Christ has changed up language and signs and the very ground of meaning, exposing a symbolism and language focused on absence and the grave, emptying religion focused on worship of the dead (ancestor worship), manipulation of death through sacrifice (pagan, Jewish, and Christian religion, focused on propitiation), or a Heraclitean and Heideggerian presumption of violence (the Greek logos) as origin, exposing the emptiness of the grave and defeating death as the reigning category and joining himself to a new order of language and meaning, binding together the sign and signified in himself. The Logos of Christ exposes the emptiness of human language, human symbol making, and human religion, as its own ground, and sets forth an alternative foundation and alternative sign system. The place this shift is realized is in the mind, the psyche, the conscious and unconscious self. Psychic conversion, a transformation of the mind, putting on the mind of Christ, means that the human conscious and unconscious, like human language and human symbol making (idolatry), are reordered or even recreated. The mental equivalent of the exposure of religion and language grounded in death, or a life revolving around absence, the grave, the abyss, is the exposure of the unconscious as a ground of meaning or a controlling factor in consciousness. Where pagan religion, in necromancy, calling upon the dead, consulting mediums, presumes upon absence and death as primary, so too the presumption that the conscious arises from the unconscious, gives primacy to absence. It is on the order of presuming death and violence are the origin of life. Absence is put in control of presence, death is made to reign over life, and the unconscious, the repressed, the forgotten, is given primacy over the mental life.
The New Testament pictures a reordering of the mind, which still pictures key roles for the conscious and unconscious mind, but both are given a very different role as they are filled with the Trinitarian presence, focused not on a natural and given ordering of the mind, but the mind made new. Theological systems can be divided as to whether they build upon the given order, natural theology, common sense, philosophical insight, or upon an apocalyptic reordering, and this applies as well to the theological intersection with psychology. Typically, theologies which presume the given order is adequate also presume something on the order proposed by Carl Jung, that the symbols and signs of pagan religion or evolutionary development, contain an inherent truth and reality. It is on the order of presuming the logos of man is on a continuum with the Logos of God, and that the hidden roots and meanings of human symbols contain the key to healthy consciousness. To over simplify, the issue is whether the unconscious contains a depth of reality (a resource for depth psychology) or is a part of a deceived construct, which needs to be exposed and transformed.
Jungian Psychology Versus an Apocalyptic Transformation of the Mind
The decisive divide in this theological moment is between apocalyptic theology and a vast assortment of others, including Robert Doran, Jonathan Pageau, John Milbank, and those Christians identifying along with Jordan Peterson with a Jungian understanding of the unconscious. For the Jungians the unconscious is a resource of archetypical symbols and reality that must be brought to consciousness to gain harmony with the conscious mind. While apocalyptic theology may not seem to align with any particular psychology, it fits, in part, the description of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, which would dismiss Jung’s psychology as pure idealism, and pictures the unconscious following the lead of Paul as consisting of a refusal of the truth (sin is the lie structuring the dynamics of personhood) and salvation is the reconstitution of the human Subject. As Paul puts it, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:20). Paul exceeds Lacan and Žižek, providing for a fulsome role for the unconscious, in prayer, in relying on the Spirit, in communion with God, but also in suspending the permanent role they give to death (in the real and death drive), but prior to this possibility, the focus on death, alienation, the law or symbolic, points to the need for an apocalyptic remaking of the mind.
Jung and Lacan and Žižek, are all building on Freud, who began to explore the unconscious and dreams, but they arrive at opposite conclusions. Jung is continuing with Freud’s notion that biology is primary, but Freud revised this assumption in his turn to death drive and a sociology of interior relations, which Lacan and Žižek will locate in language rather than biology. For Lacan, the unconscious is structured like a language, but this language is grounded in a fundamental fantasy or a grounding lie. The stuff of this lie is the same substance which Jung takes as a deep instinctual reality. For Žižek Jung’s archetypes are a perfect example of a fundamental fantasy, as in Lacanian terms, a fantasy is not a dream world we escape into; it is the framework that structures how we perceive reality so that we can ignore a traumatic, chaotic lack. For Žižek, Jungian archetypes are an “ideological mystification”—a narrative cushion designed to hide the fact that human experience is inherently broken, structured as it is on the divide in the linguistic and symbolic order.[1]
Jung and His Theological Disciples
For Jung, the unconscious is not merely made up of repressed personal memories, but is structured by archetypes—primordial blueprints, motifs, and instincts common across all human history. Jung presumes that dreams are to be mined for a truth not available to the conscious mind: “One cannot afford to be naive in dealing with dreams. They originate in a spirit that is not quite human, but is rather a breath of nature—a spirit of the beautiful and generous as well as of the cruel goddess. If we want to characterize this spirit, we shall certainly get closer to it in the sphere of ancient mythologies, or the fables of the primeval forest, than in the consciousness of modern man.”[2] Dreams touch upon archetypical realities and trues which must be mined and understood to bring the conscious and unconscious into harmony. Jung pictures dreams as tapping into a world of spirit, which may not always be benevolent, but it must be heeded as they tap into the reality of the instincts: “For the sake of mental stability and even physiological health, the unconscious and the conscious must be integrally connected and thus move on parallel lines. If they are split apart or ‘dissociated,’ psychological disturbance follows. In this respect, dream symbols are the essential message carriers from the instinctive to the rational parts of the human mind, and their interpretation enriches the poverty of consciousness so that it learns to understand again the forgotten language of the instincts.”[3]
Perhaps the most academically prominent theologian to utilize Jungian psychology is Robert Doran, who deploys Jung to complete his picture of the project of Bernard Lonergan: “what Lonergan would regard as the fourth level of intentional consciousness, becomes an exigence for psychic self-appropriation, calling for the release of what C. G. Jung calls the transcendent function, the mediation of psyche with intentionality in an intrasubjective collaboration heading toward individuation.”[4] Doran is using Jungian structures and language throughout, such as “self-appropriation” and “individuation,” so as to describe psychic health. He pictures his work as filling out Lonergan’s conversions with a fourth conversion, beyond the religious, moral, and intellectual conversions specified by Lonergan. “I call it psychic conversion. It aids the sublation of intellectually self-appropriating consciousness by moral and religious subjectivity, and thus is an intrinsic dimension of the foundational reality whose objectification constitutes the foundations of theology.”[5] As he succinctly states: “At a given stage in the self-appropriation of intentional consciousness, the intention of value or of the human good must come to participate in an ongoing conspiracy with the psychosymbolic dimensions of human subjectivity. The attempt to objectify this conspiracy will result in a position complementary and compensatory to that of Lonergan and compensatory to that of Jung.”[6]
There is a presumption of a naturally given knowledge and insight, flowing from Lonergan to Jung, such that “dream interpretation” reveals what Jung calls “active imagination” which plays its role along with “waking consciousness” in “the totality of subjectivity.”[7] Doran uses Jungian depth psychology to bridge the gap between human intentionality (the drive to understand, judge, and act) and the non-intentional layers of the psyche (emotions, images, and archetypes). Symbols and archetypes within human consciousness are inherently reliable structural conduits for the divine, though potentially distorted by individual or group bias, they are healed through psychological integration. The question is if human archetypes are neutral blueprints to be integrated or are they, as in a Girardian understanding, remnants of historical violence and scapegoating. Rather than being integrated, don’t they need to be exposed, apocalyptically destabilized, and reconstituted by the Word of the cross?
Jordan Peterson describes his self-discovery in conjunction with his first encounter with Jung and his concern to come to understand his dreams and nightmares. “I knew, vaguely, that Jung had developed specialized knowledge of myth and religion, so I started through his writings.”[8] It is here he hits upon Jung’s archetypes: “It must be admitted that the archetypal contents of the collective unconscious can often assume grotesque and horrible forms in dreams and fantasies, so that even the most hard-boiled rationalist is not immune from shattering nightmares and haunting fears.”[9] This was precisely Peterson’s problem. This led him to explore religious phenomenology.
In Peterson’s understanding, the Bible offers viable moral guidance because it distils a large human sample over a long span of time represented in Jung’s archetypes. In Marc Champagne’s description, Peterson blends the ideas of Jean Piaget and Jung to elucidate interplay between personal psychology and collective archetypes aiming to unearth reliable interpretative patterns that range over all conceivable cases, thereby providing a meta-solution to whatever problem(s) humans might encounter. Thus, “The archetypes of Carl Jung help Peterson classify the various narrative patterns that govern our fundamental understanding of ourselves and the world.”[10] The content of faith, captured in religious narratives “selected by evolutionary pressures” must be a mode of becoming informed.[11]”Jung “believed that the mind was not a blank slate but prepared before birth to cognitively and emotionally guide the individual in dealing with certain life situations that are pan-human” and Peterson takes this and adapts it.[12] For Peterson the personal and personhood are subsequent to language, symbols, and culture and one orients themself according to these givens. He does not hesitate to include the Bible and Christianity as supports of his view that truth evolves through human interaction, hierarchy, and organization. Moses did not receive the ten commandments from above, but inductively arrived at them from below and Christ is not the Truth but he “embodies the ideal of ‘speaking the truth.’”[13]
As Champagne summarizes, “In his writings and lectures, Peterson presents an ambitious re-reading of the Bible that locates this text in humanity’s evolutionary history, as it were. On his telling, the Biblical stories are a collectively authored attempt to depict the ideal person.”[14] Peterson gives primacy to both the inductive method, and the laws at which the method arrives. Christ’s claim to be the son of God is itself aimed at displacing divine authority with inductive generalization. Every son can perform the inductive trick. Peterson has no room for revelation (whether in Christ or otherwise) rather, “different folks observed the conduct of many moral persons, abstracted out the common denominator in their actions, and then reified the resultant abstraction in a narrative format.”[15]
The question is if a faith that can celebrate our “Common Stories, the participation in our common rituals” and which looks to the hierarchy of culture, politics, or as Peterson puts it, the unified attention which has evolved through time through myths, stories, and the development of social order as the truth, can be equated with the Truth of Christ.[16]
An Apocalyptic Psychology
Is Jung’s or Žižek’s picture of the unconscious correct? There may be no way to empirically decide, but the biblical picture, while more complicated than either would allow, fits the initial picture provided by Lacan and Žižek (even in their estimate). They both point to Paul’s picture of the human psyche as the ground of their theory. The Bible with Lacan and Žižek, pictures the unconscious, not as filled with archetypical symbols, but with a deceived orientation, which by definition defines the function of the unconscious. The Subject is ultimately a repressed/unconscious Subject deceived primarily about the Self (the fundamental fantasy) as his own basic dispositional frame is one that obscures the “place” from which he sees.
This obstacle within the Subject, which Žižek finds in Paul’s description of sin in Romans 7:7ff but which his theory as a whole illustrates, is the necessary kernel of the “real” around which the Subject is constituted. It is in and through fantasy or deception (the stuff of the real) that the Subject arises, and this largely accounts for Žižek’s dialogue with theology.[17] This is not to affirm all of Lacanian psychology (with which Žižek identifies) or to suggest there are curative powers in this form of therapy, but his theory aids in showing that salvation (as pictured in Romans 6-8) reconstitutes the Subject in such a way that being “in Christ” overcomes the deception and alienation inherent in, and necessary to, the Lacanian registers.
Even in Žižek’s account of Christianity there is an overcoming of the perverse relation to the law, or an overcoming of metaphysics, as Christ’s death suspends the punishing effects of the symbolic order and institutes the religion of love. As Žižek puts it, “In Lacanian terms, we are dealing with the suspension of the big Other, which guarantees the subject’s access to reality: in the experience of the death of God, we stumble upon the fact that “the big Other doesn’t exist”’ (Metastases of Enjoyment, 42). For Žižek the Jungian categories are not a hidden reality undergirding conscious reality, they are a deception posited with the fiction of the perverse Superego (the big Other). For Jung and his followers, the order of reality is captured in symbols, signs, or the law, and the best one can do is read the symbols, follow the signposts of the law, while for Paul one is freed from the punishing constraints of the law. Christ suspends this circular logic in which the Subject is attempting to ground himself and exposes the fantasy of this supposed substantial ground – a ground that exacts the payment of a living death” (Did somebody Say Totalitarianism, 49-50).
Beyond Jung and Žižek to Paul
The Jungian notion is something on the order of investing more heavily in what Žižek, building upon Paul, considers a fantasy or a lie. Baptism into Christ displaces the primordial deception (connected with the lure of desire and the Law – death) with the ontological reality of the death and resurrection of Christ, but this complete putting away of the lie exceeds the possibilities of Žižek’s focus on the reality of death and death drive. Baptism is an ontological alternative to the “body of death” as there is a joining to his body as a new Subject. The “Subject” of death has joined herself to death while the Subject of Christ has been joined to the ontological reality of God in Christ. The psychological realization builds on this ontological ground it presumes: “We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing” (Rom. 6.6). The voiding or suspension (“brought to nothing”) that takes place in v. 6 (katargέw) and which is repeated in 7:2 and 6 speaks of a transferal from one sort of Subject to another. In this, Paul exceeds Žižek, in that he pictures the suspension of death (the death drive) which is not a possibility in the Lacanian system. But this points to the apocalyptic realization of a new person, a new cosmic order, realized in Christ.
Paul’s redemption is passage from a mind out of control to one in which the Trinity is the ordering reality, up to and including a harmonious continuum between the conscious and unconscious. No longer is there the disjointed alienation, but a depth of communion within oneself characteristic of the Trinity. The unconscious structured like a language in Lacan contains only a deception or an empty word, but for Paul the Christian unconscious is not constituted through repression or deception but through a depth of communion. Where chapter 7 of Romans and Žižek picture the dialectic of human interiority as an antagonistic failure to communicate, in chapter 8 Paul depicts the unconscious workings of the Christian heart and mind as an open prayer in which “He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God” (8.27).
The tacit knowledge structuring the restoration of the mind, participates in a prayerful dialectic within the Trinity as “we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us” (8.26). Just as Jesus prayer in Gethsemane is the means by which he faces the suffering of the cross and remains true to his vocation, so too the believer obediently endures suffering by entry into this inter-Trinitarian communication between the Spirit and the Father. “In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness” (8.26) as incapacity (ἀsqέneia) is the precise point at which the capacity of the Spirit intercedes. This is not a reliance upon naturally given signs and symbols but upon the presence of God.
[1] See the video https://www.reddit.com/r/zizek/comments/ha9ych/why_zizek_rejects_jung/
[2] Carl G. Jung, Man and his Symbols (London: Aldus Books, 1964), 52.
[3] Jung, 52.
[4] Robert Doran, Psychic Conversion (https://www.lonerganresource.com/media/pdf/books/14/119_D0207_Psychic_Conversion_(offprint).pdf) 201.
[5] Doran, 201.
[6] Doran, 202.
[7] Doran, 205.
[8] Jordan Peterson, Maps of Meaning : The Architecture of Belief (Routledge, 1999) 12.
[9] 13
[10] Champagne, Marc. Myth, Meaning, and Antifragile Individualism: On the Ideas of Jordan Peterson (Societas Book 69) . Societas. Kindle Edition.
[11] Peterson, 92.
[12] Champagne, Location 647.
[13] Champagne, 92.
[14] Champagne, 92.
[15] Champagne, 100.
[16] Jonathan Pageau and Jordan Peterson, “Identity: Individual and the State versus the Subsidiary Hierarchy of Heaven” (ARC Research, October 2023) 21. (Hereafter, “Identity”).
[17] Axton, 10.