The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (38 page)

Freud never abandoned his view that religion was a form of infantilism, or rooted in infantile experience—the dependence of the child on the parent—and he believed that, just as in therapy when the patient is forced/invited to confront (unconscious) reality, so as society and civilization grew more “mature,” religion would wither away—much as Marx thought the state would wither away. Characterizing adherence to a religion as a form of unconscious mental illness, relegating it to that part of our nature that can usefully be discarded, was arguably the most frontal and offensive attack on God that a man could mount.

Viewed at this distance, we can see that Freud very much underestimated the power of religion to endure in society. One might think that, as a specialist in the emotions, he should have realized this. In some ways—and this is a rare thing to say about Freud—he appears naïve. But, as we have seen with the Vienna Circle and shall see again, he was not alone in his mistake.

NO REFUGE

By the time
Civilization and Its Discontents
appeared in 1929, Freud was well and truly estranged from Carl Jung, once his heir apparent and crown
prince but now his most prominent rival. The rupture had begun as early as 1912 after they returned from their visit to America and Jung had published the second part of
Symbols of Transformation
, which aired for the first time his idea of the collective unconscious. In explaining religion, mythology and philosophy, he departed from—and threatened the status of—Freud’s more scientific approach. The split became obvious a year later when
Symbols
was published in book form.

In
Totem and Taboo
, Freud had taken on Jung on his own ground, so to speak, so it was perhaps no surprise that his rival should weigh in on much the same subject—the psychological plight of modern man—with an essay of his own.

Modern Man in Search of a Soul
appeared in 1933. Although its title might seem to address exactly the matter we are considering here, in fact it ranged more widely. It was, for a start, an attack on Freud, one of its chapters airing the theoretical disagreements that Jung felt separated them. The book was also a restatement, or an updating, of Jung’s own psychoanalytical theories, in particular his theory of archetypes, which by then had reached as far as the notion of “introverts” and “extraverts,” plus some thinking on the stages of life (“morning” and “afternoon”), on psychology and literature and on “archaic man.” Only the last two chapters were given over to “The spiritual problem of modern man” and “Psychotherapists or the clergy.” He returned to the subject in his Terry Lectures, at Yale in 1937, and at other times after the Second World War.

What particularly interested Jung was that twentieth-century man, in comparison with his forebears, was solitary, removed from the
participation mystique
and from “submersion in a common unconsciousness.” Modern man no longer lives within the bounds of tradition and so has become “unhistorical,” discarding and outgrowing what went before. The new condition, Jung said, was a form of poverty and, in being unhistorical, a form of “living in sin.” Modern individuals are aware of being “the culmination of the history of mankind, the fulfillment and the end-product of countless centuries” and at the same time “the disappointment of the hopes and expectations of the ages.” We have “fallen into profound uncertainty,” the Great War having shattered our faith in ourselves and in “our own worth.” And that includes losing faith in the possibility of a rational
organization of the world; “that old dream of the millennium, in which peace and harmony should rule, has grown pale.”

Having lost all the metaphysical uncertainties of his medieval brother, modern man has set up in their place “the ideals of material security, general welfare and humaneness.” But the very idea of “progress,” Jung said, had begun to “terrorize” the imagination. “Science has destroyed even the refuge of an inner life.” Thus had developed a widespread interest “in all sorts of psychic phenomena as manifested in the growth of spiritualism, astrology, theosophy and so forth. The world has seen nothing like it since the end of the seventeenth century. . . . The modern movement which is numerically most impressive is undoubtedly Theosophy, together with its continental sister, Anthroposophy; these are pure Gnosticism in a Hindu dress. Compared with these movements the interest in scientific psychology is negligible.” The passionate interest in these movements arose from psychic energy which could no longer be invested in “obsolete forms of religion. . . . For this reason such movements have a truly religious character, even when they pretend to be scientific.”
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Though Jung felt that this heightened concern with our psychic life was inevitable, he wasn’t convinced that we should spend all our time dwelling on it. He thought that political internationalism, and sport, were antidotes to too great an obsession with psychic life, and that the political, social, artistic and psychological optimism of America had its place, too, in any future system.

Hitherto, only the more educated had sought psychological help, but in the future, he thought, this practice would spread to “the masses.” Ever more clergymen were undergoing psychological training; indeed, only a method that comprised
both
psychology and religion could provide the enlightenment that most people sought from therapy—rather than, say, relief from neurotic symptoms. Jung states that people come to him to find meaning in their lives. And so what he sought, in effect, was to return them to religion (though not necessarily to any one particular confession). But that return would not be through faith per se so much as through psychological insight, the insight that religion performs various psychological functions in modern man and that only by explaining religion psychologically could many people be returned to the fold.

Unlike Freud, who grew up as a “Godless Jew,” Jung was the son of a pastor. Sons of pastors have played a significant role in Germanic philosophy and psychology—Gotthold Lessing, Johann Herder, Nietzsche himself, Wilhelm Dilthey and Jürgen Habermas were or are all sons of pastors. It is as if the son could not embrace the faith of the father and opted instead for a secular equivalent.

Jung entered university to study natural sciences, switched to medicine and then turned to psychiatry in his fourth year of study, when he attended a séance in which the subject was his fifteen-year-old cousin: in trance, she lost her Basel accent and spoke in High German, claiming she was controlled by spirits. An account of this episode formed the starting point of his first published work: his degree dissertation,
On the Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena
(1902). This neatly encapsulates his lively interest in both the occult and the unconscious.

His main disagreements with Freud lay in his rejection of the latter’s insistence on the supreme importance of repressed sexuality in the etiology of neurosis, and his conviction that beneath consciousness and the (personal) unconscious there is a third, deeper level, the collective unconscious. Jung’s rival view, derived from his clinical experience and his researches among myths, ethnography and animal behavior, he said, was based on observation, on the fact that, as he found it, “psychic energy” was more significant as a source of neurosis than was sexual repression. These researches showed, he claimed, that across the world—in myths, for example—there were many images and patterns that overlapped, causing him to conclude that they derive from very ancient experiences that have been incorporated into our nature “at the deepest levels.”

To these patterns Jung attached the term “archetype,” of which he identified five as the most important: persona, anima and animus, extravert and introvert, shadow and self.

Persona is the mask we present to the world, designed to mislead; anima is the female tendency in males and animus the male tendency in females; extravert and introvert are characteristic stances we have toward the world and represent perhaps Jung’s most widely accepted innovation. What most concerns us here is his idea that God is an archetype. That is
to say, it is a disposition within us, a disposition to believe in God, though at this point Jung gets very ambiguous.

An archetype cannot be known directly, he says, only inferred or intuited. Patterns observed—in mythology, for example—refer to “archetype-contents,” not to the actual “archetype-form.” This is—or appears to be—a little like Moore’s understanding of “the good,” which cannot be defined without corrupting and limiting the idea. Jung further complicates matters by arguing that the archetype of the self is very similar to—may even be identical with—the God-archetype. There are, within the collective unconscious, archetypes of “wholeness” and “perfection” (Jesus figures here); and the purpose of life, in the process of what he called “individuation,” is to bring the personal and collective unconscious into “balance” so that the self-archetype and the God-archetype are in harmony.

This is certainly radical (insofar as it is understandable)—but is it friendly to religion or blasphemous? This is the problem with Jung. He thought his concept of the collective unconscious was as important as quantum theory, but many people failed to grasp it. (No doubt many fail to follow quantum theory, but enough do to construct a technology based on it.) Critics point out that archetypes are as metaphysical as Plato’s ideas and that although, after Jung, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Noam Chomsky found “deep structures” in anthropology and linguistics, they have not produced a transformation in our understanding, as quantum theory has done.

Jung was convinced that the modern world is in a spiritual crisis brought about by secularization, materialism and extraversion. But he did not seek a return to the church—he saw organized religion as “spiritual death.” He thought we needed a “massive reinvestment in spiritual life,” to be achieved by reconnecting with the mythical world. “Myths express life more precisely than science,” he said. “Man cannot stand a meaningless life . . . meaning comes from an unequivocal affirmation of the self. . . . The decisive question is: is man related to something infinite or not? . . . The cosmic question is a fundamental requirement of the self.” As Anthony Stevens puts it, Jung himself had a reverence for the unconscious, the imagination, transcendence and gnosis (by which he meant knowledge through experience, not book-learning or belief), and he wanted others
to experience the same. As Erich Fromm characterized it, Freud’s unconscious contains mainly man’s vices, Jung’s contains mainly man’s wisdom.
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At the same time, Jung insisted that the existence of a God-archetype was a psychological truth, not a theological one: it said nothing about the existence or otherwise of God or his/her/its form. This is why Jung has proved so controversial, and why his work so perplexes religious writers. His ideas are so ambiguous that we cannot be totally sure what he meant. At root he is saying—or seems to be saying—that man has an innate disposition to conceive of God (but not necessarily to believe in him), and that without coming to terms in some way with this disposition we can never feel whole or complete, or in balance; we cannot be spiritually healthy. We need to express the God-archetype to avoid neurosis.

Jung said that he “abhorred metaphysics,” yet his own thinking is even more metaphysical, less grounded in empiricism, than Freud’s. And he finished by saying the exact opposite to Freud. Whereas Freud argued that religion was a form of collective neurosis, grounded in repressed sexual energy wrapped up in the oedipal dilemma, Jung said religious feelings helped cure neurosis. Whatever else it is, and however successful or unsuccessful his opaque theories may be, Jung’s is the most elaborate attempt yet to marry theology and psychology.

THE MYTH OF WHOLENESS

Were this book to follow a strictly chronological approach, this chapter would have begun with Franz Kafka. But there is a point in placing him here. His oeuvre is famously incomplete, his three more important books being unfinished when tuberculosis claimed him in 1924 at the age of forty; they were then published posthumously, having been put into order by his friend the author and composer Max Brod. Any attempt at interpretation is, therefore, fraught with difficulty and to be treated with circumspection. That said, enough of his work remains in its original form for us to reconstruct at least some of Kafka’s intentions; and from this we can see that those intentions were quite unlike those of any other author of modern times.

W. H. Auden said, “Had one to name the author who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age as Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe do to theirs, Kafka is the first one would think of.” Interpretation was the main concern of Kafka, in particular our search for wholeness, which, he felt, was a legacy, an impossible legacy of traditional religion.

Each of his unfinished novels,
Amerika
, or
The Man Who Disappeared
,
The Trial
and
The Castle
, begins with the arrival of the main character in a complex social world where he is totally ignorant of the rules: America for Karl Rossmann, the law courts for Joseph K. and the village and castle for K. In each case, a variety of adventures follows but they notably fail to lead the protagonists to greater wisdom or understanding. These are not examples or symbols just of modern anomie, but more broadly of the human condition of “natality,” “in which we all find ourselves confronted by [being born into] a world created by others according to a logic we do not intuitively understand.”
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Karl Rossmann is seventeen, Joseph K. is thirty and K. is in his mid-thirties; none of them is a child but, equally, none of them has reached any kind of mature understanding of how the social world works. Nor will they make any progress in the course of the stories.

In these worlds of notable ambiguity, the most explicit of Kafka’s stories is, perhaps (an inevitable qualifier),
The Castle
. To the main character, K., the castle is less imposing than the church where he grew up, distant and inscrutable, just as the Judeo-Christian God is distant and inscrutable. Even if we prefer the interpretation of
The Castle
as a parable of the modern phenomenon of bureaucracy, it, too, is often distant and inscrutable. This would appear to suggest that Kafka is describing the main problem of living in a secular world—people simply cannot believe or accept the faith of their childhoods, when they thought the church magnificent (recalling Freud’s arguments), but do not know what to replace it with. In the modern world we live without rules. We are forced to make interpretative judgments without sufficient information to base them on.