emphasis on the reality principle. And obviously, I struggle myself with the tension of holding this, how much of a—yeah, the focus on my or my patient’s individuation versus in helping them to feel better or feel more whole, and at the same time facing a world that continues to disintegrate in front of our eyes. That’s a huge disconnect or cognitive dissonance, at times, to hold this tension. And I think that’s where I do believe that Jung, in my understanding of Jung, he needs Christ.

(1:05:42) Ann Conrad Lammers: Mmm.

(1:05:43) Jakob Lusensky: And this is my very personal working through of that.
And so I’ve been involved in some projects on trying to take psychology out of the practice room, with variously successful results, I should say. The struggle continues.