Five Jungian Psychology Books to Read in 2022
The growing popularity of Jung
Jung has had something of a resurgence in recent times. Perhaps It’s because we as a society have started recognizing the importance of our shadow selves and the need to integrate our feminine (anima) and masculine (animus) selves.
Maybe it’s because there’s a growing wave of mystically-inclined people who are crawling out from the spiritual darkness of materialism. Perhaps it’s not the hard sciences that have or will have all the answers. Perhaps it’s spirituality and mysticism that imbibes human consciousness with the greatest meaning.
Not that science isn’t important. Without science, we wouldn’t have cars. Without science, you wouldn’t be reading an article written by someone with wireless keyboard Bluetoothing letters to a highly complex computational system full of strange boards and microchips connected to the whole of the planet via the internet.
Anyway, I digress.
Maybe the collective unconscious, archetypes, alchemy, mythology, and experiences from our ancestral history hold the key to illuminations of consciousness.
Jung’s influence on modern culture has hardly gone anywhere. Many of his theories have been watered-down by self-help gurus. Many university courses are dedicated to studying his theories, podcasts that focus on his teachings, and more.
Jung’s writings can be incredibly dense, though he’s infinitely quotable with enough patience. (One of my favorite quotes of his is, “The question is, of course, what do you feel to be your task? Where the fear, there is your task!”). However, some writers take his theories, simplify them, and put their spin on them.
In this article, I’m going to recommend 5 books from those who describe themselves as Jungians. (I’m also going to include a bonus at the end of this article!).
(Note: If you’re looking for books by Jung himself and are wondering where to start, I recommend his only book that was written with a popular audience in mind, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.)
Five books
Here are five books I recommend to help you deepen your understanding of Jung and, more importantly, yourself.
1. Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth by Robert A Johnson
Dreams are dynamic mosaics, composed of symbols, that express the movements, conflicts, interactions, and developments of the great energy systems within the unconscious.
Robert Johnson helped to remind me that dreams are never a waste of time. We live in a culture where people roll their eyes when we discuss our dreams and dismiss them as something silly, of merely fantastical proportions. The term it was just a dream seems silly when you replace it with what it really is: it was just a manifestation of the deepest traumas and fears that exist in the depths of my psyche that were communicated to me in a highly complex and spontaneously creative film while my body was half-paralyzed while I snored next to my lover.
Dreams are highlighters of our unconscious. They dialogue to us, using a sophisticated and individual system of symbols and inner logic that makes perfect sense at the time, and seems confusing when we’re in the world of everyday consciousness. But we can dialogue back with them either through lucid dreaming (a topic for another article) or through writing them down in the morning, and analyzing them, which Johnson explains in great though simple detail how to do.
I found Johnson’s book incredibly inspiring, and it helped remind me how fundamental it is to not only keep a dream journal but to work with dreams to resolve inner conflicts.
He also details what active imagination is and what we can do to heal our psyche and move ourselves to individuation (to integrate all the various components of our psyche into a whole — to ascend to the peak of our growth).
Johnson also gets incredibly spiritual and highlights the fundamental nature of ritual that is missing from many of our lives and how it can help us interpret our own dreams and our active imagination, to integrate the experiences into our lives. In Inner Work, he states: “Modern people who are deprived of meaningful ritual feel a chronic sense of emptiness. They are denied contact with the great archetypes that nourish our soul life.”
2. The Neurobiology of the Gods: How Brain Physiology Shapes the Recurrent Imagery of Myth and Dreams by Erik D. Goodwyn
The fact that our brains organize things in the way that nature organizes things should be surprising only if one ascribes the dualist fantasy that there is no connection between the two; this is not the case, however — mind and matter are two subjects of the same substance.
Despite the title of this book (and its absolutely stunning cover art), it’s less mystical than the title suggests. Erik D. Goodwyn goes through a huge plethora of scientific material that has come out since Jung’s work and uses it to argue that many of his theories were spot on.
His work is sophisticated and spans a variety of topics, including spirituality, religion, neuroscience, biology, psychology, and many others.
Due to the many physiological states the brain and body go through in certain states of mind, Goodwyn discusses much of what underpins the brain’s propensity to generate symbols (hello, dreams again!).
It seems Goodwyn has read Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, the founder of American psychology who discusses a lot about the physiology of religious and spiritual states (it’s a must-read for anyone interested in the intersection between psychology and spirituality, and I’m sure it laid the foundation for neurotheology, “the multidisciplinary field of scholarship that seeks to understand the relationship between the human brain and religion”).
The Neurobiology of the Gods is wonderfully written, makes the brain click with all sorts of research, and its research speaks for itself. It’s a must-read. How could you not love sentences like the following?
Symbols carry the weight of the gods in the human heart, and are very real and potent forces acting on us.
3. Jung and the Alchemical Imagination, Jeffrey Raff
It’s not incorrect to understand alchemy as metaphor. Neither is it incorrect to approach it as a guide to actual transmutative experience in which the gold being created is enlightened consciousness.
Jeffrey Raff completely turned my ignorant and minimal understanding of alchemy on its head. I had always grown up thinking it was merely a pseudoscience, a daring hope for practitioners to merely transmute lead into gold for worldly riches.
How wrong I was!
I have since started to understand alchemy as a spiritual experience. As in the quote above, the gold is inside the psyche, although the alchemists used the ritual of changing the forms of the outside physical world to change the inside physical world.
One great thing about this book is the pictures and its guidance through alchemical knowledge. Raff has read a wide variety of source material, some of it rare, and presents it to the reader in an engaging and easy-to-read manner.
Much of this book deals with Jung’s ‘active imagination,’ and how best to achieve personal enlightenment utilizing its methodology. It also details relatable ‘levels’ that consciousness passes through in the alchemical imagination and allows you to understand how you can pass through these yourself.
One of the main lessons I learned from this book is the difference between passive fantasy and active imagination. Raff taught me that the fantasies we have achieve nothing much beyond illusion, and it’s not helpful to keep thinking up fantasies. However, active imagination is a tool to heal, to free, to transform consciousness.
This book will teach you how to let your ego-mind guide your subconscious so that their dialogue can help transform you into a complete being, ascending spiritual plane.
In Raff’s words:
Whenever any transformation is sought, the individual seeking it must sooner or later acknowledge that ego knowledge is not sufficient. Only cooperation with the subconscious can create the necessary conditions that allow change to occur.
4) Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experience by William A. Richards
Those who have experienced mystical consciousness almost universally report that they find the reductionist assumptions of many scientists and nonscientists, who tend to simply assume that consciousness is caused by the brain activity alone, to be less than compelling.
William A. Richards is a psychologist, theologian, and researcher of psychedelic therapy. Rather than overtly a Jungian, his personality seems to carry the themes of what Jung teaches, and he takes religious experience, mystical experiences, and alternative states deadly seriously.
One of the main parts of this book that stuck with me was when Richards had a patient undergoing psychedelic therapy who bolted for the door in his office. Richards had to physically tackle him and ask him why he ran.
His patient replied along the lines of, “to get away from the snake on the chair.” Going with his therapeutic instincts — and understanding that the patient must confront his fear — he told his patient to look directly at the snake. His patient instantly broke into tears and said the snake had transformed into his mother, who had a restrictive influence on his life. Illumination.
Stories about Richards and his patients punctuate this book, but he is primarily motivated by the real benefits that mystical experiences have on people and how these can be quite reliably induced by psychedelic substances.
Richards has many profound insights, including this nugget:
During the action of entheogens in sufficient dosage, most people report a sense of awe at how much they can see with their eyes closed. Eyes suddenly, as if dreaming, seem to have little if anything to do with seeing.
Read this to either challenge your assumptions on what psychedelics are capable of or deepen your understanding of using these as tools in the psychotherapeutic process. A marvelous read.
5) Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche by Robert A. Johnson
To balance our cultural indoctrination, we need to do our shadow work on a daily basis. The first read for this is that we diminish the shadow we impose on others. We contribute less to the general darkness of the world and do not add to the collective shadow that fuels war and strife. But the second result is that we prepare the way for the mandorla — that high vision of beauty and wholeness that is the great prize of human consciousness.
This man again!
This is the shortest book on the list and deals with one of Jung’s central concepts of the Shadow. It’s broken into three sections: The Shadow, Romantic Love as Shadow, and the Mandorla.
The book explores what our Shadow is and how we can best recognize and integrate it into our psyche (rather than let it be buried beneath our egos).
The idea of the Shadow is that there is a dark part of our minds that acts out in our personalities. We can either suppress it, and it’ll act out without our knowledge. Or we can recognize it, gain control, and integrate our dark side into our everyday personality.
I love how accessible Johnson’s writing is, and I read this book over two evenings (it would take one to read, but I always take notes when I read).
Bonus!
Here’s the bonus!
The podcast This Jungian Life is a great listen for those who want to understand Jungian theory more comprehensively. It’s hosted by three Jungian psychologists who interpret contemporary issues through a Jungian lens.
I’m not affiliated with this podcast — I’m just a fan!
Conclusion
So there you have it, five books to occupy you for the rest of the year and beyond.
I’d love to hear from you if you’ve read these books or if you have other books on your psychology/Jungian reading list. Leave me a comment, and I’ll do my utmost to respond.
And remember: integrate your Shadow!
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Please note that this article includes Amazon affiliate marketing links, meaning I can be paid for books purchased on Amazon through these links.
