Comprehensive study of Jung’s works allowed me to examine his relationship to religion, or God in great detail. Jung publicly distanced himself from anything that could be called a Jungian movement or a school, for instance in his lecture “Is Analytical Psychology a Religion?” [3] from 1936 (Jung 1977). In the course of his life he started to appreciate a psychological importance of religion, such as Christianity, while he explicitly warned against the spiritual vacuum he observed in some countries during his lifetime. Jung’s literary remains consist of nineteen volumes of Collected Works, two volumes of letters, several seminars, the autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, and the collection of interviews and casual writings in C. G. Jung Speaking. The amount of unpublished material exceeds the amount of the published one by far (Shamdasani 2003). Therefore, to create a tight theory out of it is somewhat risky. Jung himself did not make it easier with the unsystematic nature of his writing style. I will attempt to present Jung’s principal concepts in relation to religion, God and psychological experience of religion in general. I will try to proceed in a chronological order. 2 Religious activity as psychiatric diagnosis At the beginning of his career Jung did not show any interest in religion as an independent subject matter, but he did so almost exclusively in relation to mental disorders when examining religious hallucinations, visions of God, self-identification of patients with prophets or divine beings. Jung mentions God in his writings for the first time at the age of 34. In The Significance of the Father in the Destiny of the Individual (1909a) Jung puts forward more complex statement about religion and its function. Influenced by Freud’s Obsessive Acts and Religious Practices (1907), Jung interprets religion as “fantasy structure” created in order to resolve sexual problems (Heising 1979). Freud’s concept of sublime sexuality, at that time, was not only a significant piece of knowledge but oftentimes also the only explanatory framework for a vast array of phenomena. At that time, according to Heising, Jung even agreed with Freud in stating that the parent-child relationship is primarily sexual. If it is religion in which the most basic transformation of the child – parent relationship into the man – God relationship takes place, it is then a purpose of every religion to process, or, to be more precise, to tame the human sexuality with the difference that the Moses’ relationship with God was lawful, while the Jesus’ relationship was personal (CW 4 1909a). However subversive this notes might seem in relation to religion, Jung did not agree with Freud, not even in his most radical early period: Christianity cannot be simply opposed, because it might be useful in psychoanalysis. First explicit and general definition of relationship between religion and psychoanalysis can be found inThe Analysis of Dream (1909b): psychoanalysis can heal and strengthen human spirit where the Church has only crushed it (CW 4 1909b). Jung turned away from Freud and the whole psychoanalytical movement when he startSpirituality Studies 2 (1) Spring 2016 51
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