Spiritual Questing
Embarked on a search for meaning, more and more Americans are turning to the
But if Freud spoke most forcefully to Americans through the first half of the 1900s, Jung has the public's ear as the century draws to a close. Ironically, the appeal of Jungianism may hinge on the very quality that made it unacceptable to an earlier generation: a blend of psychology and spirituality that draws no firm boundary between the language of the psyche and the language of the soul. While scholars may view the two as uneasy bedfellows, some experts see in Jung's rising influence a larger popular trend, a movement that Peter Homans, professor of religion and psychological studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School, dubs "Religion-and-Psychology."
When social structures fall apart and traditional belief systems disintegrate, Homans says, people engage in "meaning-making" to restore cohesion in their lives. There is a hunger these days, a gnawing dissatisfaction with the answers provided by materialism and scientific progress, a craving for an inner life. Politicians sense it in their constituents, and grasp at words like "values." College professors detect it in students who wonder if there isn't something beyond "deconstructionism." New Age gurus see it in the hundreds who flock to them, ready to try everything from "holotropic breathing" to channeling. Increasingly, Americans are looking for solutions that speak to the spirit as well as the psyche.
No creeds. In this climate of yearning, Jungian psychology is blossoming. It offers a spiritual path for people too skeptical to embrace fundamentalism or the traditional Sunday-service view of heaven and hell. It draws those who are psychologically minded but unwilling to have their behavior explained solely in terms of childhood insecurities or frustrated drives. "What Jung provides," says Ann Ulanov, of Union Theological Seminary in New York, "is the explicit recognition of spirituality, without reducing it to psychological complexes, or trying to define it in specific creeds."
On a March afternoon in 1907, a 50-year-old Viennese Jew and the 31-year-old son of a Swiss Protestant minister met for the first time. Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung talked that day for 13 hours straight, and in the years that followed forged a friendship more intense than either man had experienced before. Freud regarded Jung as the successor who could help him carry his revolutionary theories to a wider audience. He had been waiting, Freud wrote to his disciple, "until a voice from the unknown mult complicated one, a father-son rivalry involving petty jealousies, disputes over theory and deeply injured feelings. But in part, it centered on an argument about the meaning of religious experience. To Freud, an atheist steeped in scientific rationalism, religion was merely a comforting "illusion," a sublimation of sexuality and aggression, the true forces that underlie human behavior. To Jung, on the other hand, spirituality was not a crutch but life's noblest ground. Asked once by a BBC interviewer if he believed in God, Jung replied, "I don't need to believe -- I know."
Early visions. Jung's religious quest was a deeply personal one. As a young man, he rebelled against his father's rigid theology but never questioned the existence of some higher spiritual order. Even as a child, he reported dreams and "visions" of a religious nature. "My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which might confer meaning upon the banality of life," Jung wrote in his memoirs. Like Freud, Jung considered himself a scientist, and he, too, stressed the importance of dreams and the workings of the unconscious mind. But in the end, Jung rejected both Freud's focus on sexuality and the older man's pessimistic conviction that neurosis is an inevitable part of human life. Instead, he held that in every human being -- and every society -- there is an innate drive toward "individuation" and self-awareness, an urge to connect with something larger.
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