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Jungian Analyst Jakob Lusensky engages in dialogues and research at the intersection of psychology and religion, for the purpose of individual and cultural transformation. Forthcoming book C.G Jung: Face to Face with Christianity.
“What we’re going through at the moment is the crucifixion of Christianity. And the Christians are saying, ‘Help, help! This is not nice. We’re on the cross. We want to fast-forward to the resurrection.’ You can’t fast-forward to the resurrection. You have to experience the agony of the cross. We cannot have a world full of individuated individuals without having also a developed and individuated community. And that’s where Christianity, I think, still has a lot to teach everybody, including Jungians.”
(0:45) Jakob Lusensky: Welcome to Psychology and the Cross. In this episode, I engage in a dialogue with Professor David Tacey. David is a Jungian scholar and interdisciplinary researcher whose teaching and writing encompasses the areas of psychoanalysis, religion, spirituality studies, and literary approaches to psychology. He is a former professor of English at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, and has written various books on human psychology, such as Religion as Metaphor; The Darkening Spirit: Jung, Spirituality, and Religion; and How to Read Jung. In this episode, David speaks of his analysis with the late James Hillman, and about his former mentor’s disdain towards Christianity, and the Jungian Self. He addresses the importance of reading the bible symbolically, rather than literally; the necessary death and rebirth of Christianity; and how Jungian individuation needs to be complemented with a Christian social ethos. Finally, we discuss Jung’s role as a prophet for the twenty-first century, in dreaming the Christian myth forward. David is serving us a full and very rich meal in this episode. It might be best enjoyed as a piece by piece meal in order to have time to fully digest. Feel free to share any feedback on cross.center. But let’s start from the beginning. How did it all begin?
(2:23) David Tacey: Yes, well, it wasn’t through any academic avenue. It was really through a personal crisis. I mean, a lot of people find Jung in a personal crisis, I find. I was desperately in love with a young woman. And I was about twenty-two, age twenty-two. She decided that the grass was greener on the other side. And then she went off with another man. And I was very bereft and depressed and upset. And I was an undergraduate student at my university in South Australia, which was called the Flinders University. And [my teacher] took me aside and she said, “What’s wrong?” And I told her, and she said, “I think that woman might have something that that you must take back.” And I didn’t quite know what she was talking about. She was a trained theologian, and a priest of the Anglican Church, which is called Church of England, and also the Episcopal Church in America. And she had studied Jung as a private matter, and was an expert in it, but had never done any training, because there was no training available in Australia in those days—talking about the early 1970s. There is still no training available in Australia. So she said, “That woman has something you must get back.” And of course, she was talking about the soul, the anima, the soul, and I didn’t understand all this. It seemed very difficult to me. I never had any teachers apart from this old lady, who was very kind. So it was just through existential despair. And then I started to realize what the anima and the animus were. And I took it from there.
My university teachers were mostly opposed to Jung. I used to ask them why and they would say “Because he’s been discredited years ago.” And I asked, “Well by who?” And why would say, “By every discipline you can imagine, from psychiatry, through sociology through psychology, through everything.” In those days, and still today, a lot of people denounce Jung without having read a word of him. So he clearly has a terribly bad reputation. Most students are not encouraged to study Jung. And so students like me, we had to simply fight for the right to read and study Jung. And usually I would hand up essays to my teachers that they didn’t understand. It’s a grassroots thing.
And there are no experts on Jung in my country. So you can’t really go to anybody here. And you’ve got to ask why is there such a terrible reputation for such an incredible genius? Luckily, the teachers didn’t influence me. And I thought, now this guy’s amazing. Jung is worth reading. And I’m going to go ahead. So I used him in my undergraduate degree, which was on literature, philosophy, and psychology—they were the disciplines I was studying—and also fine arts: I was specializing in the history of modern painting. And then I went on, did a master’s degree linking Jung with the study of literature. And then I did a PhD at the University of Adelaide, which was a Jungian study of the Australian novelist, Patrick White, who himself was influenced by Jung. So Jung had always had a quite a strong influence on Australian artists, writers, poets, musicians, and novelists, but not on the intellectual scholars. So there was a big rift between the artists and the intellectuals and the artists were very strongly positive toward Jung. So that rift in Australian society continues to exist.
(7:19) Jakob Lusensky: And just shortly, go back a little bit. Did you also grow up with sort of spirituality or in a religious home, or not? Or—?
(7:27) David Tacey: Oh, yes, I did. Yes. Yes. Strongly Christian background, very strong Christian background, which I took seriously, although my two sisters didn’t. They rejected my family’s Christianity, but I took it very seriously and sought for a personal relationship with God through Jesus. That was very important to me. And just as important was my contact with indigenous people. Because I grew up in a little town in Central Australia, called Alice Springs, which was probably more than half black, [they were] from the Aboriginal indigenous people of Australia. It was their homeland. And white people like myself with European backgrounds, we’re almost in the minority. And Aboriginal people have a very strong spiritual life. It’s not Christian, or it has some common ground with Christianity, but they have a spirituality which is close to that with the American Indians, for instance, or the shamans in Siberia, in Russia. And those very ancient cultures. They have very strong rites of passage, you know, to go from being a youth to an adult. They have a very strong connection with the earth.
So I got a lot of my feelings for the spirituality of nature, and the spirituality of earth came from the indigenous people of Central Australia. The Aranda, the Pintupi, and the Walpiri people were the three tribes that I interacted with. And then when I studied Jung, of course, this was a wonderful experience for me because Jung explained a great deal about the beliefs of the indigenous people. Indeed, Jung wrote about the indigenous people of Australia. In several of his essays, I found Jung not only personally interesting, but culturally extremely engaging as a way of understanding indigenous cultures and their symbolic lives. When I was about thirteen, some of the Aboriginal boys in my classroom would suddenly be absent for, say, three or four weeks. And I’d ask where they were. And the answer was generally they’re being taken by elders to engage in what’s called men’s business. And men’s business is a rite of passage from youth into manhood, and involving often a lot of painful activities: deprivations and lacerations over the chest, sometimes knocking out the eyetooth, and also being taught the mysteries of the tribe, and the mysteries of the ancestors.
Their ancestors are what Jung calls archetypes. This is basically the same thing. So they’re communing with ancestors during this initiation ceremony, where they’re often asked to not eat, not drink, sometimes they’re given hallucinatory drugs in order to facilitate some kind of disruption of the normal psychological process. And all that is so terribly understandable in Jungian terms. You know, the ego has to be disrupted in order for the unconscious to be felt—the unconscious which contains archetypes, but in their case, the unconscious is called the dreaming, which is an interesting word. Because naturally enough, Jungian psychology is based on dreaming, and dreams.
(11:36) Jakob Lusensky: You said you started studying at university, you wrote your PhD, in literature. What happened then—?
(11:43) David Tacey: After the PhD, I won a postdoctoral fellowship to America from the New York Harkness Foundation. And they said to me, “What would you like to do on this two and a half, three-year fellowship?” I was paid quite well and a living allowance, and they wanted me to work with someone in the university system in the United States. The only one I could think of was James Hillman, who at that stage was a professor at the University of Dallas in Texas. Anyway, so I wrote to New York. They weren’t very impressed by Hillman. They’d never heard of Hillman. And they didn’t like Texas, either. Because New York people are very elitist. And one man said to me, “No good can come out of Texas,” which reminded me of the bible, you know, when somebody says, “No good can come out of Nazareth.” Anyway, I fought against the prejudices of my New York sponsors, and I made them agree that I was going to go to Dallas. So I was supposed to go there, in order to be in intellectual discussions with James Hillman. And he had agreed initially, but then when I went over there and lived in Dallas for three years, Hillman wasn’t interested in intellectual discussions with me. So this was a bit of a crisis. And he suggested two things, that I move elsewhere, to, like, New England, and find someone up there to talk to, or I go into analysis with him as his patient, which he thought would be a better chance for me to further research the unconscious, being a patient in Jungian or—as he called his own work—post-Jungian psychology.
And of course I could hardly tell my sponsors in New York that I’d won this very prestigious prize and now [was] suddenly a patient in somebody’s clinic. And so Hillman said, “Well, look, let’s lie to them.” And so I did. He said, “Just tell them that you’re having private tutorials with me, and that they, mysteriously enough, cost the same amount as a clinical analysis.” He saw me twice a week. But I felt that at the time, I was a bit annoyed. I felt that Hillman had tricked me and almost manipulated me into becoming a patient. That wasn’t the idea. But I, just at that stage—and I was still in my twenties, and now I’m almost seventy, so, you know, fifty years later—I clearly didn’t know enough to engage Hillman in high-level dialogues. And I think he found my lack of understanding to be a constraint. So that’s why he gave me that sort of ultimatum. But anyway, I decided to stay and become his patient. I was very unwilling at first. I’d already been in Jungian analysis in Australia for a number of years. He was a great analyst, actually, an excellent, astute, marvelous dream-worker. And at the time we worked on whatever came up in the dreams, but particularly I was having difficulty with my father. And clearly, I had a father complex and Hillman helped me work through that. So I certainly owe him a great debt, because he was a very good, strong, and insightful analyst.
But he was very ruthless as well. Because of my Christian background being so strong since I was a baby, Christian symbols naturally came up in my analysis: the cross, the Way of the Cross, various miracles and signs from Christianity. And Hillman was very dismissive of them. You know, he didn’t like Christianity. And of course, as you know, he was trying to build an alternative psychology based almost purely on the Greek myths and the Greek goddesses. And he wants to see Hermes and Dionysus and Apollo in my dreams. But if I was dreaming about Jesus, which I was, he wasn’t impressed. And in that way, he wasn’t such a good analyst, because surely the patient’s dreams are always right. You know, he was trying to sort of say, “Well, why don’t you have dreams about Greek gods and Greek goddesses?” Because I’m a bloody Christian, that’s why.
And as you know, recently, in recent years, I’ve actually written some critical articles on Hillman, which I published in the Journal of Analytical Psychology in London. And, of course, when I published them, there was outrage in North America, because I think I was one of the first people to dare to actually criticize Hillman. In America, he was clearly a very dominant figure. I did admire him, of course, and I’d loved working with him. But I always had questions in my mind about him. One of the questions I had was, how post-Jungian is his psychology? I couldn’t see it as post-Jungian at all. The thing missing from Hillman, of course, was the self. Hillman despised the Jungian self because he saw it as an image of Christ. And indeed, Jung wrote many essays referring to Jesus as a symbol of the self. So in Hillman’s mind, Jesus was out and self was out as well. And I think that was something I didn’t like about Hillman’s work, which I’ve since published on in the Journal of Analytical Psychology in London, which is that Hillman’s psychology is basically Jung’s psychology without the self. So instead of the self—and also Jung’s psychology without individuation.
Hillman didn’t like individuation. And he actually distrusted development, which is a very odd thing for a practicing psychologist, not to not to be concerned with development. But they were the ways in which Hillman had rejected his own Jungian training. And I think, you know, just as Zurich had thrown him out, Hillman had a bit of a sense of anger and resentment about the whole Zurich scene. And therefore when he moved to America, it was very much on his mind to reject the Zurich version of Jung which was based around the self and individuation, and the connection between the self and the Way of the Cross, of course, it’s very close as you know. I mean, it’s easy to see individuation as a path, the Way of the Cross. And that made Hillman dislike it all the more.
(19:49) Jakob Lusensky: I think that could be a good transition into the actual sort of core theme of this podcast, which is exploring or investigating Christ and Christianity and its relationship to Jungian psychology, but also the questions that Jung wrestled with in his own life. And when we wrote some emails back and forth before this conversation, and we spoke about Hillman, and you said Hillman never said an interesting word about Christianity—insight or word about Christianity, he actually despised Christianity—something you also now repeated in this conversation.
And then I shared with you some of the readings I did in the book Lament of the Dead, where he has a conversation with Sonu Shamdasani. And a lot of that conversation sort of circles back to Christ and the Christ figure, and I just want to share also for the listeners, you know, some quotes where Hillman actually speaks about Christ or Christianity, for example, Shamdasani says about The Red Book, Jung’s Red Book, “if there were an index, it would show that the critical feature is Christ.” Hillman says, “Where does Christ and Christianity fit into a new psychology?” And Hillman is also saying, “There’s a tension in Jung. He doesn’t throw it out. He finds a way to remain with Christ.” What do you think about, you know, Hillman talking about Christ in this way?
(21:26) David Tacey: I don’t think Hillman would talk about it if Shamdasani hadn’t brought it up. You know, but Shamdasani is a pretty shrewd scholar, and very insightful, and I think Shamdasani is absolutely right. So people talk about The Red Book, and they talk about this plethora of figures, you know, like Philemon, and all these other figures that Jung encountered through active imagination. But Shamdasani’s right: the whole Red Book is resonating with Christian images and images of Christ. And Hillman was very enthusiastic about The Red Book. I think why Hillman was interested wasn’t because of Christ; he was interested because of—this was—the imagination had burst forth in all this color, and all these astonishing paintings and all this artwork. I think I think I found contradictory about this Red Book is that Jung denounced The Red Book, strongly. By the time he wrote Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, he said, he’d been seduced by the anima when he was writing The Red Book into thinking that he might be an artist—and all those artworks which are, in fact, some of them are very fine works of art. And then he decided at one point to put The Red Book behind him, because he needed to focus on the conceptual ideas-based substance of depth psychology, and not just the pretty pictures that he was producing in these states of distress as he was encountering figures from the unconscious.
So, but I think we’re very fortunate to have Sonu Shamdasani. And I agree with Sean McGrath that he has single-handedly made Jungian studies academically respectable. And I think that’s absolutely right. We have an enormous debt to Shamdasani. It’s interesting that Shamdasani is not an analyst. He’s a scholar. Analysts can’t quite write with the depth of history and understanding that Shamdasani has, and his training, and everything he has done has been extremely valuable. So I think, as you say, there are echoes of Christ all through The Red Book, and Jung clearly valued the Christ figure. But Hillman’s right to the extent that we can’t necessarily equate the Christ of The Red Book with the Christ of Christianity. You know, they’re very, it’s like, we can’t equate Jung’s God with the God of Christianity, either. I mean, Jung’s God was seemingly anti-Christian in some ways. One of Jung’s first experiences of his contact with his God was that his God let fly a giant turd onto the Basel Cathedral, which of course Freudians read as an Oedipal—they refer to it as anal aggressivity. Anal aggressivity against the church of his father, which was personified architecturally by the Basel Cathedral.
(25:12) (Narrator reading from Jung): Jung’s vision of the Basel Cathedral.
One fine summer day that same year, I came out of school at noon, and went to the Cathedral Square. The sky was gloriously blue. The day, one of radiant sunshine. The roof of the cathedral glittered, the sun sparkling from the blue, lightly glazed eyes. I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the sight, and thought, “The world is beautiful. And the church is beautiful. And God made all this, and sits above it far away in the blue sky on a golden throne.” And there came a great hold in my thoughts, and a choking sensation. I felt numbed and knew only, “Don’t go on thinking now. Something terrible is coming. Something I do not want to think. Something I dare not even approach. Why not? Because I would be committing the most frightful of sins. What is the most terrible sin? Murder? No, it can’t be that. The most terrible sin is the sin against the Holy Ghost, which cannot be forgiven.” I gathered all my courage, as though I were about to leap forthwith into hellfire. And let the thought come. I saw before me the Cathedral, the blue sky. God sits upon his golden throne, high above the world. And from under the throne, an enormous turd falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks the walls of the cathedral asunder. So that was it. I felt an enormous and indescribable relief. Instead of the expected damnation, grace had come upon me, and with it, an unalterable bliss such as I had never known. I wept for happiness and gratitude. The wisdom and goodness of God had been revealed to me now that I had yielded to his inexhaustible command. It was as though I had experienced an illumination. A great many things I had not previously understood became clear to me.
(27:41) David Tacey: I don’t get too excited by Christians who claim that Jung’s work helps Christianity to recover, because clearly Christianity as a tradition is in decline in Europe, and in all European-influenced countries such as my own, Australia and New Zealand. Christianity, in its public forms, basically, is at the point of collapse. Jung’s Christ is a Gnostic figure. I don’t think Jung’s Christ is in line with orthodox understandings of Jesus at all. But Jung respected the fact that his own soul had historical antecedents and historical background. There was no way that Jung was going to completely reject Christianity.
Although, of course, Christians rejected Jung—many, many of them, especially Father Victor White, but also other Christians that tried to work with Jung found it almost impossible to reconcile Jung’s work with Christianity. Jung burned his bridges with Christianity by insisting on gnosis about faith. And I think this was the basis of the rift with Christians: that Christians emphasize faith; Jung emphasizes gnosis or knowledge. And that’s why, you know, in that famous interview, he says, I don’t believe in God I know. Which is a funny thing to say, in some ways, because it is very Gnostic thing to say. So very much upset, I think Christians worldwide, when Jung seemed to condemn the idea of belief and the related concept of faith.
(29:48) Jakob Lusensky: But you also say, and also you told me that yeah you can be understood as agnostic, but you said, not in a negative sense, and you speak also how he sort of counterbalances this knowledge with his agnostic scientific persona. Could you say some—
(30:06) David Tacey: Well that’s right. Yes, he does. I mean, Jung’s persona, which is what we see throughout The Collected Works, except in Answer to Job. I mean, his so-called scientific persona basically dissolves. And he’s writing Answer to Job as a very passionate person, and a Gnostic who believes that there is a God, and there is divine significance in the figure of Jesus Christ. But I think these two sides of Jung were often in conflict. I think Jung wasn’t really unified in his own personality about Christianity. He certainly couldn’t get rid of it. And it had a claim on him, which I think he found almost grew stronger as he got older. So, as you know, Jung thought that the things that Christians consider to be literally true, like the virgin birth, and physical resurrection, the walking on water, the feeding of thousands with two fish and three loaves, all these for Jung were complete nonsense as historical events. They had to be read symbolically, and taken symbolically as statements of myth. But as soon as you say that to some Christians, they think you’re being very heretical and even blaspheming, because we’re talking about changing the way the Holy Book is read. But Jung thought that the writers of the gospels were all writing in symbolic ways, in symbolic terms, and that—so Jung reverses the tables. It wasn’t that he was reading the bible incorrectly, but in his view, Christians had en mass in large numbers, read the bible incorrectly for centuries. And of course, he goes right back. And one of your favorite figures is Origen, who was a strong Christian convert in Alexandria in Egypt. And he, if you read Origen’s work, he was, of course, reading the bible non-literally, reading the texts that were available in his day, including the Gospel of Thomas, reading them non-literally. And Origen said that’s the only way we should read. Otherwise, they become documents about impossible events.
So I published a book on that, which was called Religion as Metaphor. I published that in America some years ago. And that’s my—that was my contribution to this debate. And again, Christians misunderstand my motivation. It wasn’t to destroy Christianity at all, because I remain a Christian, but to try and deepen our understanding of Christianity.
(33:37) Jakob Lusensky: You wrote me before this conversation that—you said, “I don’t think Jung was ultimately a Christian.” He was born Christian, educated in the Christian mold, and much of his late work was focused on the analysis of Christian ideas, beliefs, and dogmas. But you say that it seems to you that he outgrew Christianity, and you say, as soon as he entered young adulthood. And in a way, I hear you, but I’m also hearing you speaking about how Jung wrestled and tried and wanted to create a reformation or a revisioning, or a new understanding of the gospel or of Christianity.
(34:16) David Tacey: So when I said that Jung is not Christian, I’m got my tongue in my cheek, because of course he was obsessed with Christianity all of his life. And I say Jung was not a Christian, I would qualify that statement by saying that Jung was not a Christian as the person down the street in a Christian country would recognize Christianity, the sorts of things that they hold to be true for their faith. For instance, you know, where Paul says in the Letters to the Corinthians that if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, then all our faith is in vain. While Jung just disregards that, and in fact, he wrote an entire essay on the resurrection. It’s in volume 18, which is called The Symbolic Life. And people who try to reconcile Jung with mainstream Christianity should read that essay on the resurrection. Before they utter statements like, “Jung is definitely trying to renew or revivify the Christian religion.” Jung, I think, like—very similar to his predecessor Origen—wanted to basically smash Christianity in its present forms, because of its literalism and its supernaturalism, which did not appeal to Jung at all. And if you read Answer to Job, particularly his preface to Answer to Job, he does say there that the Christianity that we are historically aware of as Christianity will have to disappear in order to give rise to a new understanding of Christianity, where all the miracles and wonders and supernatural events, including the physical resurrection, which many Christians say is the foundation of their faith. Well, Jung says that all of that has to be overturned, and we have to rediscover Christianity as a symbolic mythos. The public participation in Christianity in my country is as low as about five or six percent of the population.
(36:44) Jakob Lusensky: Well Jung is definitely right, I mean, it seems to be happening already that that this religion is in a process of if not dying, mourning, or grieving something that was, but I’m also wondering in what way this critique or this disruption, you know, of Jung is helpful for dreaming the myth forward? Because still it’s the Christian myth, and the dream is still the Christian dream, no? That, you know, and I think sometimes there’s also a lot of negativity in Jung, in the Jungian field, about Christ and Christianity, to relate to, it’s difficult to—as I spoke to another scholar, so before this one, Ann Conrad Lammers—she says that maybe a bridge is not a good metaphor for what one could do between, you know, between Christianity or Christ and Jungianism. It’s too, sort of, grand of a building, to try to build a bridge in this way. It’s failed, or it broke down. And here we are in a Christian world that is disintegrating.
(37:52) David Tacey: Yeah, the bridge collapsed. Yeah, he tried to build a bridge, but it just collapsed. See, he was only building it from his side. If you ask any engineer or architect, they will tell you that bridges need to be built from both sides of the gap. A bridge can’t be built from one side, it would just collapse. It has to be built from the other side. And that’s why when the Christians that Jung was working with deserted him, and really that’s when the bridge collapsed, there was no bridge. Although he wanted to build one. And Christians often complain that Jung was replacing religion with psychology. And I think I’ve heard many Jungians say that. I don’t believe that for a minute.
I think Jung was saying, we need an approach to religion. We don’t need to replace it. We need to understand it anew from a psychological point of view. That’s a statement he makes time and again, in Psychology and Alchemy. He keeps saying, “I’m not—” You know, he was accused of psychologism. That was the word religious people used in anger at Jung, as if he was reducing everything to psychology. It simply wasn’t the case. If you read him carefully, he was saying—what did he call religion? Something like mysterious or sanctified psychobabble or something?—until we unravel all this symbolism and understand its deeper meaning, and then it becomes valid again. And then that’s the—so perhaps Jung was the post-doctrinal Christian.
He certainly did not agree with the doctrines of Christianity. He could never read out the Apostles Creed with any sense of moral conscience. And the, you know, he’d say, “Look, this was written in the third century or fourth century.” I think the introduction to Answer to Job, which is only about five pages, is the most cogent statement Jung ever wrote about Christianity, and why it had to die in its current form. You see, this is the important thing. Jung felt it had to die in its current form in order to be reborn in a new way. So in a sense, you can see how the Christian myth is operating, even in that statement. You have to die to be born again. In other words, this what we’re going through at the moment is the crucifixion of Christianity. And the Christians are saying, ‘Help, help! This is not nice. We’re on the cross. We want to fast-forward to the resurrection.’ You can’t fast-forward to the resurrection. You have to experience the agony of the cross. And as I said, I get misread as trying to destroy Christianity, but anyone who tries to change anything, is claimed to be a destroyer.
(41:25) Jakob Lusensky: I love, you know, your metaphor or image of Christians on the cross at this moment of history. It’s a very beautiful, powerful image that you’re sharing. But I also believe strongly in what you say about the importance of symbolical understanding or reading these stories and myths, mythologically or symbolically, that Christianity is not only about, you know, personal salvation. Or maybe some would say this—but it’s also about the world. It’s also about community, it’s also about the collective. And it’s also about, “This is Christ,” for some at least, which speaks about not only my individuation, but the world’s. So I’m wondering, and that—and we do see the churches emptying out or being destroyed or being left? So I’m wondering also on that aspect, because it’s an aspect that Jungians are not always so strong on, the collective aspect of this, or you know, the universal.
(42:28) David Tacey: That’s right. And that’s why the Vatican keeps condemning Jung. You know, the Vatican has produced I think now three documents condemning Jung. And one of the reasons they keep condemning him is that they say he’s advocating narcissism, individualism, and ignoring the collective. And I’ll tell you what, they’ve got a good point. Because, to some extent, Jungian analysis is about me, my encounter with my unconscious. And that’s bizarre because Jung’s terms aren’t about me and my, they’re about the collective unconscious. So why do people suddenly forget that the unconscious is not just my personal possession, but it’s part of the collectivity?
And I think that this is the great contribution that Christianity has made, and continues to make, although it’s in a very weakened form these days. It’s this emphasis on community and this emphasis on shared experience of the divine rather than my individuation and my personal symbols of the divine which I’ve garnered from my dreams. But even that is contradictory, because Jung pointed out that the most important dreams we have are collective dreams. And he, of course, when he was in Africa, the Algomni—where was it now, in Kenya and Ethiopia—kept kept telling him that there’s a big difference between little dreams and big dreams. And big dreams are the dreams that affect the whole country, the whole race, the whole nation. And I think some of us continue to have big dreams. But if we just sit on them and think that they’re only personal things that have arisen for our personal development or aggrandizement—I do think that Jung started to feel guilty about this individualism toward the end of his career, because don’t forget, he constantly tried to correct people. He said, “My work is about individuation, not individualism.”
And he would continue to say the individualism is a misreading of individuation. And particularly in that late essay of his called “The Undiscovered Self,” that’s very much concerned about society, about people in Europe and elsewhere. They can’t live, he thought, without an idea of God. Because we have to have something at the center of our lives, which can provide a focus not only for our belief, but also for our development as individuals. And so I think Jung developed a strong conscience about the way that his work would probably be misused as a purely personal way of attending to your own personal growth, which certainly wasn’t his intention. But if you read a lot of Jungians, you would think that was his intention. A lot of the popular books about Jung are exactly rigid in that kind of mode, as if society doesn’t exist. And community isn’t needed. Well, of course, we cannot have a world full of individuated individuals without having also a developed and individuated community. And that’s where Christianity, I think, still has a lot to teach everybody, including Jungians.
(46:17) Jakob Lusensky: Well, I wanted to maybe just spend the last minutes, which is not enough, but to talk about the paper that I think you wrote most recently for your lecture series in Russia, which is called—one of them, at least, is called—“Jung as a Prophet for a New Dispensation.” And you argue that Jung actually was a prophet and can only be understood in this light. Yes, Jung is suffering from carrying a prophetic burden.
(46:49) David Tacey: Absolutely. In my view, yeah—
(46:51) Jakob Lusensky: Could you speak a bit about Jung as a prophet?
(46:54) David Tacey: Well, yes. I know my dear friend and colleague, Sean McGrath, disagrees strongly with me, and I challenge him to a debate, actually, on this. I do think that Jung can only be understood as a prophet. If you read The Red Book, I mean, the whole book is a book of prophecy. Maybe people like Sean and others are thinking that Jung is not a prophet in the mainstream Judeo-Christian tradition. And I’d certainly agree with that. But that’s not the only form of prophecy; you can have all kinds of prophecy concerned with the future.
And of course, you know, that famous discussion Jung had with Max Zeller, from Berlin, when Zeller was leaving Zurich to found the Jung Institute of Los Angeles, in California. Just before he left, he had this dream that people were building this vast temple. And the foundations were already there, but they were building pillars and walls and roofs. And Jung’s response to this was very enthusiastic. He’d tap his pipe on his chair, and he’d say, “This is the new temple.” And he’d say, “They’re building it in India. They’re building it in America. They’re building it in Russia. They’re building it in China.” And Max Zeller asked him, “How long will it take to build this church?” And Jung said, “I know.” And Zeller said, “Well, how do you know?” And Jung said, “From people’s dreams, and from my own dreams. And to build this new temple, this new religion, if you like, will take six hundred years.”
That’s a long time to wait. So I think what Jung said in his public statements, which he often said—“I’m not a prophet, and I’m not here to found a new religious order. And I’m a psychologist and empiricist and a phenomenologist”—was totally contradicted by what he said privately to Max Zeller. And that can be found in Max Zeller’s book, called The Dream: Visions of the Night. And I think Jung played a duplicitous game with many of us. He would go to London and give talks to the guild of pastoral psychology, and say that he wasn’t a religious leader, he was simply a humble clinician. It’s total nonsense. I mean, who’s he fooling? He was a prophet. And I think he’ll be regarded as such in the future, as a major prophet—not necessarily of some new religion that has nothing to do with his own Christian roots. Quite the contrary. I do think that Jung wanted to dream the Christian dream onward. And I do think he wanted it to learn a lot of things from Buddhism in particular. They’re the two religions that Jung valued most of all: Christianity and Buddhism. He was less keen on Judaism. And he wasn’t too keen on Islam either. Nor was he very keen on Hinduism. Although he did borrow from Hinduism. The very idea of the self comes from Hinduism in its concept of the atman.
But I think Jung thought that the future might be some amalgam of Christianity and Buddhism. And I think he would hope that the new religion or the new faith will maintain Christianity’s commitment to community and to social justice, but be incorporated or complemented by the Buddhist emphasis on introspection, contemplation, meditation, and interiority. And as you know, Jung was quite critical of countless Europeans, including many people from his own native Switzerland, who were abandoning Christianity and turning toward Buddhism. And he’d say, “Well, you’re abandoning the houses that you fathers built, the churches, and you’re invading the temples of India and Sri Lanka, and Japan, the Zen Buddhist temples that your fathers didn’t build.” So Jung is often criticized for those statements. But what he was saying, in effect, was the soul has history.
We can’t forget and ignore the history of the soul. And you cannot take two thousand years of Christian history and just put it in the garbage can. It’s not going to work. Christianity has been part of our spiritual and our soulful makeup for a long, long time and a long, long time to come. But that’s the good news. The bad news is that it won’t survive in its current forms. And its current forms might have to collapse in order to give rise to this sort of fusion of Buddhism and Christianity. So Jung, I think, had a very grand vision. He was a prophet, and many too Jungians try to ignore this dimension of his life and his work when we should not ignore it at all.
I mean, Jung is a tragic figure. I mean, Shamdasani says this in his book on the birth of a new psychology, that Jung falls between two stools. He’s too religious for the scientists. And he’s too scientific for the religious. So Jung, the fate of Jung, is somewhat tragic. He wanted to form a place midway between science and religion. And no one was going to do that, at least not a hundred years ago. They’re more likely to do it now, in the age of quantum physics and new biology and new ecology. This is the one of the paradoxes of the whole field. Jung speaks more to the twenty-first century than he does to the twentieth. And I know I wrote in one of my books somewhere that the twentieth century may have been Freud’s, but the twenty-first century, I think, will be Jung’s. He will emerge as the dominant figure, not Freud, who will disappear into the background as actually a very minor figure. I mean, if you look at contemporary biology, you know, like Rupert Sheldrake, contemporary physics like Paul Davies, and these sorts of people, they’re all talking about the numinous dimension of matter. You know, Thomas Berry, one of the most famous ecologists, whose work of course is based on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit who was rejected by his own Catholic Church. All these new building blocks of the new sciences. Look at physics, biology, chemistry, ecology, all the sciences, are moving in a Jungian direction. And maybe we could talk about that in another time.