Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #49951 in Books
• Published on: 1960-09-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 138 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780300001372
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Customer Reviews

A Jungian Theological Psychoanalytical must-have!!
This is an excellent work of both psychology and religion, hence the name. There have been other books by Jung that have narrower subjects or more challenging views but this one, takes my Jungian cake. It is so general but yet is exactly what one needs to study or just explore the extremely difficult topic of Psych and Religion. A winner in my book.

The Formation of Religious Symbols and the Unconscious
This collection of three lectures given by Carl Jung in 1937 presents an early version of his mature view on the role of the unconscious in formulating religious symbols. The three foci of this book are a case study of a neurotic man plagued by irrational fears of cancer, a natural history of the generation of religious symbols, and a consideration of the psychological consequences of the crisis of faith that was striking the heart of Europe.

Jung's case study is absolutely fascinating -- he presents and interprets a small number of the patient's dreams and relates them to the symbolic literature of the Gnostics, Hermetics, and Alchemists, three of Jung's favorite symbolic modalities. It's extraordinary to see a modern man completely disinterested in religion or esoterica unwittingly produce symbols that clearly serve the same psychological function as similar images in these somewhat obscure traditions.

His social analysis is crude and in my eyes profoundly misguided. Jung waxes nostalgic for a medieval Europe governed by the Catholic church in which the common folk could assimilate the transpersonal symbolic structures of the ecclesiastical matrix as a bulwark against the intrusion of the unconscious into their daily lives. He polemicizes in a most disagreeable fashion against the Protestant church and blasts the Utopian fantasies of Communism.

In his odious analysis Jung shows himself to be completely disinterested in, and probably ignorant of, the economic or material realities that govern man's existence. There is no sense that liberation from theocratic regimes produced a commensurate reduction of the degree to which the great majority of people were ruthlessly exploited by the great minority.

Perhaps Jung can be forgiven for making a classic error of Modernism and nostalgically aggrandizing a great old Europe that never was. The tenor and focus of his occasional social critiques was dramatically different post World War II, when his primary concern rightly shifted to the conditions of nationalistic totalitarianism. But as they stand in this work his social views are repugnant and anachronistic, and lack all sense of self-awareness.

One additional quarrel I have is that Jung's protestations that he is not interested in theology and philosophy, and that he deals with religious images purely as a psychological phenomenon, are not persuasive in the face of the many metaphysical claims that he in fact makes, such as offhandedly referring to atheism as a "stupid error". Few readers will agree that he has no particular religious convictions of his own, or that they don't absolutely play a core role in shaping his scientific theories.

Despite these problems the book on the whole provides a powerful and persuasive argument that he carefully builds to a gripping crescendo. His consideration of mandala symbolism in the last lecture is absolutely riveting and offers a vital empirical glimpse at the state of the religious mind in modernity.

Christainity, Muslim, Judism
All these religions have bought the unbalance between male & female. Jung nails it totally the Divine Feminine which has been nearly lost in religions that have become so powerful these days.