Active Imagination in 'Answer to Job'

In this chapter I will address one significant theme in Answer to Job given insufficient attention by Jung scholars to date: the role of active imagination in the creation of the narrative of this much criticized and misunderstood monograph. More specifically, I will not only argue that Jung’s reading of the biblical figures of Yahweh and Job was the product of active imagination, which led him to the ‘difficult and unpopular task of talking with God, rather than about him’, but also that the relationship between Job and Yahweh is, for Jung, a paradigmatic expression of this Jungian meditative practice of 'dreaming with open eyes'. Jung’s active imagination on the Job/Yahweh relationship (as well as his alchemical and kabbalistic observation that ‘whoever knows God has an effect on him’) triggered his perception of the ‘immensity of God’. And this perception, I will argue, provides the point of departure for Jung’s conscious, speculative, and hermeneutical engagement with other biblical figures addressed in the text (including Satan, Sophia, Christ, the Paraclete, the Virgin Mary), informed by his earlier writings, particularly Aion

C. G. Jung: Gnostic or Kabbalist?

This paper begins with an examination of the reasons for Jung’s sustained interest in Gnosticism, in particular identifying those Gnostic teachings (reinterpreted psychologically) which he believed anticipated his own work on the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious. It will, however, demonstrate, particularly through his handling of Gnostic writings in Aion, that Jung’s understanding of the individuation process was inconsistent with the anti-cosmic dualism of Gnostic materials available to him from Patristic sources and that, contrary to many of his critics, Jung never equated analytical psychology with the soteriological perspective of Gnosticism. As this account of Jung’s ambivalent relationship to Gnosticism unfolds, some differences between my reading of Jung’s handling of Gnostic materials and Robert Segal’s systematic interpretation of Jung’s writings on Gnosticism, widely endorsed within the Jungian clinical and scholarly community, will be examined. Finally, the paper argues that, given that many symbols and ideas of Gnosticism are shared with later Jewish and Christian Kabbalah (as well as European alchemy influenced by Kabbalah on which Jung drew far more heavily than Gnosticism), Jung’s psychological perspective, particularly after 1945 when he became more familiar with Jewish scholarship on Kabbalah through his association with Gershom Scholem and Zwi Werblowsky, is far closer to Kabbalah than Gnosticism. While Jung no more identified his work with Kabbalah than with Gnosticism, the paper draws attention to striking similarities between the thrust of the argument of his essay Answer to Job published in 1952 (only a year later than Aion) and the soteriological perspective of Kabbalah, particularly in its Lurianic form

C. G. Jung and numinous experience: Between the known and the unknown

By exploring the shades of meaning of the ‘known’ and the ‘unknown’ in Jung’s writings and the way they frame his engagement with numinous experience, this paper will demonstrate that Jung’s never fully realisable individuation process, whose goal is the ego’s acquaintance with the infinite unknowable Self, is suspended between the known and the unknown. The failure to individuate can be identified with the failure to acknowledge the relativism of all knowledge and experience, even numinous experience, realised through encounter with the unknown unconscious. In spite of his celebration of his approach to numinous experience as the real therapy rather than the treatment of neuroses, Jung’s post-religious ‘deconstructive’ relationship to religious experience can be characterised, borrowing a phrase from Ricoeur’s study of Freud, as embodying a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. In the individuation process there is no unconditional acceptance of unqualified knowledge providing the foundations for spiritual identity and authority within religious traditions, but rather a humbling acknowledgement of the relativism of all knowledge and experience, albeit one grounded in numinous experience of the Self. However, for Jung, this agnosticism is experienced not only as a limitation, but also as an invitation, even a challenge, to consciousness to further explore its unknown psychic background, thereby extending its boundaries and understanding

C. G. Jung’s Visionary Mysticism

This paper sets out an argument for a radical thesis: that Jung was a post-religious or detraditionalised, western visionary mystic. After briefly reviewing Jung’s relationship to Western esotericism and religious studies scholarship identifying the significance of visionary mysticism for the history of religions and for the contemporary study of mystical experience, I introduce Jung’s post-religious or detraditionalised, visionary practice of active imagination, referring to analogies to other western esoteric spiritual practices. Then turning to the main argument of this paper, I locate Jung’s visionary spiritual practice within a disciplinary and hermeneutical framework independent of analytical psychology capable of enriching our understanding of Jung’s relationships to a variety of western and eastern mystical traditions: Andrew Rawlinson’s recent taxonomy of mystical traditions, perhaps the most sophisticated of all twentieth-century taxonomical studies. I demonstrate that Rawlinson’s quadrant model of Hot Structured, Cool Structured, Hot Unstructured and Cool Unstructured mystical traditions enables us to deepen our understanding of Jung’s reasons for his selective appreciation and appropriation, reinterpretation and criticism of western and eastern mystical materials, and more specifically, in the light of previous scholarship outlined in this paper, to identify Jung’s post-religious, visionary spirituality with other visionary mystical traditions located in Rawlinson’s quadrant of Hot Structured traditions

C. G. Jung, Mystical Experience and Inflation

In this article I address the question: Given Jung’s insistence that he was a scientist or empiricist, rather than a mystic, can we circumscribe Jung’s interest in mysticism: that is identify which type or types of mystical experience he valued and which he did not? Since I cannot address this question comprehensively in this article, I focus my attention in the ensuing discussion on one particular form of psychopathology, preoccupying Jung throughout the post-Freudian phase of his career, which I regard as providing a key for interpreting Jung’s relationship to a variety of mystical experi¬ences: inflation. The question I want to address is whether Jung’s definition of inflation forces him to distinguish the experience of individuation from some, or perhaps even all, types of mystical experience, even to conceive of individuation and mystical experience to be in opposition to one another. To what extent is mystical experience, according to Jung, inflationary and therefore irreconcilable with the individuation process? Did Jung regard some mystical experiences as free of inflation and therefore consistent with the individuation process, but not others