Möglichkeit

My favourite drawing from Jung’s Red Book is not really a drawing at all. On the final page of the book, on which he worked intermittently for many years before returning to it in 1959, towards the end of his life, there is only one handwritten word: Möglichkeit. Possibility.

It is the last word of an unfinished sentence, surrounded by the empty space of a page enclosed within a faint rectangular outline.

Viewed as an image, I like to think of this as what Jung left us with. Not a finished psychological system or merely a conceptual framework for navigating the landscape of the soul, but a reminder that we are still at the beginning. That the possibility remains for us to continue dreaming his work onward, each in our own way.

To regard Jung’s project as completed with his death, as though everything essential had already been given, risks turning a living psychology into a historical monument. This is not to diminish his work, which remains a treasure one could spend more than a lifetime exploring. But the spirit of Jung’s undertaking was never simply about preserving the past. It was about responding to the burning questions of his own time, and perhaps even more importantly, to those of the future.

This becomes particularly apparent in his later writings, such as The Undiscovered Self, Answer to Job and A Psychological View of Conscience. Here, Jung wrestled with questions that remain very much our own: the place of the individual in a society increasingly shaped by technology and collective forces, the transformation of religious symbols and structures, and the possibility of an authentic religious life in a world increasingly estranged from its spiritual foundations.

My own dreaming, which eventually led me to begin the Psychology & The Cross podcast, emerged from the experience of having reached the end of a road. My questions led me beyond Jung and into the living Christian symbol, something I had never consciously sought. The podcast became an attempt to break out of isolation and enter into conversation with people who had travelled further along this road and might help me navigate an unfamiliar landscape.

Today, many conversations later, something new has gradually begun to emerge. And that emerging space now has a new home:

The Center of the Cross

It is a space for dialogue and new encounters between Jungian psychology and Christianity. A place to explore where we might encounter the living fire of religious experience today, and where we might find community, belonging and spiritual life beyond the walls of the church and established institutions.

You don’t need to be a Jungian or a Christian to participate. In fact, I suspect that some of the most interesting things will emerge at the meeting point of these two traditions, and in their encounters with people and experiences that neither tradition can fully contain.

In many ways, the questions that gave rise to Jung’s work have acquired a new urgency in our own time.

Jung began his confrontation with the unconscious as Europe was approaching the First World War. He had experienced a terrifying vision of a continent flooded with blood. His subsequent turn inward was as much an attempt to understand and heal his own psychic crisis as it was an exploration of the symbols and myths through which the wider culture lived.

The Christian myth, as he had inherited and understood it, could no longer adequately contain his experience. It needed to be renewed through the symbol-making activity of the human psyche, through a living encounter with the unconscious.

By the time Jung returned to The Red Book towards the end of his life, Europe had endured a second world war. New technologies and ideologies had transformed society, while the individual was increasingly vulnerable to what Jung described as psychic epidemics.

For Jung, the counterweight to these collective forces was the development of a religious attitude: a living relationship with the unconscious, an openness to the emergence of new symbols, and a renewed sense of individual conscience and collective responsibility.

Jung’s final image, the empty page framed at the end of The Red Book, reminds me that we are not simply inheritors of a tradition. We are also responsible for our own present and future. For continuing to dream the myth onward, and for finding new forms of community, belonging and spiritual life that can deepen our relationships and offer orientation in times of turmoil, also outside of the analytical room.

Perhaps we are still at the beginning. That’s a possibility. Eine Möglichkeit.