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?"
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.
Jung found confirmation of his theories in his patients' dreams, in the myths, fairy tales and folklore of diverse cultures, in Eastern religion and Christian icons. Where Freud saw the "unconscious" as the domain of childhood ideas and wishes repressed by the conscious mind, Jung found this concept too limiting. Deeper than Freud's "personal" unconscious, Jung argued, lay the "collective" unconscious, the repository for "archetypes" or universal images and modes of perceiving the world that could not be explained in terms of a single person's life. Archetypes, Jung held, were rooted in instinct, and emerged in dreams, in the age-old stories of gods and warriors, in tales of giants and evil stepmothers. They often represented the hidden or "shadow" side of human nature, both negative and positive. "We can never legitimately cut loose from our archetypal foundations," he wrote, "unless we are prepared to pay the price of a neurosis, any more than we can rid ourselves of our body and its organs without committing suicide."
Yet by investigating and interpreting the archetypal images buried deep in the psyche, Jung maintained, an individual or a culture might grow and become whole. A man, for example, could explore the anima archetype, developing the latent, feminine side of his nature; a society might become aware of the concealed, destructive images that influence its ebb and flow. And through an understanding of the collective unconscious, the psychiatrist believed, lay the path toward inner "transforma toward women, his psychological "reductionism," his focus on early parenting. Ultimately, Freud's answers were too cynical for many Americans to accept.
Transcendental roots. By contrast, Jung's vision presents less of a challenge to the way Americans see themselves, making room for the life of the "spirit" unfettered by more iconoclastic analysis. Jung appeals, as Jungian analyst and men's movement leader James Hillman puts it, "to our Emersonian roots." Where Freud pulled back the curtains on what he regarded as self-deception in religious life, Jung went to work with an embroidery needle, distrusting any theory that robbed human beings of something transcendent in which to believe. As a result, Jungian psychology has become, for many people, a way to reclaim and enrich their religious upbringing. Says one Jungian analyst: "I left the church because it was dead and boring. Now I go back and appreciate services in a way I never could before."
Perhaps sensing this, a growing number of Christian clergy are incorporating Jungian ideas into their work with parishioners. Jungian training institutes count among their students both Episcopal and Catholic priests and ministers from a variety of Protestant denominations. Centerpoint, a network of study groups once affiliated with the Episcopal Church but now free-standing, has an estimated 15,000 members worldwide. Jung's theories are even finding their way into sermons and pastoral counseling programs. "It fits so much better than a Freudian approach, because Freud was an atheist," says the Rev. Philip Blake of the Jesuit Retreat House of Los Altos, Calif. "I live my life according to the Gospel message, not according to Carl Jung. But it's a help to me."
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?"
This story appears in the December 7, 1992 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.