Aplicación en Android

Jung stands out from other depth psychologists in his positing the existence of a religious instinct. Operating in us, independent of our will, this instinct is a capacity for and urge towards conscious relationship to transpersonal deity (Jung 1953: para. 11). We can fall just as ill from disorder in our relationship to this instinct as we can to any other. Repression of sexuality leads to all sorts of outbreaks of complicated symptoms. The splitting off of our aggression leads to schizoid disorder and variations of a passive-aggressive character. Efforts to control our hunger instinct land us in eating disorders of all kinds. So too with the religious instinct: when frustrated or thwarted it has its own unmistakable pathology.

I have seen the disease of alcoholism contain a massive psychosomatic defence against facing the inner emptiness that stands behind the disease. One man poured all his energy into persona performance to flee from an engulfing sense of lack which he simply refused admittance. He knew meaning existed, but he could not house it in his own living. He needed more and more drink to keep his persona—the mask he showed to the world—intact and adequate to present his usually high level of performance. Meanwhile behind the mask, when he faced inward to his own private and unconscious life, it was as if another part of him that felt both like and unlike himself, and turned up in dreams and fantasy as a hated woman (his anima), were raising more and more hell. Sometimes he dreamt of various women who were standing up in public to expose his drinking. Other times he dreamt of a female wanting to trap him into lifelong dreary servitude. Another dream theme presented women in various stages of illness, hysteria, or maudlin moping. He put it poignantly: ‘Drink is my fuel to perform and my reward when alone, but it does not allow me to do two necessary things—to pray and to do this analytical work/He might have added, ‘dangerous analytical work’. The analysis was dangerous. When we worked successfully, we inevitably came to the mangled and dreaded woman-part that enraged the man. His psyche would use me in the transference to carry it. He would say, ‘I love you as an analyst, but I don’t want you to be a woman. Whenever I think of you as a woman I want to slap you!’ When we reached his pivotal point, this point of breakthrough, where we could look at and talk with this anima, the drinking

defence overcame him and interrupted therapy, sometimes for as long as three months. All the work seemed to wash away in alcohol.

We can repress the religious instinct, and the power of the primordial can fall on to drink and make it an idol that enslaves us in addiction. It can get identified with other things, too, and then we find our usual idolatries— money, work, food, drugs, family, love relationship. Or we can fall into identification with this power of the primordial and see ourselves as gurus, wise beyond telling, inflated beyond our small human size. We can always spot an idol because it apes the ways of God. Everything in us revolves around, say, food, or an inferiority complex, or identity crisis. We think of it all the time, in every situation, devote enormous amounts of energy to it. We are distracted from listening to others because of our thinking and fantasizing all the time about what we can eat and when, or how the other sees us and why. Inside our compulsion hides the religious instinct, bending us to masochistic enslavement, which is the shadow side of veneration (Gordon 1984).

We can also dodge the religious instinct by substituting our map of it for the territory it describes. Then we use our theories as convenient places in which to hide; Jung’s map of the numinous, for example, becomes our pseudo-religion. Revelling in it, we avoid our own immediate experience of the religious territory, living at a great remove from our creative centre. Our unreceived primordial power puffs up our interest in Jung; we become fanatical—and boring!

We can also put another person in place of our religious instinct. A woman whose love and money were entangled with a man who had been central in her life for three decades, though it was essential to separate her life from his, found this extraordinarily difficult to do, to the point where she lost hundreds of thousands of dollars because she could not move quickly or decisively to make the break. She felt both homicidal and suicidal. Disentangling her connection to him involved identifying and separating many strands—giving up her idealization of him, ending her long practice of denying the bad in him and between them, withdrawing from all the demands and displacements and projections to claim in herself the power she had put on to him. The crucial piece was her projection of the religious instinct so fully on to him that she then identified him as the authority in her life. What made her feel conscious of her capacity for relating to a centre that gave her hope and a sense of living creatively and unified within herself was all caught up with him. God came in a wrapper made up of this man’s parts. Her belief was not too clearly expressed, but was deeply felt. She hated official religions and traditional religious process and saw them as coercive and controlling. The values she held she had discovered with this man when younger, and these too she identified with him. She believed in humanness and humaneness, in the rock-bottom goodness of people, in their simple acts of kindness and respect. As she struggled to express all of

this, I asked her about what had surfaced: ‘You believe in this, don’t you? This is your value, isn’t it?’ She saw for a moment how she had wrapped her sense of value round this man like a coat that now would not come off. She saw then why she had felt that if she separated from him she would be separating herself from all she had ever believed made life worth while. She saw she could not leave him, because that meant living away from the primordial. To see that this sense of value was like indispensable protective clothing, like his raincoat around him, but was not the man himself and was not carried only by him, but was really her own coat of values, became a little epiphany for her. It was an immensely moving moment for both of us, a little bit of numinous fire suddenly flaming up in the office on an otherwise average Wednesday morning.

Jung writes early on that the soul ‘is a function of relation between the subject and the inaccessible depths of the unconscious. The determining force (God) operating from these depths is reflected by the soul, that is, it creates symbols and images.’ The soul is then ‘both receiver and transmitter’, perceives unconscious contents and conveys them to consciousness by means of these symbols (Jung 1971: para. 424). The soul lives, as it were, midway between the ego and the primordial unconscious, which expresses itself through the archetypal images that the soul receives, creates and transmits. Jung continues, ‘when God is in the soul, i.e., when the soul becomes a vessel for the unconscious and makes itself an image or symbol for it, this is truly a happy state…[which] is a creative state’ (Jung 1971: para. 424). The soul gives birth to images—like the wrapper, like the overcoat which really is removable from the man and must be acknowledged and donned by the woman herself—but we can lose these images in licentious behaviour, aesthetic indulgence, quasi-religious enthusiasm and addictive compulsion, where we project them into various substances where they soon lose their identity and disappear. To realize these images consciously and relate to them is to be free to adapt to reality and promote our happiness and well- being.

Depth psychologists other than Jung aim towards this same under-standing. It is interesting to see how this one-hundred-year-old discipline, as it advances towards the end of our century and millennium, increasingly takes up religious questions, even if only implicitly. For example, in our therapeutic theorizing, we reach further and further back in a child’s life for the origin of being, for signs of the existence of any self at all. We seek that intra-subjective space where we feel alive, real, in a creative living of life that sustains hope and joy and makes for some sense of meaning even in the most wretched of circumstances. This is the space Winnicott calls transitional, from which our symbols spring (Winnicott 1970:1–26, 65–72); the space that Freud finds between the free-associating ego and the observing-ego which allows us freedom from instinct at the same time that we channel it into life projects (Freud 1949:33–6, 45, 108–14; see also Loewald 1978:13–19). In this space

Kohut locates the cohesive self, so elusive of definition, but also central to living (Kohut 1970:134–5). Bion talks about this space as the ultimate O, the truth of the moment (Bion 1970:26); Klein finds in it the mysterious triggering of our reparative efforts to make things better and to express gratitude (Klein 1957:187–9). Such moments spring from facing the ambiguous mixture in us and in those we love of good and bad, love and hate. Christopher Bollas writes of this as an evocative space where we receive news from within, and Masud Khan of our lying fallow and finding the self from which to live (Bollas 1991:202; Khan 1983:183–9).

All workers in analysis aim for this space, but Jung speaks of it explicitly as our religious instinct—a force archaic and immediate, insistent and commanding. We may turn away from the instinct, put it to wrong use, deflect it, or fall into identification with it, but we cannot escape it. Jung brings the primordial right into the consulting room this way, and asks of every symptom or depression, or even trauma: what is the Self engineering? What is being made manifest here to which we must pay close attention?

For example, the woman who could not free herself or her money from the man she used to love discovered a radically different way of looking at her entrapment. She still saw her unsuccessful struggle over several decades to liberate herself in terms of her accusations against herself—as a product of illness, of fragmentation, of excessive projection of power on to him, of her tendency to be cowardly and too easily bullied. But now she also saw that she had equated leaving him with abandoning what she believed in, with perjuring the good as she knew it (Ulanov 1988:37). She saw now that her getting free from this man manifested not just her sickness but also her faithfulness to the good where it had found her. Her addictive attachment to him did indeed reflect her woundedness—the result of never knowing a container, of having a mother afflicted with psychotic episodes and a stepfather who tyrannized and molested her. It was not easy to give up the home-base she had established with this man. But this relationship also contained serious and ugly abuses of many different kinds, all mixed in with the goodness she and he had created together, and the goodness in which she believed and which she had identified with him as if it originated there.

The epiphany of the image of the wrapper—of the coat draped on this man—was no less for her than a discovery that God is portable. The good was not grafted on to this man, but removable. She could see it itself between them, between her and other people, on its own, existing in its own right. Like Yahweh’s priests who carry the Ark and know it is not identified with just one particular place, or like Yahweh’s words of self-revelation—I am who is, I am who is with you—she now saw that her responsibility and devotion were to goodness, not to the man upon whom she had grafted it. It lived. For her, this was where Being was and is.

Such seeing redeems suffering as it did in this case, not by denying the woman’s fragmentation or woundedness, but by revealing that hiding in her

illness was also a determination to stay close to goodness, to the transcendent, and not desert or abandon it. This may sound like a mere shift of accent, or even a verbal sleight of hand. But not to the person involved: to him or to her, it makes all the difference in the world, for here, found for us, is the deeper meaning of suffering, and that makes it bearable and forgivable. Redeemed, the woman’s suffering opened a future to her.

Jung, it is clear from these examples, works to reconnect religion to its archaic instinctive roots, from which the symbols of theology and ritual spring. When we reach and link ourselves to the primordial religious impulse deep within us, we fashion a formidable hermeneutic for ourselves. We can now interpret religious doctrines, symbols and rituals in terms of their analogies in our own psychological experiences and those of the collective human psyche. Religion ceases to be merely an intellectual activity or a systematic exploration of abstract principles of being. Instead, it reaches right into our hearts, our souls, our bowels. It helps uncover the meaning hiding in our experiences. This hermeneutic does not replace such interpretative methods as literary-form criticism, historical criticism or sociological analysis, but rather adds to them the psychological. We ask, for example, about the psychological equivalent of the visions of Ezekiel, or of the parable of the sheep and goats (Jung 1932: para. 520; see also Ulanov 1986a).

To address the psychological meaning of symbols, both for ourselves and in the history of symbology, does not equate the psyche, or any of its parts, and especially not the unconscious, with the deity. The unconscious is not God, but it is another medium through which God speaks to us (Jung 1956: para. 565). God addresses us through images that arise from the deep unconscious just as much as God addresses us through national events, historical moments, other people, a sermon, another’s pain or generosity, and especially through the witness of Scripture and the believing community. Jung reminds us with great force of God’s freedom. He also reminds us that we tend to ignore the human psyche as another central way through which God touches us—in dreams, visions, symbols, even in symptom and complex. It behooves us to keep all this in mind when working with the unconscious. We have in hand an empirical method for studying living religion (Jung 1956: paras 565–6; Ulanov 1986a; Ulanov and Ulanov 1975:35–9).

PRAYER

Prayer opens a psychological and religious reality to us. We must look at the ways prayer functions in the psyche, whether for illness or health, and we must look at whether or not prayer points to real transcendence. Jung devotes most of his attention to prayer as it functions psychologically. He says, for example, that the God-image is an archetypal idea which is everywhere,

which ‘I observe but I do not invent’ (Jung 1984:511). God is a’psychic fact of immediate experience… God has general validity in as much as almost everyone knows approximately what is meant by the term “experience of God”’ (Jung 1926: para. 625).

Our image of God is thrown up spontaneously from the unconscious like ‘a being that exists in its own right and therefore confronts its ostensible creator autonomously’ (Jung 1976: para. 95). We have a dialectical relationship with this figure. In naive moments we experience it as existing in and for itself and feel that we did not fashion it; it fashioned itself in us. We cannot really decide ‘whether the God-image is created or whether it creates itself’ (Jung 1967: para. 95). In religious language, this paradox is to be found in the creed, where in referring to Jesus, the God-image that God gives us, he is defined as ‘begotten not made’. We put this dialectical and paradoxical relationship to practical use when we pray.

We call upon the ‘divine presence in all difficult or dangerous situations, for the purpose of loading all… [our] unbearable difficulties upon the Almighty and expecting help…. In the psychological sense this means that complexes weighing on the soul are consciously transferred to the Godimage’ (Jung 1967: para. 95). Such praying benefits us because we can then carry our complexes consciously. Repression enacts an inversion of this prayer, a sort of dumping into the unconscious of all that we want to forget about. Here, instead, in prayer, we carry what belongs to us, and are able to do so because we are not all alone.

Jung goes further. He recognizes that any discipline undertaken for religious reasons not only aids us in remaining conscious of our difficulties, but also enables us to confess our sins; for it ‘effectively prevents… [us] from becoming unconscious’ (Jung 1967: para. 95). Confession brings us into a new community, because it is an enlarging enterprise, undertaken ‘for the sake of collectivity, for a social purpose…. Through sin and secrecy one is excluded and when one confesses one is included again.’ This builds up a new society: The idea of confession being a collective duty is an attempt on the part of the unconscious to create the basis of a new collectivity’ (Jung 1984:23).

By such a fullness of confession as we find in prayer, where we prevent ‘a known suffering from turning into an unknown one’, we join with others, both in keeping the conflicts of opposites within us conscious and in recognizing a superior power which lightens our burdens because we surrender them ‘to God to whom all solutions are known’ (Jung 1967: para. 95). It is crucial to note that all this enlarging and joining and recognizing occurs where we are most wounded and divided in our nature, just where we are ‘weakest and lowest; there intercession takes place’ (Jung 1984:506). Could this be the stable in us where Christ gets born? Where the soul comes alive? Where we need and desire the most and wish most strongly, because we are so poor in our own resources? There God arrives.

One man, for example, long practised in the skills of analysis, none the less felt powerless in the grip of a compulsion. He put its power in psychological terms: the ego is not in control of everything in life; therefore my compulsion is a defeat for my ego. He knew that with certainty, he felt.