Buddhist Romanticism

patient’s individuation: the on-going process by which one integrates one’s
conscious and unconscious needs, providing both an inner sense of unity
and an outer sense of purpose and meaning in life that is purely one’s own.
In other words, although one should learn how to listen to the unconscious,
one should not identify with the impersonal forces it contains, for that
would result in the psychic illness Jung termed inflation: the assumption
that one was actually identical with the divine forces welling up from the
unconscious. Instead, one should synthesize or actualize the wholeness of
one’s identity as an individual leading a purposeful life on the human
plane. Psychological health should aim, not at a transcendent dimension,
but at a sense of meaning that is wholly immanent: i.e., concerned with
finding happiness in this world and not worrying about transcendent
dimensions.
Jung saw the role of psychotherapy in this process as picking up and
moving forward with the work that religions had done in the past. All
religions, he said, were essentially “systems of healing for psychic illness.”
Like James and Otto before him, Jung saw that human religions had to
evolve over time in order to better serve this function as humanity evolved.
Unlike James and Otto, however—and here he was harking back to the
early Romantics—he did not see Protestant Christianity as the ultimate
endpoint of how far this evolution could go.
There were two main reasons for this. The first had to do specifically
with Protestantism. In shedding the rich body of symbolism that had
developed within the Catholic Church, the Protestant movement had
deprived its followers of a clear symbolic vocabulary for understanding the
messages of the unconscious. This lack of symbolic vocabulary had both
benefits and drawbacks. On the one hand, it allowed Protestants to have
more direct confrontations with immediate religious experience. On the
other, it left them defenseless and clueless as to how to read and integrate
the messages contained within those confrontations.
To understand the spontaneous images and symbols that such people
experienced in their dreams and fantasies, Jung recommended that
psychotherapists become knowledgeable in the vocabulary of symbols
developed in the religions of the past. In Jung’s own case, this meant
studying not only Catholic symbolism, but also the symbolism of a wide
range of heterodox and non-Western traditions, including alchemy,
astrology, Egyptian religion, Gnosticism, the I-Ching, and Tibetan tantrism.
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