The Importance of Religion for Our Mental Health
In this article, I analyze Carl Jung’s conclusions and my conclusions after continuing his research.
In a world where mental illnesses only increase and atheism continues to dominate, it is worth trying to understand the importance of religion for our mental health.
First of all, I’m going to show you a summary of Punita Miranda’s study on Carl Jung and religion so that you can see that since the time he lived, this issue has been vital for maintaining an individual’s mental health.
Jung’s thoughts certainly prove that religion helps people maintain peace of mind and emotional balance, as you will see by reading this summary:
Carl Jung believed that in order to gain an understanding of religious issues, probably all that is left for us today is the psychological approach.
Jung’s religious experiences played a crucial role in shaping his ideas. He felt compelled to research and offer something to combat both scientific and religious doubt.
His analytical psychology is concerned with healing and is loaded with religious aspects, especially with parallels between psychotherapy and Christianity. With his idea of archetypes and the collective unconscious, Jung added a religious layer to the psychoanalytic movement.
“Nobody could rob me of the conviction that I was doomed to do what God wanted and not what I wanted. It gave me the strength to go my own way. I often felt that in decisive matters I was no longer among men, but alone with God.”
Religion was a matter of personal interest to Jung, though it only gradually came to assume a definite place in his theory and practice. Over the years, his interest shifted from psychiatry, through psychoanalysis and typology, to archetypal theory and finally the psychology of religious motives.
“Because of [my differences], I am accused of mysticism. However, I do not hold myself responsible for the fact that always, everywhere, man has spontaneously developed a religious function and that the human psyche, from time immemorial, has been permeated with religious feelings and religious ideas.”
Jung’s “journey into the unconscious” became the great original driving force of his psychological system. The collective unconscious and archetypes, which he already knew from his work with patients and from the literature, were now experienced personally; in the “unconscious psyche” resided a source of knowledge, higher wisdom, and guidance.
From his self-experiments, Jung acquired his first notions of the anima, the Self, individuation, and the symbolism of the mandala. { The word mandala means circle in Sanskrit and is considered a symbol of healing and spirituality. For Hindus and Buddhists, the mandala helps in the concentration of meditative practice and it is common to find it in the temples of that religion.} (I wrote this explanation to help you understand the author’s descriptions.)
Later, he systematized this experimental process as a therapeutic method for his patients, calling it “active imagination” — a tool used to explore this new field of experience, which can take the form of dialogue, drawing, or painting with the unconscious.
Jung began to work publicly to build a bridge of psychological understanding between East and West. At the same time, in particular, he began a cross-cultural study of medieval alchemy.
“Archetypes have, when they arise, a specifically sacred character which can only be described as ‘spiritual’ if the word ‘magical’ is too strong. Consequently, this phenomenon is of the utmost significance for the psychology of religion.”
Jung further expanded the sacred to include “crucial transformations […] which may take the form of conversions, enlightenments, emotional shocks, strokes of fate, religious or mystical experiences or their equivalents”, situating archetypes as the source of religious experience. Therefore, he made use of the sacred to refer to a variety of psychological phenomena related mostly to archetypal manifestations, referring to this as a “sacred quality” of the archetype.
For Jung, all humanity carries within itself a psychic force that, at the same time, manifests and sustains the power of the sacred, due to a predisposition for the religious experience that we human beings possess.
According to Jung, any particular historical manifestation, for example, Christ or Buddha, never exhausts the possibility of expression underlying the manifestation — there is an archetypal potential for the experience of an image of God, which has been fulfilled by all the religious symbols of humanity.
“My attitude towards all religions, therefore, is positive. In its symbolism, I recognize those figures that I found in my patients’ dreams and fantasies […]. Ritualistic ceremonials, initiation rites, and ascetic practices, in all their forms and variations, interest me deeply, as they are different techniques for producing an adequate relationship with these forces [of psychic life].”
From this perspective, it is clear that Jung understands religion as psychic facts and that his attention tends to focus on the archetypal basis and psychological meaning. Furthermore, he was fascinated by the contrasting methods of observation employed by Eastern and Western religions, and although attracted by their similarities, for him the two conceptions of religion were radically different.
Jung was convinced that the religious experience surpassed the theological concept, clarifying that, when using the term “religion”, he was not referring to a creed, since creeds are codified and dogmatized forms of original religious experiences that became systematized as collective truth within a certain tradition.
Although he remained skeptical of institutionalized religions, Jung never ceased to be deeply concerned with the subject of religion, for him a function of the psyche deeply imprinted on us as a result of human beings’ ability to formulate images of God.
For Jung, the value of his psychology of religion lies in its ability to “revive religious traditions”, especially Christianity. Much of his later work was devoted to his early concerns with the problem of evil and its origin, topics he discussed primarily in his correspondence with the English Dominican priest Victor White.
After years of observing and investigating dreams, fantasies, visions, and psychotic delusions, Jung was more focused on the psychological origins of religion and its effects on the psyche. He was looking for a psychological method with which he could equally understand and treat the diseases of the human soul.
For Jung, the profound changes brought about by wars and a civilization dominated by materialism instigated two unconscious phenomena in which the masses (a) projected neglected archetypes onto people and nations, thus transforming them into dangerous enemies, or (b) became modern variant of fanatical religions: “our fearsome gods have only changed their names: they now rhyme with ism”
There was, therefore, a historical need to recognize the irrational as a psychological factor and it became psychology’s task not only to understand but also to promote the development of a new consciousness for new times.
“Among all my patients who were in the second half of life — that is, over 35 years old — there was not a single one whose problem was not, in the last resort, to find a religious vision of life. It is safe to say that every one of them got sick because they had lost what living religions of all ages gave to their followers, and not one of them was really cured without having regained their religious outlook.”
Although Jung never considered himself a traditional Christian, the symbols of God and Christ, the contrasting forces of good and evil, and the fundamental importance of religious symbolism function as an often repeated topic in most of his works. He maintained an ambivalent relationship with Christianity, criticizing and valuing it at the same time; he challenged the Christian point of view and at the same time argued that religion served to put us in touch with the unconscious mind.
Furthermore, from his engagement with Eastern religion, Jung’s psychology not only challenged the predominant Christian monopoly in the West, but also offered a spiritual dimension far beyond anything ever available from any religious tradition.
All of his work can be understood as an attempt to understand the future religious development of the West, with the conviction that religion is necessary for the spiritual evolution of humanity. Since time immemorial, religions have functioned as systems for curing psychic illnesses and Jung realized that, with the decline of religious life, neuroses had become more frequent, due to the spiritual stagnation of society, psychic sterility, and lack of meaning.
“[…] that is why we psychotherapists must deal with problems that, strictly speaking, belong to the theologian. But we cannot leave these questions for theology to answer; challenged by the urgent psychic needs of our patients, we are directly confronted with them every day”.
By approaching religion through psychology and turning attention to the inner world, Jung believes that the individual regains access to the origin of psychic life, marking the beginning of healing. Ultimately, for him psychological illnesses are, at root, religious in nature, and depth psychology is a path of healing and salvation.
My Conclusions After Continuing Carl Jung’s Research
Although at first, I didn’t suspect that I would eventually see that the unconscious mind that produces dreams is actually the mind of God, I understood that I should obey the unconscious mind’s guidance rather than doing what my conscience thought was right.
On this point, I disagreed with Jung, who believed that the unconscious mind was just a good adviser to our conscience, but that we should decide for ourselves what to do.
After faithfully obeying the guidance of the unconscious mind, I was able to discover much more and clearly verify that the origin of all mental illnesses is the intervention of the wild and primitive part of the human brain, which is more powerful than Jung believed.
After this verification, I was able to interpret everyone’s dreams with greater clarity and speed, and also able to help each one understand why they should do what the unconscious mind showed them in their dreams and not what they believed they should do.
Obedience to the unconscious mind is equivalent to obedience to God, which we can observe by analyzing the unconscious indications, which always show us that we should forgive our enemies and love one another.
Psychology completes religious teachings by explaining in more detail why we need to do what helps us maintain psychic balance and respect all human beings.
Goodness is the best remedy for all physical and mental illnesses, and religiosity is the best consolation for all the difficulties that a human being faces in the course of life.
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