The Appeal of Indian Goddesses

It is true, as Jung said, that we cannot help but view foreign cultures through our own Western eyes. It is always “they” in contrast to “us.” This is why he was opposed to Western adaptation to Eastern religions and practices. At best we turn the practices into “techniques” which bear little if any relation to the true sources of those religious practices. Jung refers to the Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola as comparable although different. However, for many seekers today to meditate on the life of Christ would be meaningless. Eastern meditation practices on the other hand have proved eminently adaptable.

Ten years ago I became acquainted with the India goddess Devi, unfortunately not in India, but secondhand, first having read a review of the spectacular exhibit “The Great Goddess” at the Smithsonian, and later through studying many illustrated works about her. Devi, I learned, came in thousands of guises, such as Durga, Ma, Kali, Shakti. Kumari, Lhamo. Every village in which she was honored gave her a different name. Her lineage is traced to pre-historic times and she is to this day widely worshipped throughout India, Nepal and Tibet.

We Catholics had Mary, Virgin and the Mother of God. After Mary’s death she was taken up bodily into heaven where she now reigns side by side with Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Jung referred often to Mary. When her Assumption became dogma in 1950 he was elated for to him it meant that the Holy Trinity had now achieved the perfection of a Quarternity. Catholic women I knew of my generation had no special devotion to Mary, nor did I. ( An old nun I knew once said to me: “It’s the men who need Mary.” ) The insipid statues and pictures of her and those dreary Perpetual Novenas to her did nothing to incite our devotion. At that time her great “Magnificat” was sung or said only in Latin so we were not able to appreciate her jubilant response to having been called to become the Mother of God. We Catholics were to turn to Mary to help us in our need and she would intercede for us, but otherwise her role was a passive one. “Be it done unto me according to they word.”



India’s religious imagery alone caught me, not its history, religions or spiritual practices. I was captivated, nearly exclusively, by the paintings and sculptures of Devi in her myriad manifestations, but particularly in her Durga aspect. No doubt I was drawn to her because my ideas about women had been transformed by the feminist movement of the sixties and seventies. Also, I had by then rejected the model of women as submissive and sacrificial victim, an ideal that had been fostered by such great Catholic luminaries as Paul Claudel, Leon Bloy, Georges Bernanos, Charles Peguy as well as T.S. Eliot (The Cocktail Party) and Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited) and that had sentimental appeal to me in my fervent years as a Catholic.

The shifting forms of Durga, whether that of a many-armed fierce warrior or a full breasted, smiling and benign figure, I found delightful and stirring. Whether at rest or in full battle regalia, in her fullness and many-sidedness, she was a dynamic embodiment of the feminine. The Devi were worshipped as either greater than the male gods or their equals, a cosmic force, shakti, out of which life itself came forth. With the help of Jung’s method of active imagination, this magnificent fantastic imagery offered revelations of the feminine, that I don’t believe would have been possible in my own Western, Christian culture.

The Polish poet and indomitable traveler, Zbigniew Herbert, found that in his encounters with a strange cultures he experienced “fresh perceptions and a feeling of awe,” to which the natives had become inured. Although the Westerner may not understand the full depth of another culture, even its strangest elements may have a compelling attraction that need not be refused.

Jung’s Quest for the Grail in India

Jung’s account of his experience in India illuminates how much the subjective factor enters into our observations and judgments—how much baggage we bring with us when encountering individuals or entire peoples who are foreign to us. He called this subjective factor “the personal equation.” Jung applied the concept of the personal equation to the psychologist who must be knowledgeable about his own personality in order to evaluate as objectively as possible the psyches of others. To do that he had to be free from collective opinions and have “ a clear conception of his own individuality.” And for Jung his individuality was distinctly a European one.

In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung describes his impressions of India which he visited in 1938 as the guest of the British government. He had read widely in Indian philosophy and religion, and his travels in India would enable him to make his own judgments about what he had learned through his readings. Before going to India, however, he had been deeply immersed in his studies on alchemy. So much so that he brought with him a 1602 volume of the writings of the philosopher alchemist Gerhard Dorn which absorbed much of his time during the voyage. Everything he witnessed in that continent was to serve as a counterpoint to this “fundamental strata of European thought.” Throughout his journey “[I] remained within myself like a homunculus in the retort. India affected me like a dream, for I was and remained in search of myself, of the truth peculiar to myself.”

Jung’s meetings with many learned Indians gave him the opportunity to compare their culture, religions and philosophy with Europe’s. What Jung deliberately did not do, was to avoid meeting any of India’s “so called holy men.” His more urgent need was to determine for himself what his own truth was. “Neither in Europe can I make any borrowings from the East, but must shape my life out of myself—out of what my inner being tells me, or what nature brings to me.” One gets the impression that by reading Dorn on the voyage he was forearming himself against the threat that India seemed to pose to his own European identity.

Jung admired certain features of India’s culture and religions, how, for instance, Indians seemed to have been able to assimilate the problem of evil in their religious experience. But he was clearly uncomfortable with much of what he observed, such as the religious imagery in the temples, those “exquisitely obscene sculptures” and, as he wrote later in an essay on India, those “sentimental , grotesque, obscene, monstrous, blood-curdling gods.” For Jung, India’s history, unlike that of Europe, was hidden in an ancient past beyond recall, its religions, its philosophies, as well as its people, seemed to him too “dreamlike.” Buddhism and Islam, in contrast, seemed to him eminently superior—purer.

While in India, Jung became quite ill and spent some time in a hospital in Calcutta. Shortly after he had a dream in which he had been given the task to find the Grail and bring it to a castle. Jung interpreted the dream as thoroughly European. “Imperiously, the dream wiped away all the intense impressions of India and swept me back to the too-long neglected concerns of the Occident, which had formerly been expressed in the quest for the Holy Grail as well as in the search for the philosopher’s stone. I was taken out of the world of India, and reminded that India was not my task, but only a part of the way—admittedly a significant one—which should carry be closer to my goal. It was as though the dream were asking me, ‘What are you doing in India? Rather than seek for yourself and your fellows the healing vessel, the servator mundi, which you urgently need. For your state is perilous; you are all in imminent danger of destroying all that centuries have built up.’”

When he left India to return home, he decided not to leave the ship to see Bombay (Mumbai) but once again devoted himself to his alchemical studies. “But India did not pass me by without a trace; it left tracks which lead from one infinity into another infinity.” However, his two short essays on India subsequently published have little to say about those traces.

Jung’s candid account of his experience in India shows us how hard it is to arrive at a true understanding of our own individuality especially when it is, or feels threatened by other individuals or by cultures foreign to us. Jung saw himself not just an individual but as a European. This was not an aberration for Jung, an emotional response to a culture with which he was ill-at ease. It was his conviction that however much we can and should learn from the East, we of the West must remain rooted in our own culture. What we adopt from the East we will surely turn into a “technique” without understanding the spiritual and philosophical sources from which it came. That has has surely happened with regard to Eastern meditation practices which have been adapted to suit the Western individual. But this may not be a bad thing and obviously fills a need, even if they retain only a tenuous link with its Eastern sources.

A SUPERORDINATE PSYCHOLOGY

The book published last year in honor of James Hillman is entitled "Archetypal Psychologies.” In explaining the choice of this title, editor Stan Marlan quoted Hillman: “I am not the only founder of this school. There is no one single Archetypal Psychology, but many Archetypal Psychologies.” This is another, relatively recent example of the inability of psychology to become that “unitary discipline” its adherents, Jung notably among them, struggled to achieve during the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. Shamdasani traces the history of this effort which was seen as central to psychology being accepted as a science. As it turned out this effort proved futile. No single psychology emerged to which all could agree upon.

What distinguishes Jung’s psychology from other psychologies—Shamdasani refers to it as “its singular trait”—was that “it attempted to ground other disciplines and knowledges [sic] through psychology.” “In his view, it was the only discipline which could grasp the subjective factor that underlay other sciences.” [Italics added]

His signature concepts contained many different ideas which attempted to resolve major debates in philosophy, psychology, sociology, biology, anthropology, comparative religion and other fields, and enable the formation of a distinct discipline of psychology. It is precisely this combinatory operation that gives his psychology its distinctive style and substance.

Jung’s envisioned psychology as “encyclopedic,” embracing all of human experience. An encyclopedic psychology should not be limited by a particular system —the soul cannot be contained within a system or specialization. “This was psychology on a grand scale.” This was, as Shamdasani concludes, an impossible task as Jung himself later acknowledged.

Perhaps in and of itself the psychology Jung envisioned was unlikely to succeed because it demanded too much on the part of the human egos involved. It is certain that specialization in the sciences and even in the humanities had already become so entrenched that this wider, all embracing vision was doomed from the beginning.

Still, I wonder. As the archival material on Jung and his psychology is published and made more widely available, we can expect new efforts to understand Jung’s psychology as he intended it. Perhaps these efforts will not result in the formulation of a psychology that sees itself as “superordinate” to all disciplines and other fields of knowledge and human experience—but certainly a psychology that is deeply and essentially engaged with them. If it will be superordinate, it is in the sense that it brings to them all, as Jung understood, “the subjective factor that underlay all other sciences” but which now remains elusive, ignored, or manipulated to accommodate ends external to it.

REDISCOVERING JUNG

There is a prodigious work underway that will result in a radical revision of what we think we know about Jung and his psychology. In my reckoning it began in 2003 with the publication of Sonu Shamdasani’s groundbreaking book Jung and the Making Of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science. A historian of psychology and psychiatry, Shamdasani had access to a wealth of unpublished documents, including letters (some 30,000 apparently), lectures, lecture and seminar notes. In that same year the Philemon Foundation, with Shamdasani as General Editor, was established with the task of publishing this vast archival material. Already published by the Foundation are Children’s Dreams by Jung and the Jung-White Letters. Due out in the Fall of this year is Jung’s famous Red Book, a facsimile edition, edited by Shamdasani. In addition, The Foundation has undertaken another important project, a much needed, new translation of The Complete Works (obviously,no longer “complete.”) (For more information about the Philomen Foundation see Philemon Foundation

Shamdasani has demonstrated with his masterful study, Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology, that much of what is accepted today as “Jungian psychology” does not represent how Jung himself conceived and developed it. The discipline that goes by the name of Jungian psychology is “a school of psychotherapy” that despite its claim to have originated with Jung, shouldn’t be identified with the psychology Jung worked to achieve. Instead his terms and concepts have been given other meanings than he intended while many of the issues that he was concerned with have been forgotten or ignored. “To refer to Jungian psychology in the singular—even divided into schools—has become an anachronism,” Shamdasani asserts. Jung never sought to found a particular school of psychotherapy. Instead, his intentions were focused on developing a general psychology, an aspiration in keeping with the 19th century conception of psychology as a unitary science.

With meticulous scholarship applied to a rich lode of new material Shamdasani has shown that many of Jung’s concepts were not original with him, but were being offered, discussed and debated by many others during his time. By actively engaging with them in thinking through these concepts and the problems associated with them, Jung was able to shape and refine his own ideas.

What this history also makes clear but has not been given much attention by his followers, is how wide Jung cast his net. He strove after universality. “No special theory or special subject,” wrote Jung, “should be propounded, but psychology should be taught in its biological, ethnological, medical, philosophical, cultural-historical and religious aspects.” His aim, says Shamdasani, was nothing less than “to free the teaching of human soul from the ‘constriction of compartments.’ “ But Jungian psychology as it was formulated by his followers resulted in “a radical and unacknowledged diminution of Jung’s goal.”

But given the impetus provided by Shamdasani’s Jung and the Origins of Modern Psychology and the endeavors of the Philemon Foundation and the Jungian-based societies associated with it, there is good reason to expect that we are at the beginning of a promising era in Jungian studies. Jung was certainly a man of his time, as Shamdasani convincingly shows us, but his vision of the task of psychology, once understood and applied, makes him a necessary man for our time as well.

Jung and Giegerich on the Individual:
Jung

Giegerich believes the individual is psychologically obsolete, meaning that the individual is no longer the concern of psychology, which now must function on a higher level of consciousness, among those forces that science and technology have unleashed. He admits that the soul finds its expression in individuals, but remains the driving force irrespective of the individual will and intention.

In contrast, Jung believed that these historical events (such for example, the rise of science and technology) take place nowhere else but in the hidden, subjective experience of the individual psyche. Jung makes this radical claim on behalf of the individual:

The great events of world history, are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources in individuals. In our most private and most subjective lives we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers. We make our own epoch. ( “The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man,” CW 10, para. 315. )

Far from viewing them as insignificant, Jung saw the problems of the individual, as fundamentally related to the problems of the time, that “practically every subjective difficulty has to be viewed from the standpoint of the human situation as a whole.” (para. 323) I take this to mean that consciously or unconsciously, the individual self experiences the problems present in the culture as a whole. As individuals we are the carriers or agents of these situations and the problems that may result. We are not, for example, a post-racial society, now that we have elected our first African-American president. Racism is still a powerful negative force, despite the strides that have been made to overcome it. Racism exists because it exists in individuals, acting as individuals or through the groups that individuals generate to further their aims. Can we treat “racism”as an abstraction, as a thing in itself, apart from the racism of individuals? What existence of its own does it really have?

The persistence of racism has been analyzed from many perspectives. So too is this financial mess under intense scrutiny. Human beings created this financial monster and brought it down as well, but the human equation in all of this has not yet been seriously addressed. To do so from a strictly moralistic point of view—“it’s just a matter of greed”—just won’t do. Facile moral judgments do not begin to approach the deeper and elusive causes and consequences. Meanwhile, the focus of psychology, unfortunately, has been exclusively on the individual, as if there were no vital connection with the larger world. As James Hillman and Michael Ventura noted several years ago, “We’ve had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy-and the World’s Getting Worse.”

Empowered by the soul, these events, according to Giegerich, are forces, having their own purpose and direction. What responsibility we have is to “listen” to them, to understand what their purpose and direction might be. There is truth to this, but it is not clear how this approach keeps itself free of human intervention or can be indifferent to the search for meaning from the human perspective.