Autor: Doran, Robert; Tyrrell, Bernard

Buch: Trinification of the Word

Titel: Doran, Robert - Christ and the Psyche

Stichwort: C.G. Jung; Unterscheidung der Geister; Jesus: Austreibung der Dämonen; Therapie - Sünde; Christus, Satan - anagogische Symbole

Kurzinhalt: The images released in the psyche through the coincidence ... of spirit and matter that both transcend the subject, reflect the subject's participation in a cosmic drama which is a cosmic drama ...

Textausschnitt: 137a One final point must be added to round off what is nonetheless a very incomplete sketch of a metascience of archetypal psychology. Jung knew, and psychotherapy can bear out, that the joining of spirit and matter in psychic imagery can be destructive as well as constructive, even morally evil as well as good.1 I find no way in which the vistas opened for us by the work of Jung can be understood in terms of scientific psychology alone. The themes treated by Jung do not find in his work the universal context within which alone they can be understood. We seem to be led by the process of discovery to which Jung introduces us to adopt an explanatory standpoint that is beyond the scientific disengagement of a purely immanent process of subjective psychological development and breakdown. The only adequate horizon for understanding psychic data seems to demand not only the sublation of depth psychology by intentionality analysis but also the sublation of both psychology and method by the process of the discernment of spirits. The triply compounded subject or self (spirit or intentionality, psyche, and matter or limitation) is a participant through intentionality in purely spiritual processes that transcend the subject's individuality on the upper end of the spectrum of subjectivity, but that affect the subject's emergence of [eg: Fehler im Text? es müsste heißen: or] failure of emergence into authentic selfhood; just as through matter the subject participates in the purely material processes of energy that transcend the subject's individuality on the lower end, but that also enter into and affect the subject's emergence or failure of emergence into authentic selfhood. The images released in the psyche through the coincidence, not of spirit in the subject with matter in the subject, but of spirit and matter that both transcend the subject, reflect the subject's participation in a cosmic drama which is a conflict between the divine and the demonic for possession of the soul of man and for rule over the universe itself. Thus, that the demons expelled by Jesus in the Gospel stories are now understood to be psychoses does not mean that they are thereby reduced to immanent psychic processes. It means rather that psychoses are adequately understood only when they are attributed to demonic causation. Likewise, their expulsion is not to be reduced to a matter of primitive psychotherapy on the part of Jesus. Rather genuine depth-psychological therapy or healing is adequately understood only as the victory of the reign of God over the principalities and powers of darkness. (Fs) (notabene)

138a Archetypal images, then, are the recurrent and often cyclical symbols taken from nature that enable the transcultural communication of the human drama to take place, the associative clusters that refer to and evoke human action as a whole and especially as it displays the story of a conflict between desire and reality.1 Anagogic symbols are no longer parts of a whole, however associative and generic, but the containers of the whole of human action, the symbolic correlatives of a religiously transformed universal viewpoint, symbols that seem to be and say (rather than show) or to negate the Logos, the shaping word of the universe and of history.2 Christ and Satan function, not in an archetypal fashion, so that they need one another, but in a supremely anagogic, and so dialectical, manner for the Christian psyche, and even for the secular psyche of Western people. It is not their coincidence that will symbolize the wholeness that is the destiny of the self, but only the glorious body that had once been overcome by the power of darkness, sin, and death, and that is now raised to life by the transcendent power of the Father.3 The goal of individuated totality is transcendent, not immanent, and is understood only by a theology that reflects on the living religion that alone enables human subjectivity to emerge from the endless treadmill of self-analysis to which it is diabolically condemned by a psychology that refuses to transcend the realm of rotary, cyclical, quadripartite symbols of the eternal return.4 This psychology, in insisting on the hegemony of these symbols rather than on that of symbols of liberation from the eternal return, witnesses in its own unique way to the fact that, once God is admitted on intelligent and reasonable grounds, even the intellectual tangles resulting from fundamental counter-positions on the human subject's intentionality are "not merely a cul-de-sac for human progress," but "a reign of sin, a despotism of darkness; and men are its slaves."5 (Fs)

138b The psyche of the human subject is to be articulated with an intentionality whose natural finality is the vision of God,6 but whose potentiality for the actualization of this finality is radically and, within the order of nature, irretrievably disempowered by the surd of basic sin. Individuation is to be reinterpreted as the conversion of the human psyche to participation in the universal willingness that alone expresses the natural finality of subjectivity. Symbols of the self are, most properly, symbols that reflect the existential status of the total subject at any point in its pilgrimage. But Christ may function indirectly as a symbol of the self in several ways. The Crucified, for example, may be the symbol of the life and truth and love that are victimized by my refusals to be a pure and naked desire for God,7 and also the symbol of the universal willingness that alone matches the unrestricted character of intentionality's thrust toward total agapic self-transcendence.8 The Risen One may be the symbol of the self I will be when I know even as I am known. The figure of Satan, on the other hand, may function as the symbol of the radical refusal to be a pure and naked desire for God, and of the self I will be if I continue to deny the truth of who I am. The meeting between Christ and Satan is not a link in the chain of nature's cyclical and rotary movements, but the expression of the final irreconcilability of universal willingness with the non-event of basic sin's refusal to answer the divine call. (Fs)

139a Jung's later speculations on alchemical symbolism and his pathological outbursts in Answer to Job reflect the decadence to which the romantic imagination is subject in its last phase, when it refuses to submit in truth and in tautly stretched love to the death-dealing powers of the autumn of life. Frye tells us that a central image of the last or penseroso phase of romance is that of "the old man in the tower, the lonely hermit absorbed in occult or magical studies."9 It is as though Jung embodied in his person the entire mythos of romance, but no other mythos, and principally not the apocalyptic mythos whose symbols are anagogic and whose relation to the demonic is not that of potential complementarity but that of dialectic,10 of the presence or absence of the converted subjectivity that makes its way, in fear and trembling, in the darkness of a repentant faith, but also with the resilience of a hope that has broken through the great mandala, toward the ulterior finality of the self in the direct vision of God. (E08; 28.12.2008)