CG JUNG - Countryside Anarchist

APPENDIX 2
“yoga path.” She was a practicing Catholic. Catholics have a stillborn unconscious,
because the church has already entirely formed, regulated,
and squeezed the nature of the unconscious. There is early evidence for
this. Archbishop Athanasius of Alexandria, 1 for example, in his biography
of St. Antonius, gives his monks instructions about what from the
unconscious is good and bad. He says that the devils can also speak
“words of truth” and that they can talk about things that are true. But, he
states,
It would be a disgrace for us, if those who revolted against God
should become our teachers. Let us arm ourselves with the armour
of justice and let us put on the helmet of redemption, and at the
time of battle let us shoot mental arrows from a faithful mind. Because
the devils are nothing, and even if they were something, their
strength would comprise nothing which could resist the might of
the cross. 2
Also, the religious exercises of Ignatius of Loyola 3 are Christian counterparts
to the Indian meditations or to our fantasies from the unconscious.
The religious exercises are meditations according to church instruction;
their purpose is the rehearsal of the symbols of faith. By it the
vanishing of all thoughts and fantasies that are dogmatically unacceptable
is provoked.
By means of such an attitude a complete paralysis developed in my
patient—everything was already there on the outside, and hence had become
invisible inside. I tried for six years to analyze her back into the
church, so to speak, until she confessed what she would not have confessed
to a confessor: that she believed neither in God nor in the pope
but that nonetheless she would die in the fold of the church. Despite her
age (she was fifty-five years old at that time), it made her suffer that everything
in her was dead and dark, for after all she was still alive, and this life
was asserting its rights. I was in a fix, because I saw that the living spirit
wanted to get its way in spite of everything, and then came the original
experience.
1 [Note to the 1933 edition: See Jung, Psychologische Typen, 2d ed., 78ff.] (I.e., CW, vol. 6,
§§82ff.)
2 In CW, vol. 6, §82, this passage is cited from “Life of St. Anthony,” in The Paradise or
Garden of the Holy Fathers, compiled by Athanasius, archbishop of Alexandria, et al., translated
by E.A.W. Budge (London, 1904), 24ff. The passage here has been directly rendered
from the German.
3 In 1939–40 Jung devoted his Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule seminars to a
commentary on the spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, which followed from his commentary
on Eastern texts. See Modern Psychology 4.
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