The ‘religious function’ occupies a distinctive and contested position across the depth-psychological corpus. Its most precise formulation belongs to Jung, who identified in the psyche an innate capacity to generate symbols capable of reconciling opposing forces — a capacity Marion Woodman glosses as ‘the native capacity of the psyche to produce symbols that have this reconciling effect and stirring presence.’ For Jung and his commentators (Edinger, von Franz, Hillman), this function is not a matter of institutional adherence but of living experience: it discloses itself wherever the psyche encounters the numinous, the reconciling symbol, or the individuating Self. A second, sharply contrasting treatment emerges in the empirical psychology of religion tradition represented by Pargament, which investigates religious function through the lens of coping, meaning-making, and the search for significance under stress — distinguishing substantive from functional definitions of religion and mapping intrinsic, extrinsic, and quest orientations. Jung’s lineage insists that established doctrinal containers may in fact resist the very religious function they arose to serve, while Pargament’s framework demonstrates measurable psychological consequences of religious engagement in crisis. The tension between these positions — the psyche’s autonomous symbolic capacity versus religion as socially mediated coping — defines the central problem of the term across the library.
This native capacity of the psyche to produce symbols that have this reconciling effect and stirring presence is what Jung calls the religious function.
Woodman provides the most explicit definitional statement in the corpus, identifying the religious function as the psyche’s innate symbolic capacity to reconcile opposites and restore contact with the source of being.
, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa and the Repressed Feminine: a Psychological Study, 1980thesis
Theologians sometimes even defend these ‘true’ religious symbols and symbolic doctrines against the discovery of a religious function in the unconscious psyche, forgetting that the values they fight for owe their existence to that very same function.
Jung argues that institutional religion can actively suppress the unconscious religious function from which its own symbolic authority originally derived.
, Man and His Symbols, 1964thesis
According to a second perspective, religion is distinguished by its special function in life rather than by a divine entity. Most typically, religion is said to be especially concerned with how people come to terms with ultimate issues in life.
Pargament articulates the ‘functional’ definition of religion as distinct from the ‘substantive,’ framing the religious function as the psychosocial work of confronting ultimate human concerns.
, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001thesis
It would appear that deep analysis leads to a strange dark center where it is difficult to differentiate the unconscious from the soul and from the image of God.
Hillman locates the religious function at the convergence of depth psychology and theology, arguing that analytic descent inevitably encounters the domain that religion has always addressed.
, Insearch: Psychology and Religion, 1967supporting
Jung provides, which all put the accent on experience rather than belief, ritual or organisation. The emphasis on direct religious experience is not only, as one might expect, a prioritising of the psychological dimension.
The Handbook clarifies that Jung’s conception of the religious function privileges direct experiential encounter over institutional, doctrinal, or organizational forms.
, The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications, 2006supporting
So long as one has no developmental urge that requires breaking out of that level of containment, the function of the sacred community is completely positive. If, however, the urge for a greater level of development should appear within the individual, then the moon-like containing function of the religious community turns negative.
Edinger distinguishes conditions under which the collective religious container serves versus impedes the individual religious function, linking the dynamic to the individuation process.
, The Mysterium Lectures: A Journey Through C.G. Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis, 1995supporting
He symbolizes a specific, mainly religious, function. But in mythology, as soon as the fool appears as the fourth in a group of four people, we have a certain right to assume that he mirrors the general behavior of an inferior function.
Von Franz identifies the fool archetype in quaternary mythological structures as carrying a specifically religious function, associating it with the inferior function’s compensatory and transformative role.
, Lectures on Jung’s Typology, 2013supporting
For the layman who has done his utmost in the personal and rational sphere of life and yet has found no meaning and no satisfaction there, it is enormously important to be able to enter a sphere of irrational experience.
Jung frames the clinical importance of the religious function as the capacity to open a domain of irrational experience that restores meaning where rational effort has failed.
, The Practice of Psychotherapy: Essays on the Psychology of the Transference and Other Subjects, 1954supporting
Allport contrasted a religion of means—a device, an instrument, a tool—with a religion of ends—lived, internalized, totally directive.
Pargament traces Allport’s intrinsic/extrinsic distinction as the dominant empirical framework for assessing how religion functions as either instrumental means or constitutive end in psychological life.
, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001supporting
In the search for the spiritual, the world’s religions have marked off the most critical junctions of the lifespan, setting them apart from ordinary times and wrapping them in religious garb.
Pargament demonstrates one dimension of the religious function as the ritual demarcation and sanctification of life’s critical transitions, thereby orienting coping resources around existential thresholds.
, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001supporting
Religion, at its best, is a cultural expression of that enquiring impulse; of an awareness of and openness to a God or gods; of a context that transforms our understanding of the world.
McGilchrist situates the religious function as the cultural embodiment of an epistemically orienting impulse toward transcendence and communal meaning-making.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
These religious realities are the inner and outer experiences that astound or contradict the ego. They may be positive experiences, in which one feels he is bathed in divine grace, or they may be negative experiences.
Edinger grounds the religious function in ego-transcending psychic events — autonomous eruptions from the God-image — that constitute the phenomenological core of religious experience.
, The New God-Image: A Study of Jung’s Key Letters Concerning the Evolution of the Western God-Image, 1996supporting
beyond the function of the ‘imprinting of a sociology,’ myth has a transcendental aspect, an…
Campbell distinguishes myth’s socializing function from its higher transcendental function, implicitly pointing toward a religious function that exceeds cultural conditioning and confronts mortality and mystery.
, The Power of Myth, 1988aside
For Otto, this feeling cannot be reduced to any other. It flows directly out of an absolutely convincing experience with the ‘Wholly Other.’
Pargament invokes Otto’s numinous to establish the irreducibility of the sacred encounter as a foundational category for understanding religion’s distinctive function.
, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001aside