I’ll just quote the man himself: “I’m glad I’m Jung, and not a Jungian”.
He didn’t want the Red and Black Books to be released, not so much because he was embarrassed but because it was his personal myth, his own way to draw lines in the sand of his unconscious, complete with all his own flaws and hang-ups, and now we have people running around declaring it to be the metaphysical end-all-be-all truth. And he knew it would happen.
He also said stuff like “To understand me, you first have to understand Freud and Adler”. Cue modern-day Jungians dismissing Freud and Adler out of hand.
So when people get their Ph.D proposals about Jung rejected with the words “That’d be religion, not psychology” I’m not even mad. It’s just that it happens to be that religion, myth, is a universal psychological phenomenon and studying it as such is quite valuable. Time’s not ripe, it seems, to do it without inadvertently spawning a cult following confusing the map for the territory, and even worse their prophet’s map for their own map.
this is why i quite like humanists.uk, they recognized that our brains just really like religion and made a system that satisfies that while being fully transparent about what it is, and takes steps to avoid turning into a cult and doing harm.
no, we don’t think there’s a god, but that doesn’t mean everything religious has to be rejected, we can just take the good parts and do them just because people like doing them.
Those kinds of things cover a lot, in particular the community aspect and basic coming of age stuff, but they can’t really get into the layers that mystics access. I think one approach to do it well without tripping up is to talk to the ancestors while being, on reflection, perfectly aware that you’re talking to your own genome. “Ancestors” as in think of your parents, no, earlier, your grandparents, you met them, your great-grandparents, you’ve heard stories, your great-great-grandparents, nope haven’t heard stories but you know where they’re from, go as far as you need to not have any idea about who those individuals were, but still have a sense of ancestry. That’s where it is. And once you’ve managed to get laid using your six times great-grandparent’s rizz, when you can freely access it, feel free to identify those aspects as, say, Freyr and Freya. But not before, that’s idolatry.
