Judaism and Christianity in Jungian Psychology

The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) was a member of Freud’s early psychoanalytical movement. However, he broke with Freud in 1912 over a variety of issues, including the importance of religion in psychological life. Jung viewed the religious impulse as a sui generis psychological activity, and his conception of the unconscious was fundamentally different than Freud’s (see “Judaism and Christianity in Freudian Psychology”). Unlike Freud, who viewed most unconscious contents as the result of repression, Jung conceived of two strata of unconscious processes. The personal unconscious corresponded roughly with Freud’s conception. But according to Jung, there was also a deeper transpersonal stratum shared by all human minds that he referred to as the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious was the creative mythopoetic center of the psyche. It included the archetypes comparable to the Platonic “ideas” and like the Kantian a priori, served to structure psychological...