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Here are a few of the early paragraphs from the second chapter of Eleanor Bertine's book, Jung's Contribution To Our Time. This chapter is _title_d, Jung's Approach To Religion. It is a paper that Bertine read at the Analytical Psychology Club of New York in 1958. In the paragraphs before these, Bertine gives some information about certain experiences in her own life, and she does this working toward a purpose. She tells how as a young child she naively assumed that something very deep must available to her in connection with the Christian church that her family took her to, but when she tried to look into it by asking for some more advanced literature she was told not to worry about it. I had more or less that same experience, and I would guess that many other people have too. From there, Bertine goes on to say that her higher education taught her science (she was an M.D.) in a way that distanced her completely from the possibility of finding anything particularly meaningful in life. And then she had come to be a fan of Freud, which pretty much both closed and locked the door on her as far as hope of finding anything meaningful in life went. The paragraph before the one I will start the quote from ends with this sentence - After this, realistic Russian novels and hospital work on the lower East Side became my spiritual diet, and even with an enthusiastic interest in life I found this pabulum pretty grim. =======(begin quote) Then I read Jung's Psychology of the Unconscious, and with it came a great draught of fresh air. Jung was as competent and as scientifically conscientious as Freud. But he came a little later and never accepted the idea that the ultimate mystery, either of the outer universe or of the inner depths of the psyche, could be fathomed, let alone comprehended (i.e., surrounded or contained), even by the whole human psyche, still less by only that part of it which is the intellect. He was also well enough oriented philosophically to recognize the inherent limits of man's capacity to know. He valued profoundly the discipline of the scientific method. Indeed, it was this last that enabled him to penetrate so deeply into the darkness of the unconscious without losing his mental balance. But he was not content to measure all the phenomena of the human psyche with the yardstick of the material sciences and thereby reject or hideously disparage experiences which men have felt to be the most precious and creative in their lives. On the other hand, he did not take these at their face value either, but set out to study and observe them, to allow them to develop and reveal their own essence, with the freedom from prejudice of a real scientist. With the discovery of this book, The Psychology of the Unconscious, the block in my inner life came to an end. The same was obviously not true of my problems, but a way had been revealed in which I could hopefully work on them. The rest of the story is unimportant to anyone but myself. But telling it in this context has shown, I hope, that the discoveries of Jung may offer a possible end to the impasse and vacuum left in the lives of a vast number of contemporary people by the damaging impact of science upon religion. The two had become a pair of opposites, seeming to demand that the individual give his allegiance to one side or the other, to the serious mutilation of the psyche in either case. Since both alternatives, faith and reason, are activities of the psyche, it occurred to Jung that an investigation in the psychological field might throw some light on the subject. Obviously this kind of investigation would requite the utmost _object_ivity in the investigator. He must bring to it no a priori belief, but a mind as free from preconceptions as constant self-examination can make it. To do so is no simple matter, for it is not easy or even possible to divest oneself of all past conditioning; but awareness of the problem can minimize its effects. It is not surprising that the Church in general could not tolerate such open-mindedness, for the authority of its teaching was _base_d ultimately upon revelation and hence was in no way subject to scientific scrutiny. Yet one might have expected scientists to be true to their own discipline, which demands only the painstaking observation of data and constant testing of all conclusions. No material should be barred from study for any reason whatever, so long as it is capable of being observed. But scientists, including psychologists, were just as emotionally denunciatory of Jung's discoveries as anyone else. One went so far as to say that his interest in the phenomenology of the various religions was too great to be scientifically respectable. Thus the same prejudice which had been used against Freud on the ground of his content, namely sexual phenomena, was now turned against Jung for his concern with the opposite content, religion and spirit. And strangely enough many Freudians, including Freud himself, were among the most scathing of these critics. Jung then met hostility on both sides, from theologians because he subscribed to no dogma and from scientists because his subject was not scientifically recognized. Here I must state most positively that Jung has nothing to say about the truth or falsity of the _meta_physical side of religion, which he considers to be beyond the competence of science to adjudicate. But on the human side religious experience is psychological, as every human experience is psychological, whether of truth or error and whatever its correspondence with _object_ive reality. Indeed, perception and apperception, faith, reason, understanding, imagination, and dream are all psychological processes. Thus, while psychology can make no final pronouncement about the existence of God, it can and indeed must deal with the nearly universal God-image in the soul or psyche and the immensely important experiences that cluster around it. If I think that I see something stir in the dark, it is a psychological experience whether I take the thing to be man or ghost; and if no _object_ive cause for the impression can be found, then it lies within the legitimate province of psychology to ask whether it can be explained as a projection, either of an ordinary personal unconscious content, such as the idea of a thief, or of something entirely unfamiliar arising from a deeper level of the unconscious, which is known to us only through what we can observe of its symbolic self-manifestations. This last is the level from which the symbols of religion seem to arise. And though psychology, the youngest of the sciences, does not enable us to make ultimate judgments regarding the interpretation of such data, it does offer a method of observing facts from which tentative conclusions can be drawn that may help to orient us in this vital field. Whether the God-image expresses a _meta_physical fact or is a symbol of some content from the unknown depths within the psyche, there can be no doubt of its dynamic power in human life. And if its origin is really the inner unknown, then the unconscious is far vaster than had been thought; and, as Jung has postulated, it is surrounded by a realm which is not only not part of the individual psyche but in its ultimate reaches is hardly psychic at all. From this point of view it is certainly no more belittling or disparaging to call a phenomenon psychic than to call it cosmic, for the universe within can no more be bounded than the cosmos without. I shall now try to lay before you five of the basic conclusions concerning the religious side of the psyche which Jung has drawn from a long life of careful observation in his analytical practice, supplemented by the extraordinary erudition which he acquired in studying parallels from many past times and places to the material gathered in his consulting room. Again and again he has gone back to original sources, sometimes even learning ancient languages in order to read the texts. 1. The first conclusion is that a spiritual element is an organic part of the human psyche. 2. Second, that such elements are regularly expressed in symbols. 3. Third, that these symbols reveal a path of psychological development which can be traced, not only backward toward a cause in the past, but forward toward a goal in the future. 4. Fourth, that the goal is expressed by images of completion in a whole which he calls the Self and which is unique for each individual. It is formed by the integration of the little self, or ego, and the unconscious. 5. Fifth, that this whole is characterized by all the qualities of numinousness, unconditional authority, power, and value which also belong to the image of God. Obviously I cannot demonstrate these points convincingly within the scope of this paper, but perhaps I can give a rough sketch that will serve as an introduction. The first conclusion mentioned above was obvious to Jung from the beginning of his work; namely, that a spiritual element is an essential component of the psyche. Whereas Freud saw a repression of instinct as a basis of every neurosis - and by instinct he almost always meant sexuality - Jung found that more people came to him with a spiritual than with a sexual problem. To Freud, this idea seemed only Jung's funking of an unpopular subject. But Jung noted that it was not primarily the weaklings, the childish and authority-bound, who suffered in this way; more often it was those of greater than average psychological capacity, the creative ones and those of high moral caliber. As a general rule, only the early stages of an analysis with Jung centered in the Freudian infantile reactions and in the family drama. When these had been dealt with Jung met, not with a sort of theoretical normality, but with the real problems of life: the conflict between good and evil in the patient's individual setting, the clarification of life from its contaminations,
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