c.g jung

A bit more than a year into this podcast series, it felt like a good time to stop and reflect more deeply on Jung’s wrestle with Christianity, and how it is still relevant for us today. For this reflection, I invited back three Jungian scholars with whom I had spoken individually on previous episodes. Our discussion together was an opening both of insights and questions:

* When we speak of dreaming the Christian myth forward, as Jung did, whose dream do we mean? Who's doing the dreaming?

* Is Jung’s psychological project an attempt to transcend or reform Christianity?

* What might Jung's psychologizing of Christian tradition mean for those within and outside it?

 
* In Jungian discourse, where is the body of Christ? Where are the poor?

About the participants:

Murray Stein is a renowned Jungian psychoanalyst and the author of important books such as Jung's Treatment of Christianity and Map of the Soul.

Ann Conrad Lammers is coeditor of The Jung–White Letters, The Jung–Kirsch Letters, as well as editor and co-translator of Erich Neumann’s two-volume work The Roots of Jewish Consciousness.

Paul Bishop is a renowned British scholar who has spent the last twenty-five years researching and writing on the foundational relationship between C.G. Jung and Friedrich Nietzsche and Johann Wolfgang Goethe.

Moderating the discussion is Jakob Lusensky, a Jungian psychoanalyst with a private practice in Berlin. He is the host of the podcast and a founder of the non-profit organization Center of the Cross, working within the intersection of psychology and religion with the mission of individual and social transformation.

A letter from C.G Jung To Count Hermann von Keyserling,

Küsnacht, 2 January 1928

"Dear Count,

Your return to yourself, enforced by illness, is on the right track and is something I have wished and expected for you. You identify with the eternally creative, restless, and ruthless god in yourself, therefore you see through everything personal— a tremendous fate which it would be ridiculous either to praise or to censure!

I was compelled to respect Nietzsche’s Amor fati until I had my fill of it, then I built a little house way out in the country near the mountains and carved an inscription on the wall: Philemonis sacrum— Fausti poenitentia, and “ dis-identified” myself with the god. I have never regretted this doubtless very unholy act.

By temperament I despise the “ personal,” any kind of “ togetherness,” but it is so strong a force, this whole crushing unspiritual weight of the earth, that I fear it. It can rouse my body to revolt against the spirit so that before reaching the zenith of my flight I fall lamed to earth. That is the danger you too must reckon with. It is also the fear that prevents our friend X from flying. He can be nothing else but intellectual.

You have paid a salutary tribute to the earth with your illness. Let’s hope your gods will be equally gracious to you next time!

With best wishes for the New Year,

Yours sincerely,

C.G Jung"

Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 49-50

Episode description:

Dr. Murray Stein is a renowned Jungian psychoanalyst and the author of important books such as ‘Jung’s treatment of Christianity’ and ‘Map of the Soul’. Dr. Stein is perhaps the Jungian who has delved the deepest into C.G Jung and his relation to the Christian tradition. In this episode, he sheds light on Jung’s rendering of Christianity through his psychological project. He helps us understand how Jungs’ psychology is rooted in the tradition of Protestantism, expands on Jungs’ idea of “the invisible church”, and Jung’s relationship to Jesus.

Dr. Stein also generously shares stories from his own life, as well as anecdotes of Jung himself. For instance, you will hear the story of how Jung himself his whole life walked around with a bible in his pocket and how to live one's life at the center of the cross.

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Music played in this episode: Licensed under creativecommons.org: 'Ketsa - No light without Darkness', 'Siddhartha Corsus - Constellations.'