ed to doubt a sexual sublimation theory [4] and he embarked on an intensive study of mythology and its potential for psychology. Findings of his studies on astrology and psychology were summed up in a book titledPsychology of the Unconscious (1916). There Jung went beyond purely functional understanding of religion. He poses a question of why religious desire and motivation occur in a man (final cause). He also offers an answer that it is a psychic response to unfulfilled wishes – religion is, therefore, a concept of ideas of what we miss. He adds yet another question: where does this desire and motivation originate from (material cause) and answers that it is a common receptacle of “archaic inclination” shared by all people (Jung 1916). These reflections are Jung’s first steps towards the formulation of theory of collective unconscious and archetypes. And thus religion is the field on which Jung created his most essential theory. Religion will remain an inseparable motif throughout Jung’s research into human Psyche. Rejection of Freud’s reductionism also manifested itself in terms of partial psychic phenomenon, whose manner of understanding still determines interpretation of all human desires and motivations: libido. Instead of using it in a Freudian’s spirit – as a sexual drive energy – he transformed the meaning of libido into ungraspable psychological energy. According to Jung, sexuality is only one of the manifestations of libido (CW 5 1911). By saying that, he unlocked absolutely different understanding of one’s self-realization and added to this process a dignity, wholeness and versatility that have no place in Freud’s psychological mechanics. Reformulation of libido means that there are deeper layers of psyche than only sexual. It implies that even the causes of neuroses lie much deeper and they are not only sexual, as Freud assumed. It would correspond with urgency and fatal severity of many psychological problems that evidently have no sexual origin. On the other hand, such approach promotes sexuality itself as a manifestation of a broader psychic energy, a manifestation of richness of spiritual life. Libido asserts itself in many concrete human activities of which it is the most profound driving force. As energy force it is ungraspable and it can be, according to Jung, identified with the symbol of God: “If one honors God, the sun or the fire, then one honors one’s own vital force, the libido” (Jung 1916, 96, 227). InThe Psychology of the Unconscious (1916) he states that from the psychological point of view to worship God is to worship one’s own libido: “Mankind wishes to love in God only their own ideas, that is to say, the ideas which they project into God. By that they wish to love their unconscious, that is, that remnant of ancient humanity and the centuries-old past of all people.“ (Jung 1916, 200). Jung’s psychological interpretation of a symbol of God leads him to the notion that in monotheistic religions libido manifests itself in the most comfortable manner, inasmuch as one source is worshipped. Just as libido is full of contradictory desires, God is such, too [5]. He can be forgiving and cruel beyond human logic or ethics, as later seen in the book of Job. Here Jung seems to appear as an explicit atheist, he even speaks of God as of a kind of fantasy projection known to psychologists in cases of paranoia (Jung 1916). He 52 Ivana Ryška Vajdová
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