Original Sin occupies a pivotal and contested position across the depth-psychology corpus. The term arrives not as settled dogma but as a psychologically charged symbol requiring reinterpretation. Jung approaches it through multiple vectors: as the Augustinian inheritance of concupiscence from Adam, as the mythological substrate for the doctrine of Mary’s Immaculate Conception, and as the symbolic ground from which the tension between good and evil—and the inadequacy of the privatio boni formula—becomes clinically urgent. Hillman radicalizes the concept by inverting its direction: Original Sin is not humanity’s fault projected upward onto a pristine divine order, but rather the congenital pathology of the archetypes themselves—‘the sin in the Originals.’ Pascal reads it as the only doctrine that renders human self-knowledge possible, however scandalous its logic. Campbell and Flores locate it anthropologically in the moment consciousness cleaves from paradisiacal unconsciousness: eating of the tree of knowledge as the originary wound that simultaneously creates the human condition. The Philokalia tradition resists the Augustinian formulation, preferring ancestral sin and mortality to inherited guilt. Tarnas maps the doctrine’s Calvinist intensification onto the Saturn-Pluto archetypal complex. Across these readings, Original Sin functions as a depth-psychological hinge between the mythic Fall, the emergence of ego-consciousness, and the structure of human suffering.
To express this infirmitas of the archetype theologically we would say that Original Sin is accounted for by the sin in the Originals. Humans are made in the images of the gods, and our abnormalities image the original abnormalit
Hillman inverts the traditional doctrine, arguing that Original Sin derives not from human transgression but from the congenital pathology inherent in the archetypes themselves.
, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis
her freedom from original sin sets Mary apart from mankind in general, whose common characteristic is original sin and therefore the need of redemption. The status ante lapsum is tantamount to a paradisal, i.e., pleromatic and divine, existence.
Jung argues that Mary’s exemption from Original Sin paradoxically elevates her out of humanity entirely, making the Incarnation a divine rather than genuinely human event.
, Answer to Job, 1952thesis
her freedom from original sin sets Mary apart from mankind in general, whose common characteristic is original sin and therefore the need of redemption. The status ante lapsum is tantamount to a paradisal, i.e., pleromatic and divine, existence.
Jung repeats and deepens his analysis of the Immaculate Conception, treating Original Sin as the defining characteristic of embodied humanity and its absence as ontologically disqualifying Mary from true human membership.
, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis
Without doubt nothing is more shocking to our reason than to say that the sin of the first man has implicated in its guilt men so far from the original sin that they seem incapable of sharing it.
Pascal presents Original Sin as epistemologically indispensable: however rationally repugnant its logic of inherited guilt, without it human self-knowledge remains entirely opaque.
, Pensées, 1670thesis
grew with Augustine—who in many ways was not unlike Tertullian—into that thoroughly characteristic, pessimistic doctrine of original sin, whose essence consists in the concupiscence inherited from Adam.
Jung traces Augustine’s doctrine of Original Sin as a typological expression of introverted pessimism regarding human nature, linking it to the irresolvable tension between grace and individual worth.
, Psychological Types, 1921thesis
they try to identify their own limited and relative powers with the Absolute. And this is the original sin. Sin is the narcosis of the soul; it is a perennial temptation to which men must inevitably succumb.
Flores, drawing on Frankel, redefines Original Sin as the narcissistic error of identifying finite selfhood with the Absolute, a confusion enacted in addiction’s illusory omnipotence.
, Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations An, 1997thesis
the pervasive consequences of the Fall, the inborn corruption of every human being because of Adam’s original sin; the resulting loss of free will and incapacity of the human will on its own to choose other than sin
Tarnas correlates the Calvinist elaboration of Original Sin—radical corruption, loss of free will, predestination—with the Saturn-Pluto archetypal complex as an enduring psychological configuration.
, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006supporting
the blackness of the Shulamite is an expression for sin, the original sin, as the text shows. Behind this idea lies the archetype of the Anthropos who had fallen under the power of Physis
Jung reads the alchemical Shulamite’s blackness as a symbol of Original Sin, linking it to the Anthropos myth of the primordial man’s capture by matter and the resulting contamination of the spiritual Adam.
, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, 1955supporting
In the case of Adam and Eve the announced rule was of a type very popular in fairy tales, known to folklore students as the One Forbidden Thing
Campbell situates Original Sin within the cross-cultural folklore motif of the One Forbidden Thing, treating the Fall narrative as a mythological rather than theological event bearing on the structure of human consciousness.
, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964supporting
the consequence of partaking of the fruit of the tree of knowledge is mortality… The tree of mortality (or death) is also the tree of consciousness---you can’t have one without the other
Peterson reframes the Fall as a depth-psychological necessity: the acquisition of consciousness entails mortality and spiritual death, making the Original Sin narrative a mythic account of ego’s emergence.
, The Shadow of a Figure of Light, 2024supporting
Orthodox Christians avoid using the term original sin because it typically includes concepts alien to their theological tradition.
The Philokalia tradition formally distances itself from the Western Augustinian concept of Original Sin, preferring instead an account of inherited mortality and passibility without collective inherited guilt.
, The Philokalia, Volume 1, 1979supporting
man’s will, though free, is unable to will anything but evil unless redeemed from its corruption by the grace of the sacraments of the Church. As soon as our first parents had transgressed the commandment
Campbell presents Augustine’s account of the corrupted will following the Fall as the theological architecture underpinning Original Sin’s institutional function within Western Christianity.
, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968supporting
Yet Christ was free of all sin, even of original sin, which the rest of us supposedly inherit from the first human, Adam.
Sorabji clarifies Christ’s exemption from Original Sin within Augustine’s framework, noting the inherited character of the doctrine and its logical tension with Christ’s full humanity.
, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000supporting
After the fall the generation of every man was by nature impassioned and preceded by pleasure. From this rule no one was exempt.
The Philokalia articulates a patristic Eastern account of post-lapsarian human nature in which passion and mortality—though not juridical guilt—are universal inheritances from the Fall.
, The Philokalia, Volume 2, 1981supporting
In the context of Christian psychology, the alienation experience is commonly understood as divine punishment for sin.
Edinger maps the theological concept of sin’s punishment onto the depth-psychological category of ego-Self alienation, treating the Fall’s consequences as experiential rather than merely doctrinal.
, Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche, 1972supporting
the acute sense of this wrongness is the root of the human consciousness of sin. This deficiency of its nature it tries to set right by
Aurobindo locates the phenomenological ground of sin-consciousness in the soul’s limited force and falsifying knowledge under ego-separation, offering a Vedantic parallel to the Western Fall doctrine.
, The Synthesis of Yoga, 1948aside
The sense of guilt, which was not allayed by these creations, found expression in myths which granted only short lives to these youthful favourites of the mother-goddesses
Freud traces a primordial guilt structurally analogous to Original Sin through the mythology of dying and rising gods, grounding it in the parricide scenario of Totem and Taboo.
, Totem and Taboo, 1913aside