| Summary: | "Here, for the first time in one volume, are the religious views of a major psychiatrist who finds a religious outlook on life a necessary factor in mental health. 'Among all my patients over thirty-five,' says Jung, 'there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.' While Jung, of all the great psychiatrists, has been most sympathetic to Christianity, he is also a major critic of our modern interpretation of it. He feels that Christianity today tends to be washed out, irrelevant--it has lost its bite. One of the reasons is that the generally accepted view does not adequately evaluate or understand the place of evil and darkness (the shadow) in our human life, as earlier interpretations of Christianity did. The idea that coming to terms with one's own 'shadow' can have an effect on the totality of collective evil is one of the most dramatic and socially significant of all Jungian ideas. Jung also holds the quite radical premise that spirit and instinct are not separate, and that recovery of the reality of spirit in our time will come through a rediscovery of the importance and meaning of the instincts and an honoring of them, as opposed to the more time-honored conviction that they must be crushed and trampled out. For Jung, the experience of God was the impact of the totality of life upon the soul. Our theological outlook tends to spiral us out of reality through a rationalistic and intellectual discussion of God. Since God is not to be found through intellectualizing, this leads to talk about the death of God. Jung's view is that once we get into life and keep in touch with our instincts and 'down-to-earthness,' God will become real again--a vital and guiding power and force in our lives, with awesome 'leadings' for us both in our individual lives and in society as a whole. His outlook on the reality of God and how that reality is to be recovered by modern man offers a compelling answer to the whole 'death of God' discussion."--Dust jacket.
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