The Self Was Born from a Trialogue, Not a Monologue

Steven Herrmann’s William James and C.G. Jung: Doorways to the Self dismantles a persistent myth in analytical psychology: that Jung’s concept of the Self arose primarily from his engagement with Eastern thought or from intrapsychic revelation during the Red Book period. Herrmann demonstrates instead that the Self crystallized through what can only be called a trialogue — Jung’s simultaneous reading of the Upanishads, Meister Eckhart, and William James in the years following their 1909 meeting at Clark University. As Cody Peterson’s extensive engagement with Herrmann’s research confirms, Jung “felt inspired to introduce a figure that would unite the Eastern conception of divinity (Brahman, the breath of life) with the relative God-image that his intellectual heroes had cultivated (William James and Meister Eckhart, who led him to Spiritus, or the breath of life), and he decided to name it the Self.” This is not intellectual history for its own sake. It is a structural claim: the Self is not indigenous to any single tradition but is the psychological residue of a particular kind of comparative reading practice. Jung did not extract the Self from one source and dress it in the garments of another. He recognized a convergent pattern — the relativistic, experiential, subjective encounter with a power that exceeds the ego — appearing independently in a medieval Rhineland mystic, a nineteenth-century American pragmatist, and ancient Indian sacred texts. Herrmann’s contribution here should be read alongside Edward Edinger’s Ego and Archetype, which traces the ego-Self axis as a developmental structure, and Richard Tarnas’s account in Cosmos and Psyche of depth psychology as the culmination of the modern self’s “great descent.” Where Edinger maps the axis synchronically and Tarnas diachronically, Herrmann maps it genealogically: he shows who gave Jung what and when, with a precision that neither Edinger nor Tarnas attempted.

The Clark University Meeting Was a Vocational Initiation, Not a Professional Conference

Herrmann reframes the 1909 Clark University encounter between James and Jung as something far more consequential than scholarly exchange. Jung was thirty-four, freshly disillusioned by Freud’s withholding of dream material on the transatlantic crossing, and existentially unmoored. James was sixty-seven, ailing, and possessed of a quality Jung would remember for the rest of his life: he “spoke to Jung without looking down on him.” Herrmann reads this as a guru-disciple transmission — James modeling a way of being in which scientific rigor and religious openness coexisted without friction. John Beebe’s work on psychological types illuminates why this mattered structurally: Jung was grappling with how consciousness is organized, and James had already insisted that consciousness “stands for a function” rather than an entity, that it must be approached pragmatically through “careful study of the way we actually ‘know’ things.” When Jung later developed his theory of psychological types in 1921 — devoting an entire chapter to James — he was not merely citing an influence but completing a transmission. Herrmann makes clear that what Jung received from James was not a theory but an attitude: the conviction that religious experience is psychologically real, empirically investigable, and therapeutically essential. This attitude became the generative matrix from which Jung’s entire post-Freudian project unfolded. Shamdasani’s discovery of the omitted chapter from Memories, Dreams, Reflections — in which Aniela Jaffé recorded that “James was a model” for Jung — provides documentary confirmation of what Herrmann builds into a full interpretive framework.

Eckhart as the Missing Link Rewrites the Genealogy of Depth Psychology’s Religious Function

Herrmann’s most daring claim is that Meister Eckhart “anticipated both James and Jung” by seven hundred years, and that Eckhart constitutes “the missing link” between the two thinkers. This is not hagiography. It is a precise genealogical argument: Eckhart’s insistence on a relativistic, interior, experiential God-image — what Jung called in Psychological Types “a purely psychological and relativistic conception of God” — is the shared deep structure linking James’s radical empiricism of religious experience to Jung’s concept of the Self. Eckhart’s heretical move was to locate divinity within the soul’s own ground, refusing to “fetch God from without.” James secularized and empiricized this move in The Varieties of Religious Experience. Jung psychologized it into the ego-Self axis. Herrmann traces how Jung discovered Eckhart in adolescence, rediscovered the same attitude in James at Clark, and then fused both with the Upanishadic Brahman to produce the Self as a psychological concept. This genealogy has consequences beyond intellectual history. As Tarnas argues, depth psychology uniquely positioned itself at “the precise intersection of the two great polarities of the modern sensibility, the Enlightenment and Romanticism.” Herrmann shows that this intersection was not accidental but was prepared by a specific lineage of thinkers who insisted that the God-image is both psychologically real and irreducibly subjective — a lineage running from Eckhart through James to Jung. Peterson extends this lineage further, arguing that Bill Wilson’s Twelve Steps operationalized the same relativistic God-image (“Our own conception, however inadequate, was enough to make the approach”), making AA an unwitting inheritor of Eckhart’s heresy.

Why This Book Matters Now

For anyone working within depth psychology today, Herrmann’s book solves a specific problem that has plagued the field: the tendency to treat Jung’s religious psychology as either a personal idiosyncrasy or a wholesale borrowing from Eastern thought. Doorways to the Self demonstrates that it is neither. It is the product of a precise intellectual genealogy with identifiable sources, transmission events, and developmental stages. No other book in the literature maps the James-Jung connection with this degree of specificity while simultaneously anchoring it in the longer arc from Eckhart to the Upanishads. For clinicians, the implication is immediate: the Self is not a metaphysical postulate to be believed in but a convergence pattern to be recognized — in the consulting room, in dreams, and in the relativistic attitude toward the God-image that makes genuine psychological transformation possible.