Buddhist Romanticism

dreams so as to help the patient integrate the conscious and unconscious
factors of his or her psyche in a way that fostered the ongoing pursuit of
inner unification and finding meaning in life: what Jung termed the
“becoming of the self or the “becoming of the soul.”
Jung insisted that he had adopted this strategy in dream analysis
because it worked. This was all that his professional duties required.
However, he also confessed to indulging in what he called his “scientific
hobby”: “my desire to know why it is that the dream works.” 12 In other
words, he wanted to develop hypotheses about the nature of the mind and
of mental healing that would explain both why his methods of analysis
worked and why dreams seemed to have a purpose and efficacy in curing
the illnesses of the mind.
In doing so, he not only borrowed ideas from James and Otto but also
adopted many other Romantic ideas—and in particular, Romantic ideas
about religion—that both of them had put aside. In this way, Jung came to
play an even larger role than either James or Otto in transmitting Romantic
religion to the 20th and 21st centuries.
Jung’s embrace of Romantic assumptions led his detractors to accuse
him of being mystical and unscientific, but, like the Romantics themselves,
he insisted that the scientific method had forced him to adopt these
assumptions as hypotheses. His two main reasons for splitting with Freud,
he said, were empirical: (1) In the course of analyzing his patients’ dreams,
he encountered many dream images that Freud’s theories could not account
for. In particular, he was struck by images that were obviously religious in
import, containing symbols that could not be explained by the individual’s
neuroses or by anything at all in the individual’s personal history. The fact
that these images had an import—that they seemed to be delivering a
message, and that the message was concerned with far more than healing
the individual’s neuroses—led to Jung’s second reason for splitting with
Freud. (2) He saw that, although Freud’s methods were helpful in treating
specific neuroses, they did not provide a complete cure for the patient’s
deeper spiritual malaise, and if they were applied to the dreams that Jung
and his patients found most meaningful, they would actually do more harm
than good.
In Jung’s own terms, the most fundamental difference between his
approach and Freud’s was that Freud contented himself with asking “why”
a particular dream occurred—i.e., what pre-existing factor in the patient’s
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