Doubts About Jung

While recovering from an illness early in 1999, I read several works by and about the great psychologist C.G. Jung. I found a deep appeal in Jung's writings, but something about him troubled me. On the point of becoming a Jungian, I took out of the library a book alarmingly entitled The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung. Thoroughly documented from diaries, letters and transcribed verbal reminiscences of people who knew Jung during his lifetime, the author (whose name I have forgotten) presented a picture of a man who had consciously set out to found a new, neopagan and racially Aryan religion in opposition to Christianity, who had covered his intent with three layers of meaning: the scientific, for his scientific colleagues and the world at large; the Christian, for people he with whom he was in personal contact who still held to a Christian worldview; and the neopagan, for his close associates and initiates.

The author finds Jung's theory of personality types his most useful contribution, and so do I, though I also find the idea of the "shadow" persuasive and useful (with certain provisos). I have deep and strong hesitations about his dream theory and his idea of the "collective unconscious" now that I am convinced that this was a "cover" for a reintroduction of pagan gods in a way acceptable to the modern mind. I am not normally a conspiracy theorist, am sceptical about the demonic, and had dismissed talk about Jung having a "spirit guide" as misunderstandings or exaggerations by Christians obsessed with the threat of the New Age, but having read verbatim accounts of Jung's experience with this being, who he knew as "Philemon", I have to say that he sounds like a spirit guide to me. Whether he was generated as a symbol from within Jung to communicate things he would otherwise have been unaware of (the Jungian psychological-scientific explanation), was an evil being being participating in a deception or seduction (the conventional Christian explanation), or was a messenger from a "higher plane" bringing wisdom (the New Age and Jungian-initiate explanation) is open to discussion, though I believe the second, on the whole.

In summary, I recognise Jung's greatness and the significance of some of his insights, but remain profoundly skeptical and deeply dubious about some of his "advanced" teachings.

Scylla and Charybdis

It would be a mistake to dismiss Jung as having nothing to teach us because of his occultism, neopaganism, anti-Christianity or personal faults.

It is equally a mistake to ignore these things and "baptise" Jung's teachings without discernment, questioning or doubt.

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