When I first joined the Psychology and Biblical Studies Group
back in 1991, there was one thing I thought I knew for certain
about the relationship between depth psychology and religion,
and it was this: Freud had dismissed religion as a "universal
obsessional neurosis," whereas Jung had a positive attitude
towards it. I have since learned that the differences in approach
between the two men are actually more a matter of focus than
of theory. Jung was every bit as critical as Freud of conventional
religiosity, though for different reasons. Freud believed
that "religion creates a false preoccupation with eschatology
that effectively dehistoricizes its practitioners by focusing
attention on a future life that will compensate for the sufferings
and deprivations of the present." Jung blamed Christian
theology for the rationalistic historicism which had brought
his pastor father to despair. Indeed, Jung may pose a greater
threat to institutional religion than Freud. Since the latter
restricted himself to "the lower levels" of the
psyche, it is possible to use his psychology as a strategy
for the cure of souls, while simply ignoring his atheism.
But Jung is quite a different story. His designation of religion
as a "therapeutic system" does not adequately convey
orthodox Christianity’s self-understanding, and his phenomenological
approach seems to blur the distinction between God and the
unconscious and to make analytical psychology a new religion.
Although
Freud was not a practicing Jew and Jung was not a practicing
Christian, both men were profoundly influenced by their respective
religious backgrounds. Jung was deeply troubled by the psychological
fallout resulting from the faltering structures of Western
Christianity. Freud’s personality and psychoanalytical
theory both show the abiding effect of his Jewish background.
"Something of the heart, the essence of meaningful and
joyous Judaism will never leave our house," Freud writes,
and in a letter to his fiancée, who had come from an
Orthodox home, he adds: "I have often felt as though
I had inherited all the defiance and all the passion with
which our ancestors defended their temple."
Where
the relationship of Freud and Jung to the Bible is concerned,
there is no room for ambiguity. Freud writes, "My deep
engrossment in the Bible story (almost as soon as I had learned
the art of reading) had, as I recognized much later, an enduring
effect upon the direction of my interest." Ernest Jones
found this admission "incomprehensible," and it
is omitted from later editions of the autobiographical study
which introduces Freud’s collected works. However, Freud’s
confession that love is at the center of life and that all
satisfaction comes from loving and being loved is a touching
testimony to the influence of the Biblical message on this
"godless Jew." Moreover his recognition of Paul’s
role in bringing the repressed to consciousness makes the
apostle a forerunner of psychoanalysis.
Jung sums
up what the Bible meant to him when he wrote, "We must
read the Bible or we shall not understand psychology. Our
psychology, our whole lives, our language and imagery are
built upon the Bible." No document is cited by Jung more
often. The Bible is a ubiquitous presence in his life and
thought, literally from cradle to grave. Moreover, having
rejected Freud’s postulate that sexuality is the only
psychic driving force, Jung could appreciate aspects of the
Bible which Freud disdained. Through ceremonial ritual, initiation
rites, and ascetic practices humankind has aimed at reconciling
itself to the forces of psychic life and at finding an equal
balance of the flesh and the spirit.
Both Freud
and Jung flouted scholarly convention in their interpretation
of the Bible. Freud’s "two Moses hypothesis"
provoked W.F. Albright to dismiss Moses and
Monotheism as "a futile example of psychological determinism,
totally devoid of serious historical method." I recall
an oral examination during which one of my students referred
to Jung’s suggestion that the "answer" to Job
was the crucifixion, when God experienced the undeserved suffering
he had inflicted on his blameless servant. The effect of this
reference on the other examiners was an embarrassed silence.
The unconventionality
of such Biblical interpretation is explained, I believe, by
the fact that both Freud and Jung were influenced at a deep
emotional level by the Bible and Biblical imagery. Freud writes,
"A rationalistic or analytic disposition within me struggles
against my being deeply moved and not knowing why I am and
what has moved me. Why am I subject to so powerful an impression?"
Jung writes, "Since I shall be dealing with numinous
factors, my feeling is challenged quite as much as my intellect.
I cannot, therefore, write in a coolly objective manner, but
must allow my emotional subjectivity to speak, if I want to
describe what I feel when I read certain books of the Bible."
This emotional intensity, which I have referred to as "Biblical
Empirics," finds expression in the inner compulsion out
of which both Moses and Monotheism and Answer to Job were
written. Freud recalls that the idea for the Moses book would
not let go of his imagination and tormented him "like
an unredeemed spirit." Answer to Job, the only work that
Jung found totally satisfying, came to him "like the
spirit seizing one by the scruff of the neck." Professional
exegetes rarely testify to such experiences.
Recognition
of psychology by the Biblical guild, like the blessing of
the church, comes at a price, namely exposure to pressure
to pursue our interest in ways which the academic or ecclesiastical
establishment deems acceptable. Where the church is concerned,
Eugen Drewermann’s difficulties with the hierarchy serve
as a warning. Academe’s disciplinary pressure is less
overt but no less present. Psychological Biblical criticism
may be expected to establish criteria of interpretive adequacy
which would apply to all branches of Biblical exegesis and
hermeneutics. Such criteria would surely result in the Biblical
interpretations of Freud and Jung mentioned above being laughed
out of court.
Main-line
Biblical studies, of their very nature and by virtue of the
awesome power of the guild, will tend, quite spontaneously
and unconsciously, to coopt whatever new approaches appear
on the horizon, and to blackball them when they cease to be
amenable to the guild’s interests and direction. The
German expression mundtot machen comes readily to mind. We
have a good example of this in the reception of literary criticism.
In his book Literary Criticism and the Gospels: The Theoretical
Challenge, Stephen Moore observes, "Narrative criticism’s
status in the guild depends in large part on its willingness
to show itself an able and congenial helpmate to redaction
and composition criticism." This subordination has borne
strange fruit. Whereas secular literary critics welcome "infinite
realizations" of text, "Reader response criticism
of the gospels, because it is an enterprise that tends to
feel accountable to conventional gospel scholarship, has worked
with reader constructs that are sensitively attuned to what
may pass as permissible critical reading."
For all
their differences, what Freud and Jung had in common, beyond
anything else, was their experience of the reality of the
psyche and their recognition of the impossibility of reducing
the psyche to the rational processes of the conscious ego.
Psyche, like spirit, blows where it will. It has its own mysterious
laws, and it resists subjection to the norms and control of
both church and academy.
