Confessions

Name: Confessions
Author: Augustine

Confessions is a work by Augustine (400).

Core claims

The Confessions is not an autobiography addressed to God but the West’s first sustained phenomenology of psychic depth, establishing memoria as a domain that exceeds the human subject and anticipates by fifteen centuries the archetypal unconscious theorized by Jung and Hillman.
Augustine’s conversion in the Milan garden functions less as a theological event than as a clinical abreaction — the catastrophic breakthrough of an inferior feeling function that had been held captive in the mother-complex, as von Franz precisely diagnoses — making the Confessions a prototype for every subsequent depth-psychological account of transformation through psychic crisis.
The text’s radical epistemological claim — “there is something of man, which neither the spirit of man that is in him, itself knoweth” — constitutes a pre-Freudian discovery of the structural unconscious, grounding the entire Western tradition of depth psychology not in Enlightenment science but in late-antique devotional practice.

How does Hillman’s claim in Re-Visioning Psychology that Petrarch’s Mont Ventoux experience reveals “the independent reality of soul” depend on — and ultimately diverge from — Augustine’s own understanding of memoria in Confessions Book X?
Von Franz diagnoses Augustine as an introverted thinking type whose inferior feeling broke through in the garden conversion: how does this typological reading compare with Jung’s analysis of Tertullian and Origen in Psychological Types, and what does it reveal about the psychology of religious founders more broadly?
Augustine insists that “there is something of man, which neither the spirit of man that is in him, itself knoweth” — how does this structural unknowability relate to Jung’s concept of the Self as described in Aion, and does Augustine’s theological framing protect against the inflation Jung warns accompanies ego-Self identification?