Repressed God

The Seba library treats Repressed God in 9 passages, across 7 authors (including Woodman, Marion, Jung, C. G., Jung, Carl Gustav).

In the library 9 passages

The repressed god whose needs are no longer recognized as prerequisites for psychic health demands recognition through somatic distortions. The god of nature ceases to be a spirit and possesses the woman as an autonomous animal.

Woodman’s central clinical thesis: the culturally repressed Dionysian god of nature and the body returns as compulsive eating and somatic possession in women whose ecstatic-religious instincts have been denied.

Woodman, Marion, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa and the Repressed Feminine: a Psychological Study, 1980thesis

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our true religion is a monotheism of consciousness, a possession by it, coupled with a fanatical denial of the existence of fragmentary autonomous systems… the autonomous systems then behave like any other repressed contents: they necessarily induce wrong attitudes since the repressed material reappears in consciousness in a spurious form.

Jung identifies the collective mechanism: Western consciousness’s denial of autonomous psychic systems — gods — causes those same forces to return as neurotic distortion, establishing the structural logic underlying the Repressed God concept.

Jung, C. G., Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907thesis

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Nietzsche was no atheist, but his God was dead. The result of this demise was a split in himself, and he felt compelled to call the other self ‘Zarathustra’ or, at times, ‘Dionysus.’ In his fatal illness he signed his letters ‘Zagreus.’

Jung reads Nietzsche as a case study in the return of the repressed God: the declared death of God does not eliminate the divine function but forces it into a pathological alter ego, culminating in psychic fragmentation.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958supporting

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As the human loses personal connection with personified nature and personified instinct, the image of Pan and the image of the Devil merge.

Hillman articulates the cultural-mythological dimension: repression of the instinctual nature-god Pan results in his demonization, so that the excluded deity reappears as a diabolical shadow rather than a legitimate divine presence.

Hillman, James; Roscher, Wilhelm Heinrich, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting

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the Incarnation has caused a loss among the supreme powers: the indispensable dark side has been left behind or stripped off, and the feminine aspect is missing. Thus a further act of incarnation becomes necessary.

Edinger, following Jung, argues that Christianity’s one-sided God-image structurally represses its dark and feminine aspects, making their eventual return — as atheism, materialism, or compensatory eruption — historically inevitable.

Edinger, Edward F., The New God-Image: A Study of Jung’s Key Letters Concerning the Evolution of the Western God-Image, 1996supporting

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when you reduce it and deny its existence, you are simply filled with air… Therefore many people, lacking spirit, take to drink. They fill themselves with alcohol; I have seen many a case of that sort.

Jung connects the denial of numinous experience — the reduction of the god to ‘mere air’ — with addictive substitution, showing the repressed god’s somatic and behavioral return in the absence of legitimate spiritual life.

Jung, C.G., Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939, 1988supporting

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God must set up his miserable servant as the bugbear whom he has to fight, in the hope that by banishing the dreaded countenance to ‘the hidden place’ he will be able to maintain himself in a state of unconsciousness.

In the Job commentary, Jung identifies within the God-image itself a repressed counter-force — Satan as the concealed shadow of Yahweh — demonstrating that the repression dynamic operates intrinsically within the divine archetype.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958supporting

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There is no deity in the mandala, nor is there any submission or reconciliation to a deity. The place of the deity seems to be taken by the wholeness of man.

Von Franz observes that in modern mandalas the traditional divine image is absent, replaced by an abstract or human center — registering the cultural repression of the god-image and its partial reabsorption into the concept of psychological wholeness.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, 1975aside

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