• Vincent Kundukulam

Regarding the structure of human person, Karl Gustav Jung speaks of two concepts: ego and persona. Ego is the experienced inner sense of the self, which is endowed with sameness and continuity. The persona is the social other in the self which represents the collective unconscious of the society. In course of personality development, the ego tries to conform itself to the collective expectations of the society.

The interaction between ego and persona takes place via the collective unconscious in the society, and the strong component of the latter is the archetypes that are transmitted through culture.  According to Jung, the process of individuation happens in an individual when the ego, with its personal character of fantasy, appropriates the universal character of structures from the social culture and modifies its persona. Persons break down or have mental crisis when the ego and the persona fail to properly become aware of the depth of the psychic processes happening in them. Consequently, there emerge deceptive archetypal images.

The Freudian solution to resolve the psychological crisis is to reduce fantasy to the level of reality in life or to modify the fantasy level in terms of the collective unconscious. But Jung proposes another alternative. His suggestion for cure is to grasp and expand the meaning of the personal fantasy with the help of the archetypes, and in that venture, he finds a place for religious archetypes.  In other words, while Freud thinks of healing people by curtailing the fantasy, Junge tries to constructively use the fantasy by simultaneously making the ego participate and differentiate with the archetypal images.

Jung made this positive approach possible by what he calls ‘active imagination’. He expands and dignifies the personal fantasy character with the help of mythic structures. In the therapeutic exercise, he applies a double movement: he equipes the self, on the one hand, by correctly understanding the archetypal images, and on the other hand, by lucidly interpreting their messages by way of formulating exact transcendental meanings. His interest in theology consisted in grasping the relevant meanings of myths, symbols and doctrines for people in their given cultures. For instance, he found the Christian doctrine of Trinity immensely helpful to explain the unconscious side of life, which he called the dark or shadow archetype.

Jung argued that the religious images can play the mediating and functional role between ego and persona. He investigated the transcendental archetypal a priori images that underlie the doctrinal formulations and, with their help, he tried to solve the problems of people. Rather than the objective content of dogmas, what attracted him was the transcendental power hidden in the religious images. He believed that the affective dynamism of religious beliefs, which are composed of symbols and myths, can provide meaning to the questions regarding human destiny and that by modifying the significances of the mythic universe for the person through the psychological hermeneutic, the individuals can be raised above their psychological chaos.

The following explanation would make the rationale of Jung’s psychological hermeneutic clearer. In Jung’s opinion, the thinking subject is possessed of an archetypal infrastructure and the thoughts of humans are conditioned by their mythic world. On the basis of the same reason, he believed that the thinking patterns of a person can be changed by reinterpreting the meaning of their archetypal images. Through the psychological hermeneutic of religious symbols, psychologists can helps humans to go deeper into the concealed layers of the self and to revisit their archetypal world with a new meaning. This reinitiation to the religious symbolic world would bring home new moral possibilities as well as new possibilities of thought. Slowly, this process of psychological hermeneutic shall lead to the metamorphosis of personality.

Thus, to Jung, the religious world of symbols and myths is of great help in leading the psychological process to achieve its goal i.e. to travel to the concealments of human ego, make it realized of a renewed meaning and thereby empower the individual rise above its history.

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