Religious Function vs. Polytheistic Soul

Jung’s psychology of religion is structured around the Self as imago Dei: a unitary archetype of wholeness toward which individuation tends, and in which the religious function of the psyche finds its proper object. Edinger inherits this structure faithfully: “the central aim of all religious practices is to keep the individual (ego) related to the deity (Self)” (Edinger 1972).

Hillman, working from the same Jungian premise of the autonomous reality of religious image, turns this against itself. “The monotheistic model may be overtly religious, as is Jung’s self, or disguised, as in Freud’s attempt at a comprehensive system… . By turning to polytheism we leave behind the riddling conundrums built upon monotheism — either religion or psychology, either one or many” (Hillman 1975). For Hillman, the Renaissance and the Greeks had anima, psyche, myths and images, and they had Gods; the Greeks had no theology — not even a word for religion. The depth of soul is its plurality, not its unity. To compress the religious function into a single archetype of wholeness is, on Hillman’s reading, to repeat the monotheistic move that drove the gods underground in the first place.

Miller pushes the critique further: “the secular world … deprives [the feeling function] from bearing the values of and connecting existence with archetypal reality”; the recovery of the gods and goddesses is the recovery of psychological pluralism (Miller 1974). The Lineage holds the disagreement open: Jung and Edinger anchor the religious function in the Self; Hillman and Miller dissolve the Self into its archetypal plurality. Both readings remain live in the post-Jungian field.

Sources

• carl-jung: the Self as imago Dei, the religious function tending toward wholeness (Jung 1958)
• edward-edinger: religion as the maintenance of the ego-Self axis (Edinger 1972)
• james-hillman: monotheistic ego-psychology suppresses the soul’s polytheism (Hillman 1975, 1983)
• david-l-miller: recovery of the new polytheism as recovery of psychological depth (Miller 1974)