"Deus Aderit": Learning from Carl Jung

Thinking Friend Dick Wilson in North Carolina didn’t know about my intention to write this article on Carl Jung when he ended his comments on my July 25 blog post, “vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit [Invited or not, God shows up!],” words long associated with the famed Swiss psychoanalyst. 

Jung’s Formative Years

Jung was born 145 years ago (on July 26, 1875) in a city about 50 miles northeast of Zürich, Switzerland. His father was a Swiss Reformed Church pastor, and his mother was the daughter of a distinguished churchman and academic—but she was also emotionally unbalanced when Jung was young.

Carl initially wanted to become a pastor, but he decided against the path of religious traditionalism and decided instead to pursue psychiatry and medicine. Consequently, at the age of 20 he began to study medicine at the University of Basel.

In 1900, Jung moved to Zürich and began working in a psychiatric hospital. Three years later he married Emma Rauschenbach, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist.

Jung met Sigmund Freud in 1907 and the two psychiatrists had a close relationship until 1912. They met for the last time in 1913, when Freud wrote, “We took leave from one another without feeling the need to meet again.”

In 1908 the Jungs bought land near Lake Zürich in Küsnacht, Switzerland, and had a large three-story house constructed there with money Emma had inherited. That was Carl’s home until his death in June 1961. (Emma died in 1955).

Above the entrance doorway, the Jungs had these words permanently inscribed: VOCATUS ATQUE NON VOCATUS DEUS ADERIT. An alternative translation to that given by Dick (above) is: “Invoked or not invoked, God is present.” Those Latin words are also engraved on Jung’s tombstone.  

Entrance doorway to Carl and Emma Jung's house

Jung’s Productive Years

During the first half of his adult life, Jung developed an approach toward understanding the human psyche that contrasted that of Sigmund Freud. His important books during this time are Psychology of the Unconscious (1912), Psychological Types (1921), and Psychology and Religion (1938).

During these productive years, Jung introduced such terms as archetypes, collective unconscious, introvert and extrovert (originally extravert), persona, and shadow.

Unlike Freud, who understood God as a human fabrication, the infantile projection of the human need for protection, Jung was primarily positive toward religion and the reality of God.

(Click here to access my 10/15/14 blog post titled “Was Freud a Fraud?” In that article, I question Freud’s assertion that belief in God is just wish fulfillment and that religion is ““the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity.”)

Jung’s Reflective Years

While Jung’s concept of God wasn’t necessarily that of traditional Christianity, neither was it oppositional. His position seems clearly to have been starkly in contrast to Freud’s.

In 1952, when he was past 75, he wrote to a clergyman, “I find that all my thoughts circle around God like the planets around the sun, and are as irresistibly attracted to Him” (cited here in 2016).

Seven years later in a BBC “Face to Face” interview, Jung was asked if he believed in God. He replied, “I don’t need to believe, I know.”

According to psychologist Steve Myers (see here), in that statement Jung affirmed God as “a certainty” that was “based on evidence. His practice as a psychotherapist and his mythological research had convinced him of God’s existence.”

It was my reading of the highly respected (by me and many others) Richard Rohr that prompted this article on Jung. In his 2019 book The Universal Christ, Rohr has a three-page subsection about Jung and later cites the Latin inscription above the doorway to Jung’s house.

In his “daily meditation” for 1/2/15, Rohr writes about his “wisdom lineage.” He refers to “the brilliant psychology of Carl Jung,” and that is the only twentieth-century name mentioned.

The world would be better off if more people would spurn Freud and learn from Jung. Everyone needs to realize, as Jung evidently did, that Deus aderit: God is present, whether invoked or not.