Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey - Inner City Books

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The Religious Attitude and Soul-Making
Among all my patients in the second half of life—that is to say, over
thirty-five—there has not been one whose problem in the last resort
was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. 86
There are those who misunderstand Jungian psychology to be a religion,
and for that reason either worship it as a fount of knowledge
or decry it as the devil’s own work. Jung himself denied that his
school of analytical psychology was a religious movement:
I am speaking just as a philosopher. People sometimes call me a religious
leader. I am not that. I have no messages, no mission. I attempt
only to understand. We are philosophers in the old sense of
the word, lovers of wisdom. That avoids the sometimes questionable
company of those who offer a religion. 87
On the other hand, Jung did believe that the human longing for
consciousness is essentially a religious activity. For instance, in an
essay identifying five prominent instincts—creativity, reflection,
activity, sexuality and hunger—he included the religious urge as a
subset of reflection. 88
Jung, himself a Swiss Protestant pastor’s son who decried his
father’s mindless faith, 89 stressed that when he spoke of religion, or
“the religious urge,” he was not referring to belief in a particular
creed or membership of a church, but rather to a certain attitude of
mind. He described this attitude in terms of the Latin word religio,
from relegere, meaning a careful consideration and observation of
irrational factors historically conceived as spirits, demons, gods,
86 “Psychotherapists or the Clergy,” Psychology and Religion, CW 11, par. 509.
87 C.G. Jung Speaking, p. 98.
88 “Psychological Factors in Human Behaviour,” The Structure and Dynamics of
the Psyche, CW 8, pars. 235ff.
89 See Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp. 92ff.
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