A Strategy for a Loss of Faith: Jung's Proposal

William Glassman is a psychology professor at the Ryerson Polytechnical
Institute in Toronto.

The nature of religious belief has long been a topic of interest to
psychologists, attracting the attention of Freud, William James, and
other major figures. Like these theorists, Carl Jung (himself an early
protegé of Freud) had a lifelong interest in religion. In this book,
Dourley chronicles Jung’s attempts to reconcile faith with the
religious experience he traced to the collective unconscious, and
examines the significance of Jung’s ideas for contemporary life. As a
graduate of the Jung Institute in Zurich, a Catholic priest, and a
professor of religious studies at Carleton University, Dourley is well
qualified to explore these issues.

Jung felt a conflict between his father’s beliefs, which were based
on abstract faith, and his own views, which were grounded in his
experiences of spirituality. Like Jung, Dourley believes that organized
religions, by emphasizing intellectual dogma and denying spiritual
experience, have impoverished individual development. His comparisons of
Jung’s ideas on this theme with those of Martin Buber and Meister
Eckhart will be of greater value if the reader already is familiar with
their work. Readers who are neither Jungians nor Catholics may find some
passages difficult, but, for the most part, the basic narrative is
accessible. If there is one weakness, it is that Dourley does not
address possible flaws or limitations in Jung’s approach to faith and
religious experience. After all, if rigid structures are a danger in
religion, they may also be so in psychology.