Abstract : The article looks at Jungian psychology and its inner conflict. A sober school of thought is being undermined by a pseudo-religious aesthetizing tendency. Jung’s dependency on Swedenborg is evaluated.
Keywords : Carl Jung, Emanuel Swedenborg, Black Books, Red Book, phenomenalism, aestheticism, spiritualism.
In Jungian psychology, “the reality of the psyche” is a
catchphrase. The psychic is veridical and not illusory, because it is the
only reality we can know. This is called ‘phenomenalism,’
advocated by Jung throughout his collected works. Jung maintains a
phenomenological outlook, thinking that the only true knowledge is the
experiential. He calls this ‘empiricism’ and identifies it with
the scientific method. Actually, scientists have renounced the obsolescent
form of empiricism and today endorse ‘scientific realism.’ We
can also acquire certain knowledge about things beyond our immediate
acquaintance (cf. Winther, 2020a; 2020b).
Why must subjective experience be viewed as “real”? Because
there is really nothing else than phenomenal experience. It’s what makes up
reality (circulus in probando; circular reasoning). On the other
hand, central to the theory is that certain psychic experiences are
not veridical. For instance, one may see another person as evil.
This could be due to projection, and the subject must then realize that
it’s an illusion. This leads to the assimilation of the personal
content — the underlying cause for the
illusion — and thus the experience itself evaporates
into thin air. Although it created great animosity, it was not authentic!
Thus, it seems that theory is at cross-purposes with itself. The
philosopher of science Nicholas Maxwell argues that “[a]ny
conception of rationality which systematically leads us astray must be
defective” (2004, p. 80). He coined the term ‘rationalistic
neurosis’ and represents it as “a characteristic, influential
and damaging kind of irrationality masquerading as
rationality” (p. xi). Theory may be at cross-purposes with
itself. When misrepresentations of aims occur, then we have a neurotic
problem in the theoretical framework. It is bound to have demoralizing
consequences. Any person who digests and practices a worldview that is
rationally neurotic will acquire secondary and induced symptoms. Much of
the problems that people have today really derive from the errant ways of
thought that they have absorbed. (This would explain the relative success
of cognitive therapy. It is like deprogramming; encouraging the patient to
challenge his/her distorted and unhelpful thinking.)
When a person is at odds with himself, we say that he is neurotic. The same
can be said about theories. We should remain slightly skeptical about our
perceptions. For example, a person may perceive a certain man as nice and
friendly, unaware of the fact that he regularly beats up his family
members. As he is perceived as a good person, shall he not be
convicted, then? After all, it is a truthful experience, even though the
subject didn’t know the whole truth. Anyway, do we at any occasion
know the whole truth? It is morally highly problematic to postulate that
the content of mind has a reality of its own. It is termed the “mind
projection fallacy” — assuming that a statement
about an object describes an inherent property of the object, rather than a
personal perception.
Jung’s theory encloses the subject in a virtual reality, surrounded
on both sides by a transcendent reality that remains forever beyond our
grasp. As we can only have knowledge through inward experience, we can
never reach certainty about the outside world as such; nor the divine
world. The “epistemological barrier” prevents us from acquiring
any certain knowledge. This extract from a letter to Pastor Damour is
characteristic for his thinking:
Barth’s objection to the psychologizing of religious experiences, which I see you also have defended, is a totally unjustified prejudice. Does Barth or anyone else know what the unconscious is, or does Barth want to prove to us perhaps that religious experience, as we know it, comes from some other source than the psyche? The theological authorities I appeal to in this connection are Tertullian and Meister Eckhart, not to mention my own experience, which has given me more insight into the nature of the human psyche than the editorial pulpit of Herr Barth. This is precisely why the theologians, on their own admission, don’t know how to cope with the psyche of the sick. The human psyche and the psychic background are boundlessly underestimated, as though God spoke to man exclusively through the radio, the newspapers, or through sermons. God has never spoken to man except in and through the psyche, and the psyche understands it and we experience it as something psychic. Anyone who calls that psychologism is denying the eye that beholds the sun. (Jung, 1973, p. 98)
What Karl Barth protested against was Jung’s psychologization of
the divine. Jung says that, to him, “the unconscious is God.”
It means that every manifestation of the unconscious, even an impetus to
murder, could be seen as a manifestation of God, so much as
“murderousness” is part of God’s dark side (cf. Jung,
Answer to Job, CW 11). It is an heretical delusion, predicated on
his phenomenalism. Neither theology nor science reckons with an
epistemological barrier. Scientists continue to investigate the material
world, and they learn new truths all the time. Through theory and
experiment they encroach upon reality. Scientists never encounter a
barrier! Jung, however, saw theory as conjectural and inconclusive. He was
wrong, because theory can be proven correct. Of course, Barth was well
aware that God can manifest in the psyche. In the bible, God’s voice
is heard in dreams. What he reacts against is the reduction of the divine
to psychic phenomena. It is indeed psychologization, as the phenomenon
overwhelmingly takes precedence.
Jung’s theory amounts to a definitive alienation of God. A substitute
psychic god takes his place as “my psychic experience.” For all
practical purposes, God can never be anything else than a content of
“my” mind. Comparatively, physicists do not think of material
phenomena as “my experience”; nor do theologians reduce God to
“my experience.” The “enclosement” of the subject
is arguably a sign of a neurotic theory, as there is really no such thing
as ‘objectivity’ anymore. Among Jungians there is a certain
subjective religious feeling for the “truths” that Jung has
uncovered (ignoring that he viewed them as his “personal myth”).
For an example of this attitude, listen to the recent podcast on This
Jungian Life, where three Jungians discuss with Sonu Shamdasani
around the Black Books (2020). The unsound veneration of the Black Books
and the Red Book was easy to foresee, in that there is not much else for a
Jungian to hold to. God will remain forever totally unknown. Theory,
including theology, is merely provisional conjecture. Jung’s
experiences, however, are the real thing! It foments aesthetizing
tendencies among Jungians. David Tacey says:
In the wave of interest generated by The Red Book, advocates have forgotten that Jung denounced this work as belonging to his ‘aestheticising’ phase: ‘I gave up this aestheticising tendency in good time, in favour of a rigorous process of understanding’ (Jung, MDR, p. 213). This aspect of Jung’s experience is not featured in the cult of The Red Book, because its promoters are more interested in aesthetics than understanding. (Tacey, 2014)
In Jungian psychology, sound theory coexists with unsound
pseudo-religious aesthetic phenomenalism, and the latter is getting the
upper hand. How did it come to this? Evidence suggests that Jung’s
revelations of the unconscious weren’t quite authentic. They really
sprang from his reading of Swedenborg. This brought theoretical
complications. The renowned spirit-seer insists that the mind is always in
the world of spirits, where its abstract content takes concrete appearance.
To the unearthly eyes of the spirits God appears as a sun against a blue
heaven. All mental content, and every thought, is a reality in itself. It
is psychic realism taken to the extremes. Jung’s psychic realism was
further aggravated by his infatuation with subjectivistic philosophy;
Kantianism and German Idealism.
Jung read seven volumes of Swedenborg during his student years. During his
so-called crisis, after his break with Freud, he resumed his study of
Swedenborg. This was also when he made the preparatory work for the Red
Book. If we compare the two thinkers, it becomes evident that
Emanuel Swedenborg must be designated as Jung’s spiritual
father. It is therefore surprising that Sonu Shamdasani (2003) never
mentions him. Shamdasani’s work is about Jung’s intellectual
influences, and Jung affirms that he studied Swedenborg intently during two
periods in his life. So why doesn’t Shamdasani think him worthy of
mention? Presumably, he wanted to associate Jung only with
“respectable” thinkers, because Jung has this reputation of
being a spiritualist, not a scientist proper. Jung, in the Red Book,
recounts how his system was revealed to him. In fact, he already knew this
system, mostly through Swedenborg. The viable structure in his theory
derives from him. To the Swedenborgian framework he added a hotchpotch of
conscious sources, such as Kantianism, Neoplatonism, German
Idealism, mythology, alchemy, etc. It is not true that Jung’s
psychology came to him from the unconscious in a revelatory manner. It is not
primarily an empirical system.
Jung’s archetypes approximate Swedenborg’s notion of
‘spirits’ and ‘angels.’ They inhabit the
‘inward heaven’ (the ‘world of spirits’) and the
‘innermost heaven,’ respectively. Swedenborg says that
“the world of spirits occupies the inward bodily regions” (SE
n. 1610). This is the earliest definition of the unconscious. Jung
appropriates Swedenborg’s concept of the ‘anima.’ It is
through the anima that we communicate with heaven. The ‘shadow’
mirrors Swedenborg’s ‘animus’ (the lower and instinctual
man). Swedenborg asserts that male and female psychology are mirror images,
that is, the female is like the male on the inside and vice versa. This is
equal to Jung’s unconscious anima-animus relation.
In Swedenborg, the spiritual pilgrim ascends through degrees, corresponding
to Jung’s stages of individuation. This is achieved through
“illumination from within,” corresponding to conscious
realization in Jung. The movement toward wholeness means an ascent through
the degrees by way of ‘conjunction,’ which is the union of the
more elevated and spiritual degree with the outer or lower degree. Thus,
conjunction is integration. The progress leads to an approximation with the
Grand Man (Homo Maximus). It is mirrored in Jung’s concept of the
Self. Swedenborg says that “[t]he Grand Man consists in heaven in its
entirety, which in general is a likeness and image of the Lord” (AC
n. 3883). Heaven is the innermost man, and Jung has appropriated this
concept as “Christ as a symbol of the Self.”
Swedenborg rejects asceticism and advocates a full-fledged life. He argues
for a wholeness both in the heavenly and worldly sense. This is exactly the
Jungian sense of wholeness. Swedenborg’s concept of
‘correspondences’ implies that all phenomena have transparent
spiritual meaning. It is reminiscent of Jung’s notion of
synchronicity. According to Swedenborg, the ‘human proprium’ is
constantly undergoing modification by the ‘heavenly proprium,’
which is also present in our soul. The human proprium tends toward
self-gratification and self-righteousness, but is being repaired by the
heavenly proprium. This picture corresponds more or less to the relation
between ego and Self in Jungian psychology.
Swedenborg conceptualizes ‘spirit-seeing’ as a technique of
conjuring “symbolic mental images of the angels of the inward
heaven” (SE n. 2186). In order to do this in a waking state, he
drank copious amounts of coffee. I think it’s essentially a
“left hemisphere exercise” that amounts to an allegorical
representation of conscious thoughts. Jung transliterates the technique as
‘active imagination.’
Jung wrote the Black Books while studying Swedenborg. Thus, it is hard to
believe that he managed to convince himself that his system was
“empirical,” inspired by the collective unconscious. In fact,
it is an adaptation of Swedenborg’s system. It is quite original, as
it deviates from Neoplatonism and Christian theology in important respects.
Nevertheless, it must be categorized as a form of Christian Neoplatonism.
Did Jung “forget” that he had appropriated these ideas, and
instead let them come back to himself through self-fabricated images? Maybe
he managed to fool himself. Anyway, it is not a bad system; but it has a
conscious source. In the Red Book, Jung seems to translate his conscious
thoughts into mystical language:
Then turn to the dead / listen to their lament and accept them with love. Be not their blind spokesman /[Image 105]/ there are prophets who in the end have stoned themselves. But we seek salvation and hence we need to revere what has become and to accept the dead, who have fluttered through the air and lived like bats under our roofs since time immemorial. The new will be built on the old and the meaning of what has become will become manifold. Your poverty in what has become you will thus deliver into the wealth of the future. (The Red Book, cap. xv.)
The spirits of the dead are the archetypes of the unconscious. The conscious
personality mustn’t lose control: “Be not their blind
spokesman.” It adheres to Swedenborg’s view; he saw it as his
mission to educate the spirits of the dead. I contend that the text is not
inspired by the unconscious. It is an aesthetical version of Jungian
psychology; mostly an allegorical version of his conscious thought.
It’s like Jung tries to emulate Swedenborg’s spirit-seeing.
Swedenborg’s visions seem also to have been, to a large degree,
allegorical translations of his own consciousness. Before he abandoned
himself to spirit-seeing, he was a scientist of repute. It’s good
that Jung didn’t follow in his footsteps, but decided to leave behind
his aestheticizing phase, as it is merely cheating. It’s as if the
brain’s left hemisphere attempts to create its own universe, as
formulated by abstract reason. To allegorize one’s own thoughts, as
if it were a religious message, is like biting one’s own tail. So why
didn’t Jung prevent the publication of the Red Book? Perhaps he
wanted to preserve the myth that his work was inspired by the unconscious,
and the Red Book provided evidence.
People with schizophrenia typically hear voices. Unfortunately, the voices
seldom have anything valuable to say. It’s due to a left hemisphere
short circuit. They only hear their own shattered thoughts. Swedenborg
wasn’t a schizophrenic; but he managed to short-circuit himself so
that he experienced his previously formulated worldview. It came not in
shattered form, but was sound and coherent. Sometimes he lectures spirits
(among others, Aristotle!) about his own conscious system. Of course, this
is not how psychology conceives of the encounter with the unconscious.
It’s the reverse — we encounter something we
didn’t know. (This does not preclude, however, that the unconscious
sometimes penetrates into his visions.) Martin Lamm says:
Thus, Swedenborg’s teaching is not some kind of conglomerate of his hallucinations, as the psychiatrists that have studied him love to think. Rather should we say that his visions and revelations, from the crisis period of the dream diary, and all the way to his final years, are only objectified manifestations of his own world of ideas, an unconscious continuation in dream and hallucination of his own conscious speculation. […] Hence Swedenborg’s spirit teaching is not a disorderly reverie that would exempt the researcher from a serious treatment of his theology. It is a fully systematic formulation of his psychological theories in Oeconomia. (Lamm, 1987, pp. 190-197, my transl.)
Spiritualists have this capacity, without being schizophrenic, of
observing their own thoughts and wishes as from a vantage point. Swedenborg
was a highly moral and highly intelligent person, and therefore his
spiritual experiences are valuable, as such. But he didn’t encounter
authentic spirits. Nor did Jung encounter authentic archetypes. A major
difference between them is that, unlike Jung, Swedenborg had the capacity
of entering a spiritualistic trance state. This was witnessed on occasion
by some of his contemporaries. The dangers with such persons are that they
can throw out the wisdom collected throughout the millennia by claiming
divine inspiration. In Swedenborg’s case, his revelations led to the
establishment of The New Church. He never actively pursued this himself;
but since he had rejected certain essential doctrines of Christianity, it
was a foregone conclusion.
Similarly, Jung paints himself as a prophet who has had revelations from
the “unconscious God.” It’s not the modest kind of
revelation which saints have, such as seeing the Virgin Mary. Rather, he
thinks of it as a new world picture, a new view of man. It shall supersede
the Christian worldview. For instance, he rejects the doctrine of
privatio boni. It implies that we will go back to viewing evil as a
tangible spiritual force. Fr. Victor White characterized
Jung’s position as “quasi-Manichaean dualism.” It is not
merely silly, it is heresy.
In a Christian understanding, God ruins a person’s worldly life, and
cuts off his worldly attachments, in order to bring him nearer to God. The
Swiss national saint, Nicholas of Flüe, is a case in point. Jung,
however, views subversion of worldly life, centered as it is around our
ego, as an expression of God’s evil side. He defines the process of
individuation as the movement toward wholeness in life, not as a life
diminished. Still, there are many examples where peoples’ lives are
ruined, and the wholeness which they had built is shattered. Arguably, his
Answer to Job represents the culmination of rationalistic neurosis,
arising from inherent contradictions in theory. Job had done everything
right, and he had manifested a wholeness in his life, precisely according
to the Jungian ideal. So, why did God destroy it? Jung finds no other
explanation than that God did this out of malice, because he is both good
and evil. He is ambivalent, on account of general unconsciousness and moral
deficiency. It was his evil side which destroyed Job’s life, and this
immoral action represents a step toward higher consciousness on part of the
Godhead.
This is a very controversial interpretation — a modern
form of Manichaeism. One could understand things differently. Job had been
building a Tower of Babel of a kind. It served to reach up to God (the
Self) and to manifest God’s wholeness on earth. But God tore down his
tower. A similar thing happened with Nicholas of Flüe. He had
come some way toward the ideal of wholeness, but was reduced to simple
circumstances. This is the opposite of the completeness of life. According
to a commonplace Jungian reading, refusal to listen to the Self and the
call to achieve wholeness brings consequences. The Self, in an act of
revenge, punishes the subject by destroying his wholeness altogether. But
if he was already working toward wholeness, i.e., to make his life
complete, in what sense did he refuse to follow the Self’s call to
wholeness?
We all want to build a little Tower of Babel in our lives, as a substitute
for God. But whatever we achieve in the earthly realm, it is really only
“straw.” As Ecclesiastes says: “Everything is meaningless
and a chasing after the wind.” That’s why God overthrows our
tower. He wants us to find God; the only true meaning there is. God ruins a
person’s life for the purpose of removing all his attachments in
life, so that he can find God. Thus, from the empirical evidence we can see
that the Self wants personality to become simple, but not complete and
multifaceted. The latter only entails that the ego continues on its worldly
building project. From a divine perspective, the person wastes his/her life
on trifles. The Self does not always (at least with some persons and in
some phases of life) incite a movement toward completeness. It does just
the opposite! Theory cannot really explain it, and that’s why Jung
views the ruination of life as the evil will of God. The building project
must continue after we have taken root in life, but now through the
incessant integration of archetypes and yet more conscious insights.
Arguably, this is just a game; a kind of pseudo-religious ritual. Jung
writes:
But the way is my own self, my own life founded upon myself. The God wants my life. He wants to go with me, sit at the table with me, work with me. Above all he wants to be ever-present. But I’m ashamed of my God. I don’t want to be divine but reasonable. The divine appears to me as irrational craziness. I hate it as an absurd disturbance of my meaningful human activity. It seems an unbecoming sickness which has stolen into the regular course of my life. Yes, I even find the divine superfluous. (The Red Book, cap. xiii)
He found it hard to accept that what he was doing was straw. Instead he
makes an obverse interpretation. He thinks that his activity is meaningful;
but the will of God is meaningless and destructive. He refused to follow
the Christian God’s call to “abandonment to divine
providence.” And then he wrote Answer to Job, his horrible
disavowal of the Christian God.
No one comes to the Father except through the Son. The reason why certain
people with spiritualistic talent are so preposterous, believing they can
sidestep the Son and have grand revelations of a new world order, is
because they really think they are talking with God. In fact, they are only
talking with themselves. Such people can have a destructive impact, if
wisdom acquired through history is thrown out. Swedenborg objects to
theologia verbalis and embraces theologia realis (cf. Lamm,
1987, p. 7). We see exactly the same attitude in Jung.
Beginning in 1744, Swedenborg was beset by a religious crisis. Judging from
his Dream Diary, many experiences were authentic manifestations of
the unconscious. This is evident from the fact that they controverted his
conscious standpoint. Beset by agony and doubt he appears as a
true Christian mystic. As our personal will is an obstruction to salvation,
the only path forward is self-effacement — in a way to
abandon the ego and rely on God’s grace. It contrasts starkly with his
later theological period. He argues then, like he did before the religious
reversal, that we must with our own powers contribute to the salvational
work, especially through resolved reformation of our character. From then
on his spiritual experiences would seldom, if ever, contradict his
conscious standpoint (cf. Lamm, 1987, pp. 140-41).
Jung never went through a crisis as radical as Swedenborg’s. There
was never an “invasion of the unconscious,” considering that his conscious
values were never contradicted. It has often been portrayed as an episode
of madness, even though the evidence points to the contrary. During this
time, he made important theoretical work that required conscious focus and
directed thought. He continued to receive patients, five to seven
consultations per day, and he did military service as a commandant. This
does not bespeak a man who has fallen out of order (cf. Schaller, 2019).
His use of active imagination has been mythologized as a “descent
into the unconscious.” It merely consisted of him composing the Black
Books during evenings. Active imagination could be seen as a ritual means
of relating to the unconscious, corresponding to Swedenborg’s
spirit-seeing. It does not bring forth the unconscious to any significant
extent.
Jung’s dreams are vastly more interesting, since in dreams the
unconscious truly comes to expression. A prime example is the one where his
father, the parson, lectures him on biblical matters, and he felt like an
“idiot” (Jung, 1989, pp. 217-20). In many respects this
dream was a slap in the face.
Active imagination is preferably seen as a wholesome sacrifice of restless
ego energy. It is helpful to hold back for a while and
pen down one’s vague intuitions. It appeases an ego that is always
“chasing after the wind.” It serves to temper ambition and tone
down our worldly attachments. But the gateway to
the unconscious is not unbarred; the archetypal
unconscious is not conjured.
Insofar as active imagination can bring quietude and peace, it’s an
appropriate technique. Swedenborg warns, however, that spirit-seeing may
lead to madness, by the “deception of hell” (cf. Lamm, 1987,
p. 142). Jung takes the same view about active imagination. In truth,
active imagination is safe. The activity does not open the
gateways to heaven and hell.
Nor should hypnagogic imagery be understood as
revelations of the unconscious. If the subject thinks about elephants all
day long, he is likely to see a hypnagogic image of an elephant. When
consciousness is relaxed, the content of mind translates into an image. It
shall not be perceived as a vision of the Indian god Ganesha. In like manner, if
the subject is expecting an invasion of the unconscious, he may see a
hypnagogic image of a flood.
Historians of psychology have clearly underestimated Swedenborg’s
influence. It’s like Jung tries to bury this fact in the production
of the Black Books and the Red Book. He claims that everything which he
produced after this period of nekyia (necromancy) was merely an
elaboration of what had been revealed to him. In fact, it consists mostly
of a reworking in modern terms of Swedenborg’s theology and
psychology. Perhaps Jung was gifted with this Swedenborgian talent for
“automatic allegorization” of conscious concepts. I gather that
the spiritualistic talent ran in his family.
The connection between Swedenborg and Jung should really be investigated by
an expert. But no Jungian analyst would want to discredit Jung’s own
myth and lose his/her own credibility by revealing that Jungian psychology
is really an outgrowth of Swedenborgianism. So I wrote something about it,
in these two articles: ‘Jung and Swedenborg: Modern
Neoplatonists’ (2013) and ‘Critique of Individuation’
(2014). There is also an article of mine in German, published in Offene
Tore, 1/19, Swedenborg Verlag, Zürich.
© Mats Winther, 2020.
References
Bergquist, L. (2001). Swedenborg’s Dream Diary. Swedenborg
Foundation Publishers.
Jung, C. G. (1969). Psychology and Religion: West and East.
Princeton/Bollingen. (CW 11)
--------- (1989). Memories, Dreams,
Reflections. Vintage.
--------- (2012) (Shamdasani, ed.). The Red
Book (Liber Novus). A Reader’s Edition. W. W. Norton &
Company.
Jung, C. G. & Adler, G. (ed.). (1973). Letters,
Vol. 1: 1906-1950. Princeton University Press.
Lamm, M. (1987). Swedenborg: En studie över hans utveckling till
mystiker och andeskådare. Hammarström & Åberg. (1915)
Marchiano, L. et al. (2020). ‘Visionary Imagination:
Jung’s Private Journals’. (Episode 139, Nov 26 2020). This
Jungian Life. (here)
Maxwell, N. (2004). Is Science Neurotic?. Imperial College Press.
Schaller, Q. (2019). ‘Jung’s Alleged Madness: From
Mythopoeia to Mythologization’. Phanês (Vol. 2, 2019,
pp. 1-27). (here)
Shamdasani, S. (2003). Jung and the Making of Modern
Psychology – The Dream of a Science. Cambridge Univ. Press.
Swedenborg, E. (1749-56). Arcana Coelestia (Secrets of Heaven).
--------- (1747-65). Spiritual Experiences
(Spiritual Diary).
Tacey, D. (2014). ‘James Hillman: The unmaking of a
psychologist. Part one: his legacy’. Journal of Analytical
Psychology. Volume 59, Issue 4, pp. 467-85.
Winther, M. (2014). ‘Critique of Individuation’. (here)
--------- (2013). ‘Jung and Swedenborg:
Modern Neoplatonists’. (here)
--------- (2020a). ‘Jung’s
metaphysic and epistemology: Platonism or Phenomenology?’. (here)
--------- (2020b). ‘Carl Jung,
privatio boni, and the return of Manichaeism’. (here)
See also:
Winther, M. (2020). ‘An Assessment of the Theology of Carl Gustav Jung’. (here)
