Spiritual Questing
Embarked on a search for meaning, more and more Americans are turning to the
It came one night just as she was falling asleep, a dream of an old man all bent over, wearing shoes made out of lead. "I closed my eyes, and there he was," Nancy Sugars recalls. Other people might have paid no attention, might have pulled up the covers and settled more deeply into slumber. But to Sugars, such images are not to be ignored. They are pregnant with meaning, the key to a world of buried symbols, a path to greater understanding. The old man is not just an old man. He is Saturn, Roman "god of the seed and of the sower," an archetypal figure representing her animus or "masculine" side. The lead shoes are a message: Anchor yourself more closely to the Earth.
Nancy Sugars is not the "flaky" type. She is 71, the wife of a retired military officer, the daughter of a department-store manager. She lives in a modest bungalow in San Anselmo, Calif., and on hot days serves visitors iced tea and homemade chocolate cookies. But like an increasing number of Americans, Sugars felt there was something missing in her life, a spiritual gap that needed filling. Raised an Episcopalian, she attended services but found the church's answers unsatisfying: "I was born a questioner, and it didn't make sense to me to think of heaven and hell as literal." Conventional psychotherapy, which ignored religious concerns, seemed equally unfulfilling. What she was looking for was something that spoke to her entire being, to both her mind and her spirit. And what she found, finally, was the work of Carl Gustav Jung.
Cultural touchstone. Thirty-one years after the Swiss psychiatrist's death, Jung's theories are surging in popularity, becoming a cultural touchstone, a lens for processing experience, in some cases almost a religion. In churches, quotes from Jung's work spill from the pulpit. New Age publications sprinkle their pages liberally with Jungian buzzwords. Books on Jungian topics -- most recently, "Women Who Run With the Wolves," by Jungian analyst Clarissa Pinkola Estes -- are climbing the bestseller list. And while the men's movement urges men to reconnect with the masculine archetype of the "warrior," drawing on Jung's notion of universal symbols buried in the human psyche, feminist writers encourage women to explore the "goddess" inside them. Even Madison Avenue has discovered Jung: In a recent commercial, a beer drinker jokes that an appreciation of Budweiser's finer qualities may be stored in the "collective" unconscious. Says Chicago Jungian analyst Murray Stein: "It's a theory whose time has come."
Not all that long ago, the relevant question for many Americans was "Carl who?" Freudian theory, with its emphasis on early childhood experience and repressed sexual and aggressive drives, dominated psychiatry and penetrated deeply into popular culture. But Jung was familiar to most people only as a footnote to Freud: The fierce friendship and even fiercer break between the two men were legendary. Jungian theory, stressing psychologi gave Jungian psychology only passing mention, and scholars in other disciplines shunned him, dismissing his theories as "unscientific" and quasi-mystical. There were reports that Jung was antisemitic, that he became romantically entangled with former patients. Psychiatrists rarely bothered to read him at all. Jung was, in their view, an eccentric genius who had strayed into areas that could only be called "loosey-goosey." As one Freudian analyst scoffed, "Jungian theory? What theory?"
advertisement
