Wolfgang Giegerich - “Dreaming the Myth Onwards”: C. G. Jung on Christianity and on Hegel

Versions of the following chapters have previously been published elsewhere:

, The Patriarchal Neglect of the Feminine Principle: A Psychological Fallacy of Jungs first appeared in Harvest: Journal for Jungian Studies 1999 vol. 45, no. 1, pp. 730.

, God Must Not Die! C.G. Jungs Thesis of the One-Sidedness of Christianity appeared in Spring 2010, Vol. 84 (God Must Not Die! Or Must He?), Fall 2010, pp. 1171.

, Jungs Betrayal of His Truth. The Adoption of a Kant-Based Empiricism and the Rejection of Hegels Speculative Thought was first published in Harvest. Journal for Jungian Studies vol. 44, No.1, 1998, pp. 4664.

Once again I want to express my sincere gratitude to Greg Mogenson, the series editor, for his engaged interest in the ideas presented in the following chapters as well as for his helpful comments.

W.G.

For frequently cited sources, the following abbreviations have been used:

CW: Jung, C. G. Collected Works. 20 vols. Ed. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler, and William McGuire. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 19571979. Cited by volume and, unless otherwise noted, by paragraph number.

GW: Jung, C. G. Gesammelte Werke. Zrich and Stuttgart (Rascher), now Olten and Freiburg i:Br: Walter-Verlag, 1958 ff. Cited by volume and, unless otherwise noted, by paragraph number.

Letters: Jung, C. G. Letters. 2 vols. Ed. Gerhard Adler. Bollingen Series XCV: 2. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975.

MDR: Jung, C. G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Rev. ed. Ed. Aniela Jaff. Trans. Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Cited by page number.

T he phrase to dream the myth onwards comes from Jungs Collected Works 9i, 271. This translation of the phrasethe sentence reads: The best we can do is to dream the myth onwardsgives rise to misunderstandings, and accordingly in Archetypal Psychology it has at times been misunderstood to mean an invitation to us by Jung to do just that, to dream myths onwards. But when we look at the context of this sentence and at Jungs German text we find that he tried to convey a different meaning. Warning against the illusion that archetypes could be explained or translated into precise conceptual meanings, he expressed his opinion that our explanations or interpretations of mythic or archetypal images are at best or at most a dreaming (Jungs emphasis!) the myth onwards by giving it a more modern form. Another time he used in a similar sense the word Weiterdichtungen (GW 8 152, a spinning-further of the yarn of the dream fantasy), here, however, not for our interpretations of dreams, but for the alterations that the dream as a pure product of the unconscious undergoes already in the dreamer in the process of its reaching consciousness. At any rate, no call to do anything, no program, but rather a warning against confusing our interpretations of archetypal images with explanations. In the best case, Jung thought, interpretations stay within the enclosure of the archetypal image itself to be interpreted, within the unbroken spell of its spirit and atmosphere, and that in all other cases they simply bypass it.

In using in the title of this book the phrase dreaming the myth onwards, I am nevertheless precisely harking back to the misreading just outlined. I use it in the programmatic sense that Archetypal Psychology has given it. For two reasons I feel justified in doing this. First, I restrict the myth to which this phrase now, in my use of it, refers to a single one, that of Christianity, to the Christian myth (Jung our

The five essays of the first part of the present volume try to reconstruct essential aspects of Jungs attempt to develop the Christian myth further (in his sense of Weiterbau and Weiterdichtung) as well as his personal stance towards the Christian God in general. They examine critically Jungs religious ideas, his psychological theology (or theosophy, as I prefer to call it): Jungs views about mans appropriate relation to God, his claims that the feminine requires to be anchored in the figure of a divine woman, that the Christian Trinity is fundamentally deficient and needs to be expanded so as to turn into a quaternity, that Christianity as such is likewise deficient, namely one-sided, and that evil must be given the status of substantial reality (in contrast to the traditional conception of evil as a