(00:00) Jakob Lusensky: What in your view are the obstacles when trying to bridge the psychology Carl Gustav Jung and Christianity?
(00:12) Sean McGrath: I think I can make a very simple answer to this. The obstacle is psychological absolutism. And in this regard, Wolfgang Giegerich, I think, is an extremely important figure. Because he’s picked this up from Jung, that psychology has no outside, it has no limits, and has to be absolute. And he’s really run with it. And so he’s gotten rid of those parts of Jung which don’t really agree with psychological absolutism.
So, what is psychological absolutism? It means a psychology that has no outside, as we just said, but it also means a psychology that owes nothing to theology, that doesn’t take and that doesn’t stand to be critiqued in any regard from anything beyond psyche. That whether that’s a discourse, such as theology or metaphysics, or whether it’s actually God—God’s self, you know—I think Giegerich is correct that a psychological absolutism has to be atheistic—it’s just a doctrine of the human being. And I think that here, there’s not much place for dialogue with, let’s say, mainstream Christianity. I mean, there’s a tradition of Christian atheism, and that—that could have some interesting possibilities here. But in terms of, let’s say, Pauline Christianity, or mainstream Protestant, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox Christianity, psychology cannot be absolutized. And there are reasons for this absolutization. And interestingly, they don’t have anything to do with the psychology of Jung; they have to do with some of its philosophical presuppositions, in particular, with his commitment to Kant. And the way he resolves the Kantian dilemma of, you know, we only deal with appearances—we don’t know what the thing is in itself.
There’s another way of dealing with that problem, rather than just totalizing psychology. A totalized psychology becomes like psychological idealism. But there’s another way in which we can we can deal with the Kantian problem. We can see this in German idealism, and that is to speak of a psychology that, let’s say, is open, like an open system. A psychology that is in dialogue with something outside of itself—let’s say reality—a psychology which recognizes the real as in some way excessive of the ideal or of the psychological. And that’s a first step toward, let’s say, understanding psychologically what a Christian means by the Trinity. Because a Christian does not mean merely the contents of the psyche by the Trinity. They mean the creator of heaven on earth. So if we’re going to listen to the Christian, rather than saying, Oh, well, you’re just talking about things that psychology has proven to be purely immanent to psyche—for you to listen to them and allow the Christian to speak in their own terms—we’ll have to see that there are legitimate reasons for contesting this absolutization of psychology. And, you know, the question of dealing with the transcendent comes up. But it’s not as though it’s impossible to have a psychology which is also open to the transcendent. In fact, I think that that is the practice of many psychologists, but on the level of theory, we could also have a psychological theory that recognizes, let’s say, the finitude, the limitations of psychology. That psychology ultimately is contained by something greater than itself, call it reality, and that a psychological discourse ultimately will have to be, find itself limited by, factors that lie outside of its purview.
(3:48) Jakob Lusensky: But would you say that Jung himself was sort of modelling psychological absolutism, or you mean that it more became that?
(3:57) Sean McGrath: Well, this is a very interesting question. And that was exactly what Giegerich and I got into a verbal spat over in a journal a few years ago, where I tried to argue that there’s nothing essentially absolutizing or idealist about Jung’s psychology, although it could coherently be developed in that direction. And Giegerich has done so. But one could develop it in another direction. And just as Giegerich has had to kind of correct certain aspects of Jung which don’t line up with psychological absolutism, so too would, let’s say, a finite psychology have to correct certain absolutizing features in Jung. But these corrections are going to happen, at least in terms of understanding a psychology of the finite or a finite psychology—these corrections are not going to be merely psychological, they’re not going to be moves within psychology. They’re going to have to be philosophical moves. For example, we’re going to have to deal with, let’s say, Kant, and the way Jung has accepted Kant’s philosophical argument for the impossibility of metaphysical knowledge. That’s not a psychological point. That’s a philosophical point, which Kant—which Jung—takes as a kind of a foundation that could be corrected. There’s a history of dealing with that problem. In fact, one can show that Kant himself is incoherent on the thing in itself, and that, you know, we need to do some philosophical work here, in order to correct the assumptions of psychology so that we do not land up in a kind of absolutized psychology or psychological idealism such as Giegerich has produced. Now, if you want to be a psychological absolutist—Giegerich, I think he is far more consistent, far more consistent than Jung. But this is one of the great things about Jung, you know: he’s such a wild theoretician; he’s like a guerrilla theorist. He’s just all over the place. And that’s what makes him so exciting to read. And this is why we’ll be reading him for a long, long time, because he opens up so many possibilities. But we can’t simply leave him where he is. And in this regard, I think Giegerich is absolutely right.
You know, the next step forward is not simply to repeat Jung and reproduce his kind of wild theorizing, but actually to develop something, develop lines of thinking from Jung, which maybe have to impose a little more consistency and coherence there than Jung himself brought to the question.