Jung and metaphysics: a contradiction? (2005)
by Robert I. Winer, M.D.

Jung and the spiritual indicia

It is my sense that Jungian depth psychology has a paucity of written material on what might be called the spiritual indicia as it relates to traditional religion and how this spiritual factor functions in individuals. In a 1929 lecture given at the 4th General Medical Congress for Psychotherapy, "The Aims of Psychotherapy," Jung asked the clinician to consider the principle of psychotherapeutic indicia. Beside age, Jung included the indicia of attitude preference (introvert / extravert); predominance of one particular psychic function; and whether a patient had a spiritual or materialistic attitude toward life.

It is to those who know that their predominant temperament is a "spiritual attitude toward life" that this section is devoted. Yet I hope that these thoughts are vital to all who see life as a continual process of growth. It seems to me a reflective life demands that one know what side of the indicia their temperament lay: the spiritual or the material. This indicia doesn't mean that one can ignore or repress the opposite tendency but rather that the preferred side be given more of a feeling value. Thus, the balance of these two opposites will generally be more of an imbalance, imaged as a scale where one side has more weight than the other. From an energic standpoint, this imbalance leads to a dynamism – a flow of energy whereas a perfectly balanced scale results in no movement or flux, since there is no potential energy. A life lived within the image of this "over-weighted " scale is always full of wonderful and life-bringing change.

Jung, the spiritual indicia, and traditional religion

What does Jung have to say about the spiritual indicia and the traditional Judeo-Christian life and viewpoint? For the most part, he found it devoid of spiritual energy and life, which I believe was the chief reason he chose not to walk out his spiritual life within the framework of any existing Judeo-Christian congregational setting. For Jung, the spiritual life that he helped others into was an exclusively individual journey and space.

One would do well to keep in mind that Jung's writings are not theological but psychological and empirical. This fact is often ignored, though in defense of the reader, the psychological background necessary to understand his viewpoint seems far beyond the average person. For myself, it took almost four years of concentrated study before I began to clearly understand this Jungian distinctive. Therefore, it is inevitable that Jung will be misunderstood, and for the most part labeled as either an atheist, agnostic, or New Age advocate. Since his approach to Christian theological concepts is psychological, traditionalists will find it shocking that his writing's seem to give historical, alchemical, and non-canonical writings an equal footing to Scripture. This occurs because one of Jung's central principles was that it is beyond the scope and domain of the psychological and empirical standpoint to give any written material a higher status based upon how any community views it. Jung writes about this principle as "epistemological considerations." In particular, it is this psychological / empirical standpoint that gives the most offense to the traditionalist from a Judeo-Christian perspective.

Robert Winer, M.D.
January, 2005