of years old refinedmanagement of believer’s instincts, but in religion “something” is being authentically expressed. Jung never shared Freud’s theory of sexual sublimation without reservations and he considered religious activity as a general human desire. Even though, the desire fulfilment had been a frame within which he partially operated, hence the interpretation of God as psychologically portrayed libido. Abandoning the theory of wish fulfilment as such also changed his view on a symbol of God. It is not a symbol of libido anymore, but transpersonal unconscious as such (CW 7 1912). Jung here refers to the unconscious as a union of opposites, both God and Devil at the same time. He reshapes a symbol [8] of God into something that arrives to man from the collective psyche, but at the same time it is a symbol for the collective psyche – the deepest, mysterious layer of mind. Symbol of God has become a true content, not sublimation of something else: “The contents of the unconscious lay the same claim to reality on account of their obstinate persistence as do real things of the external world (…) It must not be forgotten that there have always been many people for whom the contents of the unconscious possessed a greater reality than the things of the outside world.” (CW 6, 168). Jung is not interested in “essence” of religion, but in its psychological effect. Therefore, when he writes about religious orientation being a psychological need, it does not mean a defense of irreplaceable role of a particular religion. It only means that one will always behave in a manner known to him from religion. Religious function is for him an essential component of the psyche and is found always and everywhere, however undifferentiated it may be (CW 6, 315). It must be kept in mind that Jung uses a term “symbol of God” as a declaration of psychological effect, not a term “God” as a thing-initself, and he did so all of his life. He refused to speculate metaphysically as he mentioned many times. What Kant called “thing-in-itself” (Ding an sich), Jung refers to as “merely negative borderline concept” (Jung 1932, 10) saying that „every statement about the transcendental is to be avoided because it is only a laughable presumption on the part of a human mind unconscious of its limitations“ (CW 13 1929, 54). Psychology is to study not God in himself, but the human idea of God. It relates to the fact that, according to Jung, psychology is a science not metaphysics. For Jung the Godimage is a symbol and therefore it cannot be reduced to completely subjective origin. Anyway, in his another workThe Relation Between the Ego and the Unconscious (1928) Jung converts to a concept of God and the divine as an autonomous psychic content: „[B]y affixing ‘divine’ to the workings of the autonomous contents, we are admitting their relatively superior force... It is a force as real as hunger and the fear of death.“ (CW 7 1928, 239). Jung explicitly discusses that although science cannot prove God’s existence in any way, the experience with God as a psychic fact cannot be disproved. Science has never discovered any “God”, epistemological criticism proves the impossibility of knowing God, but the psyche comes forward with the assertion of the experience of God. God is a psychic fact of immediate ex54 Ivana Ryška Vajdová
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