Spiritual Questing
Embarked on a search for meaning, more and more Americans are turning to the
Indeed, for some devotees, Jung's work has replaced organized religion altogether. Analyst Edward Edinger, for example, places Jung among history's greatest religious figures. And in a paper entitled "With Jungian Psychology, Do We Need Religion?" psychologist Kendra Smith reports that a woman she knows "claims Jungian psychology as her spiritual path and dream analysis as her spiritual discipline."
Not everyone is celebrating the current Jungian vogue, to be sure. While Jung's work is making inroads into academic circles once hostile to his ideas, many experts remain critical of a theory that mixes discussions of the soul, alchemy and Jesus Christ into treatises on neurosis. "Psychology is supposed to be scientific, and in the final analysis all religion tops out with the supernatural," protests psychologist Albert Ellis, president of the Institute for Rational-Emotive Therapy in New York City. Even admirers of Jung's work find his explanations of the link between psyche and spirit sometimes fuzzy and inconsistent. Says Richard Smoley, editor of the San Francisco-based journal Gnosis: "There is something fundamentally problematical about mixing the two."
Jungian analysts, hypersensitive to the psychiatrist's reputati reflected in a late-20th-century mirror. A typical Jungian case history moves quickly from a discussion of psychological symptoms to analyses involving Greek gods, wise old men, spirit guides and witches. Viewed in its most positive sense, the new interest in Jung represents an effort to forge connections in an increasingly fragmented world, its myths and symbols creating what Doniger terms "an invisible community." Jung's theory, says British analyst Andrew Samuels, is a "mongrel" psychology, mixing myths and symbols of disparate cultures, yet linking all humanity through the collective unconscious. It speaks, he says, to a question on many people's minds in the 1990s: "To what extent am I supremely myself, and to what extent do I share an identity with others?"
advertisement
