The popularity of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung has exploded in recent years. His work has been championed by Jordan Peterson, and Jungian terms like “projection” or “having a complex” have become part of the common language. 

So how should a Christian approach Jung’s work?

The answer for me came in a book called God and the Unconscious. It was first published in 1952 by Victor White (1883-1963), who was a British Dominican priest. God and the Unconscious is a brilliant and profound work of theology. It deals with complicated and deep subjects in a clear way, and comes to a conclusion that is profoundly Christian and intellectually sound. This book should be put into the hands of any person — and there are now a lot of them — who is interested in Jung’s work.

From Understanding to Healing

To simplify greatly, Father White’s conclusion is this: the science of psychology has something to offer human understanding of what Jung called the psyche, or the soul. Yet the soul wants ultimate healing, joy and happiness, and that can only be found in Jesus.

To be sure, the soul is vast and deep. And in life a person can suffer from “complexes” stemming from unresolved issues. Jung was right in that helping to identify and represent these issues can be figures from myth, literature, and religion, which all represent the common themes of mankind throughout our entire history.

However, to fully resolve our complexes — to completely come home as it were —there is only one person who can heal us. That person is Jesus Christ.

The Author Wrote Back and Forth to Jung

Even seven decades after its first publication, God and the Unconscious remains fresh. For one, it is a deep and respectful engagement with psychology. Father White understands the usefulness psychology has, like any other science, in identifying human problems. Jung himself corresponded with White and wrote the introduction to the book.

Yet White filled in what us missing in Jung: the Lord. Carl Jung was very respectful of religion, strongly arguing that psychology could simply describe problems. But he finally admitted: “The truth or reality of religion lies beyond the competence of psychology.”

In response, Fr. White offers this: “Yet the psyche’s own deepest yearning. Even for its own health and sanity, is for truth and reality, whatever may be the cost of abandoning agreeable make-believe … the limitations of psychology’s own empirical method compel it ever to confess its ignorance, and to point elsewhere for any answers there might be.” In other words, you can respect the depth and complexity and even accuracy of Jung, but the soul wants a final answer. It wants not just to identify the complexes, but to beat them.

Utterly Unlike the Gods of the Gentiles

That final answer is Jesus. White takes on the idea, popular among many of Jung’s fans, that Jesus was just one of a long line of “gods” in the old pagan world who died and were reborn. In other words, that Jesus is just another myth. Nonsense:

The self-sacrifice of Christ is not only new, it is also final — and that is perhaps it’s most startling novelty… . Just because it has been lived and died out in fact and history, consciously and voluntarily, the myth is not destroyed but fulfilled; its endless repetition is broken together with its unconscious, compulsive power. Indeed, in becoming fact it ceases to be mere myth.

We Are Not Our Own

Self-sacrifice means whole self-giving, an unqualified renunciation of every claim on what we possess — and we do not possess ourselves. Indeed, the more we advance in self-knowledge and self-possession, with or without the aid of psychology, the less we find we know, the more we find that is beyond our dominion and control, the more we know we are not our own, and therefore we are incapable of self-sacrifice. Only a Lord of all, who possesses all, can initiate and consummate the sacrifice and impart to us the new life which springs from death.

Amen and amen.

Mark Judge is a writer and filmmaker in Washington, D.C. His new book is The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi.