Jung Carl Gustav - Religion and the cure of souls in Jungs psychology

Readers familiar with German will probably be aware that a standing problem in the translation of psychological literature is the word Seele. The word is used in a very wide sense in German, and does not appear to carry with it the nimbus of exclusively religious, metaphysical, or even transcendental implications which attach to the word soul in modern English usage. I do not know why this non-psychological overtone should exist in English, forsoul is as native to us as Seele is to the German language; indeed they derive from the same Saxon root. Nevertheless the overtone is so marked that, in order to avoid it, English psychologists tend more and more to speak of the psyche and of psychicphenomena or processes, just as until recently the spoke of the mind and still speak of mental diseases. Although the word psyche is gradually establishing itself in German, it has not yet succeeded in ousting Seele from its position as the subject of psychological investigation, an ironic fatality which seems likely to overtake the soul in English-speaking countries.

In Jungian psychology, a conceptual and empirical distinction is made between Seele and Psyche. Seele is defined as the internal personality, the way in which one behaves in regard to his internal psychic (psychische) processes; it is the inner attitude, the character that one displays towards the unconscious. Psyche, on the other hand, is the totalityof all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious (Psychological Types, Definitions). A further distinction is made between theobjective psyche(the unconscious) and the subjective psyche (ego-consciousness).

From this it is clear that whereas the term psyche would be legitimate in any contextsince a given psychological fact, state or process must be either conscious or unconscioussoul denotes more a junction of relationship, and is the link between the conscious personality and the unconscious. As such a link, it is technically known as theanima (animus in women). The broad distinction between soul and psyche is not at all easy to adhere to in practice, and the extended use of Seele in Jung's own writings shows both the force of linguistic habit and the impossibility of applying the above definitions consistently.

The author of the present book writes not primarily as a psychologist but as a theologian. His use of the word Seele jar exceeds that ofPsyche, but to translate it mainly by the latter term, as is now customary in psychological literature, might perhaps impart too strong a psychological colouring to his thought. For a Christian theologian the soul is surely rather more of a personal and moral entity than it can be for the psychologist, who sees it constantly dissolving back into the collective psyche from which it arose, like a wave of the sea. At the same time this dissolution has its counterpart in the transcendental aspect of the soul; for in mystical experience the soul is held to dissolve in God. In a theological context these personal, moral, and yet transcendental aspects seemed in place, and the word soul has therefore been used except where the author himself has Psyche.