# Re-Imagining Jung June 18, 2024 [ Matthew Dillon ](/people/matthew-dillon) *Edited by* [*Aaron Michael Ullrey*](/people/aaron-michael-ullrey "Aaron Michael Ullrey"). *The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting CSWR scholars and their research.* In November 1913, the famed psychologist Carl Jung entered a trance that started a conversation with his Soul. Prone to violent shifts in emotion and plagued by depression, Jung even suffered moments of psychosis, envisioning the lowlands surrounding the Alps to flood with water, then corpses, then blood. His self-induced trancework helped him survive the tumultuous five-year process he called his “confrontation with the unconscious.” Jung entered a visionary world, using what he called active imagination to interact with characters ranging from the Devil to the prophet Elijah; he understood them as hidden dimensions of his psyche. By the end of his confrontation with the unconscious, Jung felt healed, later stating that “all my works, all my creativity, has come from those initial fantasies and dreams which began in 1912.” Jung has long been read as a foundational psychologist, but he is better understood as a religious visionary who translated his trance experiences into a psychology that has enduring influences on spirituality and popular culture. Despite Jung’s self-reported ecstatic experiences, he is sparingly read, and almost never cited, in the academic study of religion. Scholars are apprehensive about his grand universalist claims. I, too, am anxious about his theories like the collective unconscious (humans across time and place share the same psychological bedrock) and archetypes (cultural similarities arise from shared neurobiological structures). But dismissing Jung entirely is a loss in light of his writings’ value considering imagination and his visionary thinking about experience, let alone Jung’s undeniable influence on spirituality. ![Colorful painting done by Carl Jung of himself with wings and surrounded by nature and symbols](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/hds_cswr/files/thumbnail_philemon_in_trb_image.png) Jung maintained detailed notebooks recording his confrontation with the unconscious, published in 2020 as The Black Books, a gold mine for the study of imagination. The Black Books contain a wealth of mystic lore: death and rebirth, deification, birth of a god in the soul, and learning from a non-physical guru named Philemon (who existed, presumably, only in Jung’s imaginal experiences). One hundred years of Jung studies document his religious background and personal habits, even what he was reading during his fateful confrontation with the unconscious. His journals depict his affective responses to and his interpretations of these visionary experiences. He even painted some of them! Scholars struggle, generally, to figure out how traditional religious symbols and ideas are overdetermined by writers, but Jung’s journals record a visionary figure’s experiences correlated with precious, self-recorded data about his life and mind. Gananath Obeyesekere highlights a dialectic at work between non-rational modes of cognition (dreams, visions, trance, etc.) and more rational modes of cognition, such as Descartes’ cogito and Enlightenment philosophy. Jung records both sides. He presented his initial fantasies again with further interpretation and paintings when he created The Red Book, published in 2009. Black and red refer to the colors of his original leather-bound notebooks. The history of religions swells with inspired visionary thinkers from Mother Ann of the Shakers to Jiddu Krishnamurti, but Jung’s literary output is unparalleled in its exploration of the interplay between the conscious and unconscious and the intermingled ecstatic and rational thinking behind visionary knowledge. Why bother re-introducing Jung to the academic study of religion? Simply put, our students never stopped reading him. And he is the most read psychologist among those today identifying as New Age or spiritual but not religious (SBNR). Jung’s ideas inspired some of the most popular book and film franchises in history, including Dune and Star Wars. Multi-platinum selling bands from The Beatles to Tool reference Jung in lyrics. Centers and Institutes bearing his name exist in major cities across America spread from Los Angeles to New York. Outside academia, Jung has always been considered a visionary, ecstatic thinker and has been read that way. His theories, though, are less an explanation of world religions than a psychological ethnography about how modern people engage religions, myths, and symbol systems therapeutically, deracinated from their original contexts. Jung’s treatment of mandalas, for example, shows he can be incorrect explaining religious contents but instructive about modern meaning-making. Toward the end of his confrontation with the unconscious, Jung began to have dreams and spontaneous visions of mandalas that he interpreted to show the harmonious relationship between the conscious and unconscious, contending these mandalas represent distinct contents of the psyche, such as moods, ideas, or archetypes. This is not how mandalas work in South Asian religions where they map geographic or cosmological space or facilitate ritual engagement with a deity or principle. Despite this, Jung’s writings on the psychological meaning of mandalas have motivated successive generations to engage mandalas as diagrams of their own inner worlds, sequencing them to chart their own personal development. Critically engaging Jung elucidates why students and the wider public find his writings spiritually provocative while at the same time critiquing Jung’s shortcomings. See also:- [ Religion and Psychology ](/topic-tags/religion-and-psychology) - [ Researcher Reflections ](/topic-tags/researcher-reflection) - [ Transcendence and Transformation ](/programming-threads/transcendence-and-transformation)