Carl Jung and David Bentley Hart

On Intellectual Integrity

There are some rules in the intellectual world which are pretty reliable for detecting bloviating stupidity, or blathering solipsism (or however you want to render b.s.), and one of them is this: if someone launches a five-thousand word attack on a noted author, and almost never quotes a line from the voluminous works of that author, the article must be b.s. Every author has said so many dumb things, that if you can’t find at least three really damning lines that sum up his intellectual faults, then you haven’t looked. You’re making it up. You’re not doing due diligence. Even the Inquisition when they set about burning a good man made sure to quote him chapter and verse.

A good example of this problem can be found in the encounter between David Bentley Hart and Carl Jung, which appeared years ago in First Things magazine. Jung was highly unusual: a church of one, one might say; and in his voluminous works there is plenty to disagree with and much that is wrong. This is not an excuse for dishonesty in dealing with his writings (or anyone else’s); fighting fair is something one does at all times. Jung’s value I think will be shown in this essay. David Bentley Hart had his time in the sun and he still publishes but I think the lack of conscientiousness, discipline, and integrity - very clear in his analysis of Jung - has by now caught up with his reputation. He managed to type a five-thousand word attack on Jung without making any recourse to the author himself. The case, even if truthful, would be dismissed on a lack of evidence provided by the prosecution. But I will provide the evidence for Mr. Hart, and clean up his lazy mess, and I will let my readers decide if his case against Jung is proven or not.

Carl Jung from his office, where, according to David Bentley Hart, he preached “vacuous contentment with the world’s ultimate triviality.”

First of all, before I begin, I really must wonder if religious writers of a certain sort have a blueprint lying around in the office, which they use for all their takedowns. It goes something like this: first of all: so-and-so is a relativist! He doesn’t believe in good and evil! Once that is done, we can move to accusation number two: so-and-so believes in a mechanistic universe! He is a materialist! He’s part of the awful modern age, where the beauty of kittens no longer proves that we should burn heretics and have unlimited papal sovereignty! Point number three follows: So-and-so thinks that shorn of all metaphysical consolation we should all just try to be happy! He espouses therapeutic-cultural narcissism! Part four involves a long disquisition on some notable heresy of the past, and saying that this new author is just another damnable heretic, and the Church parried those guys before and will this time too. Actually we’ve been here before, and thank goodness St. So-and-so ordered the burnings of people like this back when Christians were real Christians. Look at the takedowns, and you’ll see the same arguments over and over. Here goes:

The first accusation is unusually irrelevant, so it comes in brief and fleeting form. But it is there for the dumb readers who know that it is code for Aha! Jung is another modern relativist. I can safely throw him in the intellectual garbage heap. Hart is talking about the visionary dream-figures Jung writes of in his Red Book. Hart says:

Many of them seem intent on getting Jung to abandon his conventional belief in any real dichotomy between good and evil, and to recognize that God and the devil are just two sides of a single reality.

This, Hart makes clear, is bad; Hart is for dichotomy, he says, Jung against. So was Jung a relativist? Let’s take a look (this from his last work, his autobiography):

The Christian world is now truly confronted by the principle of evil, by naked injustice, tyranny, lies, slavery, and coercion of conscience. This manifestation of naked evil has assumed apparently permanent form in the Russian nation; but its first violent eruption came in Germany. That outpouring of evil revealed to what extent Christianity had been undermined in the twentieth century. In the face of that, evil can no longer be minimized by the euphemism of the privatio boni. Evil has become a determinant reality. It can no longer be dismissed from the world by a circumlocution. (329)

In fact, Jung spends a good deal of time – notably in his work on Christianity, entitled Aion – attacking a traditional theory of evil espoused (for a time at least) by St. Augustine and others, that evil does not exist but is only a privatio boni (absence of good). Jung asserts over and over that evil is a “determinant reality” in itself and not merely an absence of good. From the above passage I can understand why university relativists don’t study Jung much – and they don’t – because he is most emphatically not a relativist.

On to accusation number two, that he was a mechanistic materialist. After voicing his grave concerns – “to tell the truth, I find The Red Book a rather disconcerting document… because I cannot shake the sense that it is somehow a real reflection of the spiritual situation of our times” – Hart goes on to talk about what is actually going on in our society, Jung being an example of it:

Moreover, the metaphysical picture of reality that the West has embraced ever more unreflectively since the rise of a mechanistic philosophy of nature is one that forcibly expels the transcendent from the immanent. At one time, it seemed enough simply to open one’s eyes to see the light of the divine reflected in the mirror of creation: The cosmos was everywhere the work of formal and final causes and of a pervasive divine wisdom, an endlessly diverse but harmonious scala naturae rising up from the earth to heaven. The whole universe was a kind of theophany, and all of reality participated in those transcendental perfections that had their infinite consummation in God. Now, however, we have learned, generation after generation, to see nature as only a machine, composed of material forces that are inherently mindless, intrinsically devoid of purpose, and therefore only adventitiously and accidentally directed towards any end, either by chance or by the hand of some demiurgic “Intelligent Designer.” And, with the rise of Darwinism, even this latter hypothesis has come to seem largely otiose.

This had me thinking – does Hart know anything about Jung? Is he really accusing Jung of mechanistic materialism? Note that Hart never quotes Jung. So I will: I will quote Jung describing his amazement at how city people seemed to have lost their contact with nature and wildness and hence with God:

The more I read and the more familiar I became with city life, the stronger grew my impression that what I was now getting to know as reality belonged to an order of things different from the view of the world I had grown up with in the country, among rivers and woods, among men and animals in a small village bathed in sunlight, with the winds and the clouds moving over it, and encompassed by dark night in which uncertain things happened. It was no mere locality on the map, but “God’s world,” so ordered by Him and filled with secret meaning. But apparently men did not know this, and even the animals had somehow lost the senses to perceive it. That was evident, for example, in the sorrowful, lost look of the cows, and in the resigned eyes of horses, in the devotion of dogs, who clung so desperately to human beings, and even in the self-assured step of the cats who had chosen house and barn as their residence and hunting ground. People were like the animals, and seemed as unconscious as they. They looked down upon the ground or up into the trees in order to see what could be put to use, and for what purpose; like animals they herded, paired, and fought, but did not see that they dwelt in a unified cosmos, in God’s world, in an eternity where everything is already born and everything has already died. (66-7)

The earthly manifestations of “God’s world” began with the realm of plants, as a kind of direct communication from it. It was as though one were peering over the shoulder of the Creator, who, thinking Himself unobserved, was making toys and decorations. (67)

Plants interested me too, but not in a scientific sense. I was attracted to them for a reason I could not understand, and with a strong feeling that they ought not to be pulled up and dried. They were living beings which had meaning only so long as they were growing and flowering – a hidden, secret meaning, one of God’s thoughts. They were to be regarded with awe and contemplated with philosophical wonderment. What the biologist had to say about them was interesting, but it was not the essential thing. Yet I could not explain to myself what this essential thing was. How were plants related to the Christian religion or to the negation of the Will, for example? (83)

Again, I can understand how mechanistic materialists might avoid Jung and celebrate Freud (who was one of their own), but why would a Christian throw Jung in with the mechanistic materialists? Jung definitely engaged with this problem; but always on the side of the theophanous.

Point three: therapeutic narcissism. Hart has some room to maneuver here, because Jung was after all a shrink. So of course he goes on the offensive:

We have been taught not only to see the physical order as no more than mindless machinery, but also to believe (or to suspect) that this machinery is all there is. Our metaphysical imagination now makes it seem quite reasonable to conclude that the deep disquiet of the restless heart that longs for God is not in fact a rational appetite that can be sated by any real object, but only a mechanical malfunction in need of correction. Rather than subject ourselves to the torment and disappointment of spiritual aspirations, perhaps we need only seek an adjustment of our gears. Perhaps what we require to be free from illusion is not escape to some higher realm, but only reparation of the psyche, reintegration of the unconscious and the ego, reconciliation with ourselves—in a word, therapy.

Jung is utterly different from the modern notion of a psychiatrist, “pharmacists whose job it is to homogenize individuals into mechanical-society functionality.” Jung’s experiences running an insane asylum helped convince him that the clinically insane were drawing from a stock of ideas and images with close parallels in art and literature and religion: a sane person might write a series of Twilight or Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings or Narnia books, while an insane person might believe that his or her life was one of those books. But both the sane and the insane are in touch with something, something which in fact may be important – in fact, that contact with strange areas of the psyche is why we know Tolkien today, and probably Lewis as well. I have written about this in the past:

The realization that insanity was not quite as distant from the common run of experience refined Jung’s clinical work, which was defined by two key characteristics. First, he was convinced that psychic phenomena are real: to say “it’s all in your head!” or “it’s just psychological” located the phenomenon, but did not for him in any way take away from its reality. Phenomena such as lies, misunderstandings, fantasies, misrememberings, delusions, hallucinations, errors, and dreams he did not treat as bad data so much as another data-set which could be used to reach other (at times quite useful) conclusions. “My aim was to show that delusions and hallucinations were not just specific symptoms of mental disease but also had a human meaning” (110)…. Second, he refused all medical detachment: he believed that he as a doctor should be as affected by the patient as the patient by the doctor; in other words, he did not believe in relating to them as doctor to patient but as person to person:

[quoting Jung] “In any thoroughgoing analysis the whole personality of both patient and doctor is called into play. There are many cases which the doctor cannot cure without committing himself. When important matters are at stake, it makes all the difference whether the doctor sees himself as a part of the drama, or cloaks himself in his authority. In the great crises of life, in the supreme moments when to be or not to be is the question, little tricks of suggestion do not help.” (133)

“As a doctor I constantly have to ask myself what kind of message the patient is bringing me. What does he mean to me? If he means nothing, I have no point of attack. The doctor is effective only when he himself is affected. ‘Only the wounded physician heals.’ But when the doctor wears his personality like a coat of armor, he has no effect. I take my patients seriously. Perhaps I am confronted with a problem just as much as they. It often happens that the patient is exactly the right plaster for the doctor’s sore spot.” (134)

This conviction led Jung to grow as an individual in a remarkable way, and one of the things most clear from his autobiography is how remarkable a life he had: all kinds of people spoke honestly to him as they spoke to no one, and like Odysseus “he knew their minds.” He knew intimately lunatics, murderers, artists, scholars, the great as well as the unknown. His entire life he investigated something he knew he never understood; and hence his knowledge grew and grew and grew.

His idea that mental suffering had a “human meaning” and was not a mere matter of “this pill or that pill and back to the treadmill you go” has little to do with modern therapy – honestly, name a doctor whose operating principle is “what does the patient mean to me?” – but it does sound vaguely Christian. Here was one case of his:

A lady came to my office. She refused to give her name, said it did not matter, since she wished to have only the one consultation. It was apparent that she belonged to the upper levels of society. She had been a doctor, she said. What she had to communicate to me was a confession: some twenty years ago she had committed a murder out of jealousy. She had poisoned her best friend because she wanted to marry the friend’s husband. She had thought that if the murder was not discovered, it would not disturb her. She wanted to marry the husband, and the simplest way was to eliminate her friend. Moral considerations were of no importance to her, she thought.

The consequences? She had in fact married the man, but he died soon afterward, relatively young. During the following years a number of strange things happened. The daughter of this marriage endeavored to get away from her as soon as she was grown up. She married young and vanished from view, drew farther and farther away, and ultimately the mother lost all contact with her.

This lady was a passionate horsewoman and owned several riding horses of which she was extremely fond. One day she discovered that the horses were beginning to grow nervous under her. Even her favorite shied and threw her. Finally she had to give up riding. Thereafter she clung to her dogs. She owned an unusually beautiful wolfhound to which she was greatly attached. As chance would have it, this very dog was stricken with paralysis. With that, her cup was full; she felt that she was morally done for. She had to confess, and for this purpose she came to me. She was a murderess, but on top of that she had also murdered herself. For one who commits such a crime destroys his own soul. The murderer has already passed sentence on himself. If someone has committed a crime and is caught, he suffers judicial punishment. If he has done it secretly, without moral consciousness of it, and remains undiscovered, the punishment can nevertheless be visited upon him, as our case shows. It comes out in the end. Sometimes it seems as if even animals and plants ‘know’ it.

As a result of the murder, the woman was plunged into unbearable loneliness. She had even become alienated from animals. And in order to shake off this loneliness, she had made me share her knowledge. She had to have someone who was not a murderer to share the secret. She wanted to find a person who could accept her confession without prejudice, for by so doing she would achieve once more something resembling a relationship to humanity. And the person would have to be a doctor rather than a professional confessor. She would have suspected a priest of listening to her because of his office, and of not accepting the facts for their own sake but for the purpose of moral judgement. She had seen people and animals turn away from her, and had been so struck by this silent verdict that she could not have endured any further condemnation. (122-3)

This could be from Father Zosima in the Brothers Karamazov.

Let’s go back to Hart, who continues his irrelevant bloviating:

This, at least, is the troubling prospect that The Red Book poses to my imagination. It may truly be possible for an essentially gnostic contempt for the world to be inverted into a vacuous contentment with the world’s ultimate triviality. Jung quaintly imagined he was working towards some sort of spiritual renewal for “modern man”; in fact, he was engaged in the manufacture of spiritual soporifics: therapeutic sedatives for a therapeutic age.

“Vacuous contentment with the world’s ultimate triviality” sounds like the mantra most Catholics need to get through the average Sunday sermon. Put it in Latin on a bumper sticker – Vilitate Mundi Ultima Bovine Contentus – tell ’em it means “Vatican II was only a pastoral council.” But does it apply to Jung? Since Hart doesn’t provide the evidence, we will have to hope Jung will damn himself in his own words:

The decisive question for man is: is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance. Thus we demand that the world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as our personal possessions: our talent or our beauty. The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life. He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy. If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change. In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted. In our relationships to other men, too, the crucial question is whether an element of boundlessness is expressed in the relationship. (325)

What do you think, reader? Is Jung condemned for “vacuous contentment with the world’s ultimate triviality”?

I want to get to the question of happiness as well. Here is Hart, with another complaint about the modern world:

Every historical period has its own presiding powers and principalities on high. Ours, for what it is worth, seem to want to make us happy, even if only in an inert sort of way.

I have heard conservative Catholics complain about this before, and it always intrigues me. It is a curious accusation. Would God be upset if we were happy? Might not a loving God rather prefer happiness to its opposite? Dostoevsky thought of our obligation to be happy as a crucial Christian teaching (I realized happiness was the most important distinguishing feature of Dostoevsky’s writing when I heard moderately intelligent people complain time and again to me that his writing was so depressing and heavy: moderately intelligent people may be relied on to say the opposite of the truth in everything related to art and religion). Dostoevsky’s words:

For we are made for happiness, and any one who is completely happy has a right to say to himself, “I am doing God’s will on earth.” All the righteous, all the saints, all the holy martyrs were happy.

They are happy because they have a link with the infinite, with God: and this changes the character of their entire lives. But this God-experience is precisely the thing which is ruled out by bad religion, which Jung recognized. When discussing his father’s religious doubts – which reached the point of torment – Jung contrasts the freedom and peace, coupled with real belief, that he himself had. He uses the figure of Abraham to discuss an immediate experience of God who can command things which do not appear to square with the tradition (in Abraham’s instance, God commands him to murder his son):

That was what my father had not understood, I thought; he had failed to experience the will of God, had opposed it for the best reasons and out of the deepest faith. And that was why he had never experienced the miracle of grace which heals all and makes all comprehensible. He had taken the Bible’s commandments as his guide; he believed in God as the Bible prescribed and his forefathers had taught him. But he did not know the immediate living God who stands, omnipotent and free, above His Bible and His Church, who calls upon man to partake of His freedom, and can force him to renounce his own views and convictions in order to fulfill without reserve the command of God. In his trial of human courage God refuses to abide by traditions, no matter how sacred. In His omnipotence He will see to it that nothing really evil comes of such tests of courage. If one fulfills the will of God one can be sure of going the right way. (40)

In Christian terms this helps explain things like the fact that Mary, who got pregnant out of wedlock, was not stoned as the Law requires; why Jesus did work on the Sabbath; why he violated the dietary laws; why he did not wash before eating; why mandatory male circumcision was ended. All of things were repugnant to the traditionists (“Pharisees”), who became an image of the religious person who cannot break through to God: the older son so dutiful he is disgusted his father will kill the fatted calf for his whoremongering younger son, the responsible workers in the vineyard who burn with rage at the thought of others blithely receiving the salvation they sacrificed their own happiness for. This is not to say that God can’t work within the rules; we don’t have to go to the opposite extreme of utter antinomianism. But God can work in other ways too, the way he saved the sons of Jacob by having them sell Joseph into slavery. Christ’s religion defined itself against Pharisaism, and, to use Pope Francis’s term, “rigidity.”

Such people define everything externally and mechanically – even words like “transcendence” get defined this way. (I know one Conservative Catholic who had a catalog in her head of what acts were “loving” and which ones were not – the act itself was loving or not, regardless of the feeling in one’s heart. This is typical.) Hence transcendence is ecclesiastical: sitting in church on Sunday morning is transcendence. What Jung offers – since no episcopal authority backs it up – cannot be transcendence. It is “transcendence without transcendence” – churchspeak for “transcendence without benefit of clergy,” which must be an impossibility. Ultimately this is the heart of Hart’s article. He accuses Jung of mechanistic lack of transcendence. What he means is that Jung does not accept the ecclesiastical mechanism for mechanically producing transcendence and so he can be dismissed. In truth it is Jung who preaches a transcendent, Abrahamic God:

God is not human, I thought; that is His greatness, that nothing human impinges on Him. He is kind and terrible – both at once – and is therefore a great peril from which everyone naturally tries to save himself. People cling one-sidedly to His love and goodness, for fear they will fall victim to the tempter and destroyer. Jesus, too, had noticed that, and had therefore taught: “Lead us not into temptation.” (55-6)

I learned from him [Biedermann’s Christliche Dogmatik] that religion was “a spiritual act consisting of man’s establishing his own relationship to God.” I disagreed with that, for I understood religion as something that God did to me; it was an act on His part, to which I must simply yield, for He was the stronger. (57)

One must be utterly abandoned to God; nothing matters but fulfilling His will. (40)

And this element of transcendence Jung thought of as crucial for human life. He thought it was best found in religion, and that psychiatry was scrambling to deal with the failures of Western religion, which had become “an intellectual juggling of words”:

Among the so-called neurotics of our day there are a good many who in other ages would not have been neurotic – that is, divided against themselves. If they had lived in a period and in a milieu in which man was still linked by myth with the world of the ancestors, and thus with nature truly experienced and not merely seen from outside, they would have been spared this division with themselves. I am speaking of those who cannot tolerate the loss of myth and who can neither find a way to a merely exterior world, to the world as seen by science, nor rest satisfied with an intellectual juggling with words, which has nothing whatsoever to do with wisdom. (144)

That said, he believed that a deep religious life was possible in the churches, and he considered the future of Christianity “of vital importance”:

I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success or money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears. For that reason the idea of development was always of the highest importance to me.

The majority of my patients consisted not of believers but of those who had lost their faith. The ones who came to me were the lost sheep. Even in this day and age the believer has the opportunity, in his church, to live the ‘symbolic life.’ We need only think of the experience of the Mass, of baptism, of the imitatio Christi, and many other aspects of religion. But to live and experience symbols presupposes a vital participation on the part of the believer, and only too often this is lacking in people today. In the neurotic it is practically always lacking. In such cases we have to observe whether the unconscious will not spontaneously bring up symbols to replace what is lacking. But then the question remains of whether a person who has symbolic dreams or visions will also be able to understand their meaning and take the consequences upon himself. (140)

Try to square this with Hart’s accusations:

In the end, he concluded, psychic alienation can be conquered only through Jungian psychotherapy. The only true pneumatikos, it turns out, is a psychiatric patient (one whose psychiatrist likes to talk a great deal about archetypes).

The easy question: where does Jung say such a thing? Of course the answer is nowhere. As Hart says, “I am omitting many details, admittedly, but I doubt it matters.” Don’t worry Davey, no need to actually read the authors you write about. You’re orthodox, remember! No empiricism necessary! On the same note, I find Jung’s writing in every single one of the quotations I have produced clear and concise and incisive and interesting. But this is how Hart describes Jung as a writer: “I have to admit that I have never been an admirer of Jung’s writings, even on those rare occasions when I have fleetingly spied what looked like a glimmer of insight among their caliginous fogs.”

I have gone on far too long already, but when I decide to tell the world someone is wrong I like to make it clear they are not merely making a mistake or two but are utterly and completely wrong. I have not even gotten to the fourth part of the argument, about gnosticism. Suffice it to say that gnosticism has many different forms and has become a ridiculously vague word – what Jung would call a good field for projection. In Hart’s hands it comes to mean both a longing for transcendence that completely shatters this world, and the vacuous contentment that lets it go its own way, and he says that Jung is Gnostic and also worse than a Gnostic. Here he goes:

The Red Book manages to preserve the most ungainly aspects of ancient Gnosticism—its boringly rambling symbolic narratives, the pretensions of its spiritual patriciate, its self-absorption and ethical sterility—but none of its genuinely sympathetic religious qualities: the ennobling sorrow, the tragic sense of estrangement from the world, the delightful paranoia.

I don’t really know what he means by “delightful paranoia,” but it is such a great moniker for the whole world of thought that has been corrupted by the internet, and it is truly symptomatic that a 21st century American Christian should be feeling nostalgia for the “delightful paranoia” of the Gnostics.

A page from Jung’s Red Book, his private illuminated manuscript, drawn by himself. Hart calls this “mechanistic materialism.”

I do not think the Red Book is anything more than a curiosity, which is one of the reasons – together with the expensiveness of color reproductions until very recently – that it had never before been released. When profit is involved, neglect is generally a sign of poor quality. If there is a Beatles album in the vaults of the BBC that has not yet been released, we may be quite certain that it is not any good. Nor did Jung intend to publish this book. It was his private book, and the beauty he lavished on such a creation speaks very highly for him. Jung did publish his “Seven Sermons to the Dead,” which is basically identical in style and substance. It is both interesting and embarrassing – slightly less interesting, and slightly more embarrassing, for instance, than its model, Thus Spake Zarathustra. The Red Book’s paintings are vaguely Blake-like but like Blake’s they are really not technically very good. No one is suggesting that Jung was a great painter, and I will say that I really do not consider him an artist at all. But the book was part of a larger project which was utterly fascinating. Jung resigned his university post and gave himself over to a thorough exploration of the unconscious, which involved attempting to give everything inside himself external expression. From my essay on him:

The Christian way of putting it would be that everything he found inside he attempted to incarnate in external reality. “Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation,” he says, and this is for him the sum of our fate, and the only options are volentem ducunt, nolentem trahunt. Everything interior requires what alchemy called the krater, the vas, the Grail, the “vessel of transformation,” the thing which can receive the seed; fulfillment was this union of idea and vessel. For Jung this image-making could be as simple as saying what he felt needed to be said; but he also painted (images from his dreams, images of his ancestors, etc.); built over the course of his lifetime a small castle, towers and all (which looks extraordinary; you would think it was five hundred years old, built of stone, not a mid-twentieth century building); sculpted; carved monumental Latin and Greek quotations onto rocks; and kept a most impressive secret book (his “Red Book”), written in a superb calligraphic hand and extensively illuminated. As with much “therapeutic art” the quality of his production is not always of the highest: he wrote a very bombastic “Seven Sermons to the Dead” expounding some of his religico-mystico thoughts, which is both interesting and an embarrassment. But his house looks utterly fascinating and is a reproach to the whole disastrous twentieth century in architecture. It looks like the outgrowth of a full life, rather than the cheapness, barrenness, and conformity that most people have to endure as their surroundings.

Part of Bollingen Tower, which Jung designed and built himself. The cube of stone Jung carved himself, with inscriptions in Latin and Greek.

The Red Book has to be considered one portion of the artistic output of one man who was not even an artist, and yet his commitment to his inner life ended up giving him an impressive legacy, and certainly fructified the work of innumerable other artists, who time and again look to Jung for inspiration. Again from my essay:

“Freud himself had a neurosis,” Jung said, “no doubt diagnosable and one with highly troublesome symptoms, as I had discovered on our voyage to America. Of course he had taught me that everybody is somewhat neurotic, and that we must practice tolerance. But I was not at all inclined to content myself with that; rather, I wanted to know how one could escape having a neurosis. Apparently neither Freud nor his disciples could understand what it meant for the theory and practice of psychoanalysis if not even the master could deal with his own neurosis.” Intriguingly, one of the common opinions held in psychiatric circles is that Jung specifically failed in this quest: that in fact the more he gave himself over to this process of integration, the crazier he became. He gave up his university post and began painting pictures, carving Greek inscriptions, building castles, writing sermons to the dead, turning theology on its head, etc. He lived much of the latter half of his life without electricity or running water. Again, it is easy to see why artists have felt more kinship with him than doctors have. But his legacy is most impressive – the twenty-volume Princeton edition of his works shows bewildering breadth. His essays range from “The Reaction-Time Ratio in the Association Experiment” (still a most useful technique), “The Analysis of Dreams,” “A Contribution to the Psychology of Rumor” and “On the Significance of Number Dreams” to “Woman In Europe,”“What India Can Teach Us,” “Gnostic Symbols of the Self,” essays on flying saucers, Picasso, Wotan, Adam and Eve, “Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon,” “The Origin of the Hero,” “Transformation Symbolism in the Mass”, a foreword to the I Ching, and on and on – not to mention the things he is famous for, such as his theory of archetypes or the unconscious. It appears that his sacrifice of bourgeois-professional respectability for the life he had was well worth it, not only for posterity which has benefited from his work but for himself; his book confirms what the many members of the Jung circle – Marie-Louise von Franz, Joseph Campbell, Helen Luke, Heinrich Zimmer (all interesting figures in their own right, and I’m sure there are many more) – all proclaim loudly, that Jung was possessed of a warmth and generosity and wisdom that created life all around him.

This is the context into which one should put his Red Book. As for its contents, I find myself agreeing with Jung, that we all have much more craziness inside ourselves than we are willing to admit, but something in it is life-giving and even sanctifying. Jung himself admitted that we could not always know if these interior sources were biological or divine. But he was certain that God was wired into our very nature:

If, therefore, we speak of “God” as an “archetype,” we are saying nothing about His real nature but are letting it be known that “God” already has a place in that part of our psyche which is pre-existent to consciousness and that He therefore cannot be considered an invention of consciousness. (347-8)

This would make sense to a Christian, would it not? That we were born with a capacity to recognize God? To return to Hart one more time, he considers this viewpoint – that there is something transcendent and salvific to be discovered inside ourselves – just weakness:

Most of us now are susceptible to the psychologistic assumption that spiritual disaffection is something to be cured by discovering and decoding some forgotten, half-effaced text inscribed somewhere within the self.

Compare this to:

The kingdom of God does not come by observation, nor will they say “Look here!” or “Look there!” For indeed, the kingdom of God is within you.

That’s Jesus, of course, not Jung. But what would something like this mean to Hart? Is there nothing “inscribed somewhere within the self” that can lead us to this kingdom that is supposedly inside us? Maybe Jesus himself succumbed from time to time to a “psychologistic assumption” or two.