Carl Jung was an atheist. Standard Jungians know this, but they do not say it outright.
Jung is like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, etc in that he does not believe in an external entity creator of the universe. Jung’s « God » is phenomenological, not theological, and he allows for many valid varieties of religious experience.
Sigmund Freud was a naive atheist, a scientistic thinker. Like Richard Dawkins, he saw no place for God in the physical universe.
Jung was an atheist in this sense too, only he was more psychological (or existential), as he used « God » as a name for the emergence of numinous events in the psychic process, so he wrote a « theogony », i.e. a genetic phenomenology of the formation, or « birth », of the God-image in the human psyche
From the notebooks of a self-experimentation, a psychological work in a literary and theogonic form was created (Sonu Shamdasani, Introduction to The Black Books).
Jung had a strong sense of (and commitment to) a cosmic ordering (largely rejected the kind of contingency championed by later folks like Rorty and current biology/genetics) from physics to the correct path/form of lives of his patients and of politics, so a kind of process theology not unlike the christianity of Whitehead or:
Sadly Hillman too had some sense of the telos of a life but I guess this accounts for both of their unfortunate faiths in the powers of the unconscious to lead us to better/truer ends/resolutions, and of course Wolfgang and co. preaching sublation.
J’aimeJ’aime
No need to be so grumpy. Their works are brilliant and inspiring, the institutions they founded or promoted or collaborated with are boring sausage machines. The latter does not negate the former.
J’aimeJ’aime
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