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Psychology and Religion: West and East
Psychology and Religion: West and East
Volume 11 of the Collected Works. The volume gathers Jung’s mature writings on religion, opening with the 1937 Terry Lectures (delivered at Yale and published the next year) and including Psychology and Alchemy’s sister-text A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity, the Transformation Symbolism in the Mass, Answer to Job, and the foreword to the I Ching, alongside the eastern essays on The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, Yoga and the West, and Zen Buddhism.
The Terry Lectures contain Jung’s most explicit definition of religion as the careful and scrupulous observation of what Rudolf Otto aptly termed the numinosum (Jung 1958, par. 6) and the methodological declaration that grounds the entire psychology-of-religion project: “This standpoint is exclusively phenomenological … concerned with occurrences, events, experiences — in a word, with facts. Its truth is a fact and not a judgment” (Jung 1958, par. 4). Jung writes as the psychologist of homo religiosus — refusing both the apologist’s claim that religion is metaphysically true and the reductionist’s claim that it is merely subjective. The unconscious produces religious symbols as facts; their psychological reality is what the volume documents.
Subsequent essays on the Trinity and the Mass extend the same method into Christian dogma, reading the dogmas as elaborated archetypal symbols whose truth is the truth of the psyche they articulate. Answer to Job, the volume’s most controversial inclusion, presses the same logic to its limit: the imago Dei itself develops in the encounter with humanity. Together with Aion, this is Jung’s most sustained treatment of the religious function as the structural core of the psyche.