C. G. Jung, son of a Swiss Reformed pastor, used his Christian background throughout his career to illuminate the psychological roots of all religions. Jung believed religion was a profound, psychological response to the unknown—both the inner self and the outer worlds—and he understood Christianity to be a profound meditation on the meaning of the life of Jesus of Nazareth within the context of Hebrew spirituality and the Biblical worldview. Murray Stein's introduction relates Jung's personal relationship with Christianity to his psychological views on religion in general, his hermeneutic of religious thought, and his therapeutic attitude toward Christianity. This volume includes extensive selections from "Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity," "Christ as a Symbol of the Self," from Aion, "Answer to Job," letters to Father Vincent White from Letters, and many more. First published in 1999. Murray Stein, Ph.D., is the author of Jung's Treatment of Christianity, Practicing Wholeness, Transformation—Emergence of the Self, and Jung's Map of the Soul. He is an international lecturer and teacher, and currently vice president of the International Association for Analytical Psychology. He is also a training analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago.
Author
Carl Gustav Jung (/jʊŋ/; German: [ˈkarl ˈɡʊstaf jʊŋ]), often referred to as C. G. Jung, was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology. Jung proposed and developed the concepts of extraversion and introversion; archetypes, and the collective unconscious. His work has been influential in psychiatry and in the study of religion, philosophy, archeology, anthropology, literature, and related fields. He was a prolific writer, many of whose works were not published until after his death. The central concept of analytical psychology is individuation—the psychological process of integrating the opposites, including the conscious with the unconscious, while still maintaining their relative autonomy. Jung considered individuation to be the central process of human development. Jung created some of the best known psychological concepts, including the archetype, the collective unconscious, the complex, and synchronicity. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a popular psychometric instrument, has been developed from Jung's theory of psychological types. Though he was a practising clinician and considered himself to be a scientist, much of his life's work was spent exploring tangential areas such as Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, and sociology, as well as literature and the arts. Jung's interest in philosophy and the occult led many to view him as a mystic, although his ambition was to be seen as a man of science. His influence on popular psychology, the "psychologization of religion", spirituality and the New Age movement has been immense.
