JUNG, C. G.

JUNG, C. G. (1875–1961), was the originator of a distinctive variety of depth psychology. Until recently, accounts of the life and work of Carl Gustav Jung had emphasized the strong influence of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and had portrayed Jung as first an obedient follower of Freud and then a rebellious dissident. Although Jung's ideas were to a great extent influenced by his contact with Freud, Jung's originality preceded as well as followed his contact with Freud (see Bair, 2004, and Shamdasani, 2004). Jung's independence stems partly from his Christian background and is expressed in his mature conviction that depth psychology, his form of which he named analytical psychology, is inseparable from a religious appreciation of the world. Jung has had a greater influence on humanistic religious scholarship than has Freud, whose psychology has been more influential in the social sciences.

Life

Jung was born in the village of Kesswil, Switzerland, the son of a Lutheran minister. When he was four years old the family moved to Basel on Lake Constance, where Jung spent his childhood and youth. He took a medical degree from the University of Basel in 1902. Believing that psychiatry would allow him to combine his scientific with his humanistic interests, Jung joined the staff of the Burghölzli, the psychiatric clinic of the University of Zurich. There he worked under Eugen Bleuler, its highly regarded director. In 1903 he married Emma Rauschenbach and moved to Küsnacht, a small village near Zurich, on the shore of Lake Zurich, where he spent the rest of his life.

In 1900 Freud published what came to be his most famous book, The Interpretation of Dreams, and began to attract a talented following. Among the most gifted was Jung. The two corresponded and, in 1906, met. For the next seven years Jung's life was shaped almost entirely by his relationship with Freud. The two became intimate friends and corresponded extensively. Jung initially concluded that Freud's theories of the unconscious, dreams, childhood conflicts, and psychological illnesses (neuroses) were essentially correct, and he adopted them in his own psychiatric work. Freud considered Jung his most promising colleague.

The close collaboration did not last. Each man began to misunderstand the other, and heated resentments developed. Freud insisted on the sexual roots of neurosis, whereas Jung advanced a nonsexual approach. Jung maintained that he could discern a religious dimension in psychoanalysis, whereas Freud insisted that the basis of psychoanalysis was entirely scientific. The two broke off their correspondence and in 1913 abandoned all professional collaboration. From that time forward their personal lives, careers, psychological theories, and theories of religion diverged, and their bitterness toward each other never abated.

Freud survived his disappointment with Jung by turning his energies to his other followers and to the worldwide recognition that his ideas were receiving, but Jung had far less on which to fall back. Shaken by the break, he found it necessary to isolate himself. In 1913 he resigned from his teaching post at the University of Zurich and withdrew from the International Psychoanalytic Association. He had left the Burghölzli in 1909. Having made these breaks, Jung entered a period of intense inner stress during which he was beset by disturbing fantasies, visions, and dreams. For the next several years he occupied himself with analyzing the products of his own mind. Later he would look back on that turbulent time as the most creative period in his life. At its close he wrote what have become his two most important works, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (1943 and 1928/1935 in German, 1953 in English) and Psychological Types (1921 in German, 1923 in English). These books established Jung's reputation as the founder of his own school of depth psychology.

For the remainder of his life, Jung practiced his approach to psychotherapy, wrote prolifically, and lectured and traveled widely. In addition to psychotherapy, two subjects of special interest to him were Western religion and the moral failures of modern society. His best-known books on these subjects are Answer to Job (1952 in German, 1954 in English) and The Undiscovered Self (1957 in German, 1958 in English). Near the end of his life Jung dictated an autobiographical memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962 in German, 1963 in English).

Analytical Psychology and Religion

The relationship between analytical psychology and religion is part of a broader topic: the relationship between modernity and religion. There are at least four views on this issue. The fundamentalist view pits religion against modernity and opts for religion. It denies modernity, or at least its inescapability. For fundamentalists, religion can continue to exist as it purportedly has done since the days of the apostles. Because fundamentalism ignores rather than confronts modernity, it cannot be taken seriously as a response to modernity.

The rationalist view is similar to the fundamentalist one in that it pits religion against modernity. For both fundamentalists and rationalists, there can be no modern religion, and the term modern religion is self-contradictory. However, rationalism, antithetically to fundamentalism, opts for modernity over religion. To rationalists, modernity itself is inescapable. One is born into the modern world. The question, then, is not, as for fundamentalists, whether modernity is acceptable to religion but whether religion is acceptable to modernity. The rationalist answer is no.

For rationalists, modernity is coextensive with science, and science, both natural and social, dooms religion. The scientific attribution of events in the physical world to impersonal processes is incompatible with the religious attribution of those events to the decisions of gods. Similarly, the social scientific attribution of human behavior to processes such as socialization and internalization is incompatible with the religious attribution of that behavior to phenomena such as sin and possession. Because rationalists are by definition scientific and cannot have both religion and science, they must reject religion for science.

Rationalists do not limit the function of religion to explanation. They recognize that religion serves many other functions as well, such as prescribing values. However, they insist that the nonexplanatory functions rest on the explanatory one. For example, acceptance of Jesus as a preacher of ethics depends on acceptance of Jesus as a resurrected being—a scientific impossibility. Religion can work only when its explanation is accepted, and science precludes the acceptance of that explanation.

For rationalists, the impact of science on religion is even more insidious. Science not only competes with religion but also accounts for it. Science explains not only the world but, through social science, religion itself. Religion does not merely cease to explain but becomes the explained. The explanation of religion typically provided transforms the chief function of religion from explanation into something sociological, economic, or psychological. To science is thus ceded not only the explanation provided by religion but also religion as an explanation. Religion remains irreconcilable with modernity because the nonexplanatory functions still depend on the explanatory one: if religion can no longer serve to explain the world to its adherents, it cannot exist, in which case it can scarcely serve to do anything else.

The romantic view breaks with both fundamentalism and rationalism in its refusal to oppose religion to modernity. Rather than forcing a choice between the two, it strives to reconcile them. Like fundamentalists, romantics prize religion as an eternal and invaluable possession. Nothing can supersede it. But unlike fundamentalists, romantics do not prize religion as an explanation. Religion for them serves to do almost anything but explain. It serves to express, to advocate, to comfort, to harmonize, or to give meaning. For rationalists, religion may serve a host of nonexplanatory functions alongside its explanatory one; those functions may be more important than the explanatory one; and those functions may overlap with the ones touted by romantics. But religion cannot exist once it stops being an explanation. By contrast, for romantics, religion can still exist and even thrive. In fact, the conflict with science gives religion the opportunity to rid itself of its explanatory baggage and to make explicit for the first time its nonexplanatory core. Far from undermining religion, science abets religion by compelling it to show that it has always been something other than an explanation. Romantics turn a necessity into a virtue.

The fourth view of the relationship between religion and modernity is the postmodern one. Like fundamentalists, postmodernists refuse to defer to modernity, but not in the name of religion, which they spurn as fully as rationalists do. In opposing modernity, they appeal not to prescientific religion but to postscientific culture. They reject science as the epitome of modernity, by which they mean above all the belief in objectivity, neutrality, and universal truth. They espouse subjectivity over objectivity, commitment over neutrality, and local truth over universal truth. Like fundamentalists and unlike both rationalists and romantics, postmodernists deny the inescapability of modernity. Indeed, for them the heretofore moderns have already escaped it, for they are now living in postmodern times.

Categorizing Jung

Jung was not a fundamentalist. He deferred to science and interpreted all aspects of religion nonliterally. He was not a budding postmodernist either. He proudly considered his discoveries, beginning with his association tests, scrupulously scientific. If nothing else, he antedated postmodernism. (For an attempt to see Jung as precociously postmodern, see Hauke, 2000.)

Jung was a grand rationalist insofar as he explained religion scientifically, that is, psychologically. No one psychologized religion more relentlessly than he. Certainly Freud lacked both the patience and the erudition to do so. In such essays as "A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity" (Jung, 1953–1966, vol. 11, paragraphs 169–295) and "Transformation Symbolism in the Mass" (Jung, 1953–1966, vol. 11, paragraphs 296–448) Jung translated every aspect of the religious phenomenon into psychological terms. He psychologized not only the content but also the origin and function of religious belief and practice.

Yet Jung was a grand romantic insofar as he was indifferent to the explanatory function of religion. For him, religion was a psychological activity clothed in an explanatory or a metaphysical guise. Hence he continually characterized himself as a psychologist rather than a metaphysician and regularly distinguished his psychological use of the term God from any metaphysical one: "When I say 'God' this is a psychic thing.… This has nothing whatever to do with God per se " (Jung, 1973–1974, vol. I, p. 487). Jung bristled at his characterization, especially by theologians, as a meta-physician.

Conversely, Jung's rigid, Kantian-based distinction between the metaphysical and the nonmetaphysical realms allowed him to psychologize metaphysics without becoming metaphysical. Thus he objected as vigorously to theologians who denied him his psychological due as to those who mistook his psychology for metaphysics: "Psychology has no room for judgments like 'only religious' or 'only philosophical' despite the fact that we too often hear the charge of something's being 'only psychological'—especially from theologians" (Jung, 1963, p. 350). Even when Jung waxed metaphysical, as in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he did so as a metaphysician, not as a psychologist, thereby preserving the distinction between the domains.

Jung found most theologians exasperating not only because they confused psychology with metaphysics but also because, as theologians, they focused on religious belief. For Jung, the heart of religion is experience, not belief. Experience shapes belief or creed rather than vice versa: "I want to make clear that by the term 'religion' I do not mean a creed.… Creeds are codified and dogmatized forms of original religious experience" ("Psychology and Religion," Jung, 1953–1966, vol. XI, paragraphs 9–10).

Jung's disdain for the creedal, explanatory, metaphysical side of religion does not by itself make him a romantic. Even a rationalist such as Freud would deem the main function of religion psychological rather than explanatory. The question is whether for Jung religion can exist after the rise of science. The question is whether for him religion can exclude belief yet remain religion. Where belief, like the rest of religion, can be psychologized, the acceptance of religious belief requires the acceptance of it as true about the external world, not merely as true about oneself. Therefore to say that for Jung belief was expendable because he psychologized belief is to miss the point.

Jung's Stages of Psychological Development

To see the place of religious belief for Jung, it is helpful to plot the various stages of psychological growth into which he divides humanity (see Segal, 1992). The terms used here for some of the stages are this author's, not Jung's. The key divide for Jung is between primitives and ancients on the one hand and rationalists and romantics on the other. Both primitives and ancients are religious, and overtly so. By ancients —an admittedly imprecise term of this author's—is meant religious people up through the present, including not only ancient Sumerian, Egyptian, and Greek religions but also Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism.

Primitives project themselves onto the physical world in the form of gods and, furthermore, identify themselves with those gods. Ancients also project themselves onto the physical world in the form of gods but do not identify themselves with their gods, who are taken as entities distinct from their worshippers. Today's fundamentalists are the heirs of the ancients. Primitives and ancients alike use religion to explain the world, but religion functions simultaneously and unconsciously to connect both groups to their unconscious. Religion operates circuitously by means of projection onto the physical world, so that one encounters oneself through encountering god. Still, religion consciously serves as an explanation, and the psychological function depends on the projection involved in the explanation.

By contrast, neither rationalists nor romantics are religious. Both groups have substantially withdrawn their projections from the physical world. For them, the world is natural rather than supernatural, impersonal rather than personified. It is explained by science, not religion: "Only in the following centuries, with the growth of natural science, was the projection withdrawn from matter and entirely abolished together with the psyche.… Nobody, it is true, any longer endows matter with mythological properties" ("The Philosophical Tree," Jung, 1953–1966, vol. 13, paragraph 395). Although some projections onto the external world remain, such as the anthropomorphizing of animals, most projections are now onto fellow human beings: "Projection is now confined to personal and social relationships.…" ("The Philosophical Tree," Jung, 1953–1966, vol. 13, paragraph 395).

Rationalists pride themselves on their rejection of religion, which they set against not only science but also their image of themselves as progressive, omniscient, and omnipotent—in short, modern. They, not any divine puppeteers, are the masters of their destiny. They reject not only religion as explanation but also the explanation religion offers, for that explanation subjugates humans to gods. In rejecting religion, rationalists unwittingly reject one of the best vehicles for encountering the unconscious. Of course, some rationalists reject the idea of an unconscious as contrary to their self-image. Others, notably, Freud, stress the hold of the unconscious on humans and consequently harbor a far more deterministic view of human nature. Still, for Freud, the unconscious lies within humans rather than outside them. It replaces god as the determinant of human destiny. For some rationalists, religion is nothing but an explanation, and for them science does all that religion has done. For other rationalists, including Freud, religion is much more than an explanation, but it is still partly an explanation, and the triumph of science over religion as explanation undoes religion altogether.

Although romantics no less than rationalists reject religion as an explanation, they do not applaud the demise of religion. On the contrary, they bemoan the loss of religion for its nonexplanatory functions, especially that of giving meaning. Romantics seek to preserve or revive religion by reconceiving it as other than explanatory and therefore as compatible with science.

Jung's Reconciliation of Religion with Science

Jung did not fault religion for losing rationalists or even romantics to science. As an explanation of the world, religion must yield to science. Jung spurned sophisticated attempts to reconcile religious explanation with scientific explanation, for example, by placing God behind the scenes.

Similarly, Jung did not fault science for making atheists of rationalists and romantics. He celebrated, not condemned, science for its advances, and saw the development of psychology as part of the scientific enterprise, which for him encompassed social as well as natural science. He vaunted himself as a scientist of the mind and declared psychology to be the key science. Whether Jung is characterized as a rationalist or a romantic, he refused to deny the triumph of science over religion as an explanation of both the physical and the human worlds. Contrary to fundamentalists, he believed that science had supplanted religion as explanation. The only options left were to replace religion—the rationalist response—or to reconceive it—the romantic response. Jung opted, or seemingly opted, for the romantic route.

Jung's strategy was to separate mythology from the rest of religion and to offer mythology as a psychological, not an explanatory, phenomenon. Severed from the rest of religion, that is, from religion as explanation, mythology could continue to exist in the face of science. By mythology, Jung meant the stories of the lives of gods and heroes.

For Jung, mythology and religion traditionally had worked in tandem. Together with ritual, the other part of religion for Jung, mythology had provided the best entrée to God. In contrast to belief, which provides only information, myth offers experience: "The protean mythologem and the shimmering symbol express the processes of the psyche far more trenchantly and, in the end, far more clearly than the clearest concept; for the symbol not only conveys a visualization of the process but—and this is perhaps just as important—it also brings a re-experiencing of it" ("Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon," Jung, 1953–1956, vol. 13, paragraph 199).

Unlike early Christianity, present-day Christianity had failed to update its myths. That failure was part of its overall inability to reinvigorate itself. Sometimes Jung argued that Christianity had gone astray in trying to meet the challenge of science by severing belief from experience and relying only on belief. Jung's objection was that belief without experience is empty and that belief is in any case often incompatible with modern historical as well as scientific knowledge. At other times Jung contended that Christianity had gone astray by turning belief into dogmatic faith severed from knowledge. Jung's objection here was that even faith requires experience to sustain itself.

Although these criticisms did not involve myth, at other times Jung asserted that present-day Christianity had erred in its attempt to update itself by eliminating myth, for example, in the theological liberals' transformation of Jesus into a teacher of timeless ethics and in the theologian Rudolf Bultmann's project of "demythologizing," which Jung misinterpreted as eliminating rather than preserving myth. Jung objected that the supposed incompatibility of myth with modern knowledge stemmed from a false, literal interpretation of myth. Jung also believed that myth is indispensable to experience and therefore to religion. Christianity had sought to overcome the opposition between religion and modern knowledge by discarding belief that is at odds with knowledge—a rationalist kind of response in its preoccupation with belief. However, in eliminating myth, Christianity had eliminated experience as well.

By Christian mythology, Jung meant most of all the life of Christ. Read literally, the Gospels are incompatible with history and science alike. Taken psychologically, the Gospels sidestep these impediments. The life of Christ becomes a symbol of the archetypal journey of the hero from primordial unconsciousness (birth), to ego consciousness (adulthood), to the return to the unconscious (crucifixion), and to the reemergence from it to form the self (resurrection). Without denying the historicity of Christ, Jung maintained that Christ can be inspirational even as a mythical, that is, a psychological, hero. In arguing that the prime appeal of Christ has always been psychological rather than historical, Jung espoused a romantic position. The obstacles that modern historical and scientific knowledge pose to a literal rendition of Christ's life offer an opportunity to make clear for the first time the psychological meaning intended from the outset. Ironically, Jung's position was in fact close to Bultmann's. Both sought to show that Christian mythology had never been intended to be taken literally, so that the impossibility of continuing to accept it literally was a blessing in disguise.

Jung never faulted Christian mythology for its outdatedness, only its interpreters: "Our myth has become mute, and gives no answers. The fault lies not in it as it is set down in the Scriptures, but solely in us, who have not developed it further, who, rather, have suppressed any such attempts" (Jung, 1963, p. 332). By developing Christian mythology, Jung did not propose altering the psychological meaning of the life of Christ. He intended only to be explicating that meaning by filtering out the literal rendition.

At the same time Jung recognized that religion had ceased to be an option for many persons, even though he, unlike Bultmann, acknowledged that many others remain or seek to remain the equivalent of the ancients. For those for whom religion is no longer a possibility, such as rationalists, the alternative to psychologizing religious myths is to replace them with secular ones.

Secular Myths

For Jung, secular myths minimally take the form of a recasting of traditional, religious myths in secular garb:

Mythological motifs frequently appear, but clothed in modern dress; for instance, instead of the eagle of Zeus, or the great roc, there is an airplane; the fight with the dragon is a railway smash; the dragon-slaying hero is an operatic tenor; the Earth Mother is a stout lady selling vegetables; the Pluto who abducts Persephone is a reckless chauffeur, and so on. ("Psychology and Literature," Jung, 1953–1966, vol. 15, paragraph 152)

Far more significant has been the creation of distinctively secular myths, of which Jung's best example is the belief in flying saucers. That belief is widespread and arouses the archetypal emotions of awe and fear. Flying saucers are invoked to explain events in the physical world, such as fast-flying objects and strange lights. Above all, these technologically advanced phenomena fit the present-day scientific self-image: "It is characteristic of our time that the archetype … should now take the form of an object, a technological construction, in order to avoid the odiousness of mythological personification. Anything that looks technological goes down without difficulty with modern man" ("Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth," Jung, 1953–1966, vol. 10, paragraph 624).

For primitives and ancients, myth functions outwardly as well as inwardly not merely in explaining the world but also in giving it meaningfulness. A personified world operates responsively, in accordance with the purposes of gods and the pleas of humans. To cite Jung's favorite example,

The Pueblo Indians believe that they are the sons of Father Sun, and this belief endows their life with a perspective (and a goal) that goes far beyond their limited existence.… Their plight is infinitely more satisfactory than that of a man in our own civilization who knows that he is (and will remain) nothing more than an underdog with no inner meaning to his life. (Jung, 1968, p. 76)

Jung granted that most secular myths do not, like the myth of flying saucers, connect adherents to the physical world. Most myths presuppose the withdrawal of projections from the world, which now is experienced as impersonal and therefore meaningless. Most secular myths refer only to the human world and not to the physical one. For example, the myth of the Cold War as an apocalyptic struggle between the forces of good and the forces of evil demonizes Communists but not the earth. Still, Jung sought the existential, not merely the psychological, import of myths: connecting humans to the external world.

That continuing import is evinced above all in Jung's concept of synchronicity. Synchronicity restores to the physical world its meaningfulness even without its personality, which science precludes. Meaningfulness is now inherent in the outer world rather than imposed on it through projection: "Synchronistic experiences serve our turn here. They point to a latent meaning which is independent of [our] consciousness" (Jung, 1973–1974, vol. II, p. 495). Meaningfulness stems not from the existence of god, or personality, in the world but from the symmetry between human beings and the world. Still, the effect is the same as that once provided by gods: rather than being alien and indifferent to humans, the world proves to be akin to humans, not because gods respond to human wishes or because human wishes directly affect the world but because human thoughts correspond to the nature of the world. Jung continued to demand the withdrawal of projections from the world, but synchronicity restores to the world the meaningfulness that projections once provided.

Synchronicity is not itself myth. It is the experience of the world as meaningful. Myth would be an account of that experience. The payoff, however, would be less an explanation of the world than connectedness to the world. Secular myths that, like the myth of flying saucers, connect one to the physical world and not just to other human beings have the potential to duplicate the past existential as well as psychological functions of religious myths.

Jung as Romantic

In conclusion, Jung was a rationalist insofar as he sought secular myths, that is, he sought alternatives to religious myths. As a rationalist, he could grant that the function of religious myths was no more explanatory than that of secular ones, but he would still argue that religious myths worked only for those who explained the world religiously. Secular myths were needed for those who now explained the world scientifically.

However, Jung was a romantic insofar as he considered secular myths to be secular versions of religious ones rather than secular alternatives to religious ones. He was thus retaining religion even in the face of science. First, he used the term myths in referring to secular myths, thereby linking them to religion. Second, the fullest secular myths, such as the myth of flying saucers, concern the physical world and thereby restore the symmetry between humans and the world formerly provided by religious myths. Third, the myth of flying saucers nearly brings back gods to the world in the form of the omniscient and omnipotent occupants of the saucers.

At the same time the link of secular myths to the physical world evinces a rationalist residue in Jung. Even if the myth of flying saucers primarily shapes the way the world is experienced and not the way it is explained, that myth does explain outer events. Moreover, the line between experience and explanation is blurry, and explanation affects experience. Rather than ceding the physical world to science, secular myths try to reclaim it.

Conversely, one might maintain, Jung so relentlessly psychologized (and existentialized) religion that religion replaced by psychology was religion as it had always been, whether or not this interpretation had ever been recognized by its practitioners. That is how Jung could trace a straight line from Gnostic religion to alchemy to analytical psychology:

[W]hen I began to understand alchemy I realized that it represented the historical link with Gnosticism, and that a continuity therefore existed between past and present. Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed the bridge on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious. (Jung, 1963, p. 201)

Analytical psychology represented an advance over Gnosticism and alchemy only in separating out what in them had been a mix of metaphysics and psychology. Taken this way, Jung was a consummate romantic.

Bibliography

Bair, Deidre. Jung: A Biography. Boston, 2004. The fullest, most factual biography of Jung to date.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 1st ed. New York, 1949. 2d ed. Princeton, N.J., 1968. Reprint: Princeton, NJ, 2004. The classical application of Jungian psychology to hero myths. It provides a common plot for hero myths that symbolize the journey of the second half of Jung, from ego consciousness to the collective unconscious and back. This work is the Jungian counterpart to Otto Rank's Freudian Myth of the Birth of the Hero

Charet, F. X. Spiritualism and the Foundations of C. G. Jung's Psychology. Albany, N.Y., 1993. Argues that Jung, rather than conceding the explanation of the world to science, used spiritualism as a way to meld religion with science.

Clarke, J. J. Jung and Eastern Thought: A Dialogue with the Orient. London and New York, 1994. An examination of Jung and Eastern religions.

Hannah, Barbara. Jung: His Life and Work. New York, 1976. The standard hagiographical biographical account of Jung, whose psychology is attributed entirely to his genius and his inner life.

Hauke, Christopher. Jung and the Postmodern: The Interpretation of Realities. New York and London, 2000. A comparison of Jung's ideas with postmodern tenets.

Homans, Peter. Jung in Context: Modernity and the Making of a Psychology. Chicago, 1979.

Jung, C. G. Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Edited by Sir Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. New York, 1953–1966; Princeton, N.J., 1967–1979; London, 1953–1979.

Jung, C. G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962). Edited by Aniela Jaffé. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. New York, 1963.

Jung, C. G. "Approaching the Unconscious." In Jung et al., Man and His Symbols, pp. 1–94. New York, 1968 (originally published in 1964).

Jung, C. G. Letters. Edited by Gerhard Adler and Aniela Jaffé. 2 vols. Princeton, N.J., and London, 1973–1974.

Main, Roderick, ed. Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal. Princeton, N.J., and London, 1997. The best sourcebook on Jung and synchronicity.

Miller, David L., ed. Jung and the Interpretation of the Bible. New York, 1995.

Noll, Richard. The Jung Cult. Princeton, N.J., 1994. Argues that Jung, far from being committed to science, cloaked fundamentally antimodernist, atavistic, religious inclinations in a modern, secular guise.

Rowland, Susan. Jung: A Feminist Revision. Cambridge, U.K., 2002. The finest feminist assessment of Jungian psychology.

Ryce-Menuhin, Joel, ed. Jung and the Monotheisms: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. London and New York, 1994. A discussion of Jung and Western religions.

Segal, Robert A., ed. The Gnostic Jung. Princeton, N.J., and London, 1992.

Segal, Robert A., ed. Jung on Mythology. Princeton, N.J., and London, 1998. A sourcebook on both Jung and Jungians (Neumann, Von Franz, and Hillman).

Shamdasani, Sonu. Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science. Cambridge, U.K., 2004. Argues that Jung was part of a group of leading psychologists who aimed to make psychology the queen of the sciences by incorporating the irreducibly subjective element in theorizing in any science.

Stein, Murray. Jung's Treatment of Christianity: The Psychotherapy of a Religious Tradition. Wilmette, Ill., 1985.

Stevens, Anthony. Archetype: The Natural History of the Self. London, 1982 (reprinted with the title Archetypes [New York, 1983]). An attempt to make analytical psychology scientific by explaining archetypes through ethology and neuropsychology.

Walker, Steven F. Jung and the Jungians on Myth: An Introduction. New York and London, 2002 (originally published in 1995).

Robert A. Segal (2005)