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.
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