• Vincent Kundukulam

After the Second Vatican Council, a variety of new approaches have appeared in the field of theology, and among them, the notable shift is in the method of doing theology. If in the pre-Vatican era, the emphasis was on the systematic formulation of dogmas, in the post-Varican period the primary concern of theologians has been in the hermeneutical act. The nature of theological work has become more interpretative than dogmatic.

The new hermeneutical turn took two different directions in the theological research: the one centered on reviewing the themes related to purely theological topics and the other in relation to the phenomenology of religion. The attempts to reflect on the dogmas of faith in the light of the tools that are developed by the human and social sciences kept an open space for inter-disciplinary researches on religious subjects. It is in this regard that today the psychological understanding has some bearings upon Christian faith. Here, we are interested in discussing briefly on the dialogue that take place between Jungian psychology and theology.

Faith in transcendence is central to all religions and Karl Gustav Jung deals with this question in relation to the concept of religious image in humans. According to Jung, the religious image has a dynamic function in the process of individuation – the course of forming a stable personality – that every person undergoes. The religious image opens human consciousness to the development of self-understanding. The interesting point of conversation here is how does the religious image affect the growth of personality and how far the faith in a transcendental reality influence the interplay between religious image and formation of self in the individual.

A certain number of theologians recognize the place of psychological process in the formation of faith, but to them the transcendental dimension happens beyond the level of the psychological formation of self. They see a division in the self with a lower section and a higher sector. The lower layer is related to the psychological development and the higher strata is connected to the religious or spiritual realm. This divisive perception of self, made Jung difficult to enter into dialogue with these categories of theologians. Whereas, to another set of theologians the transcendental dimension plays its role as an immanent reality in the individual.  The Jungian reflections pertain to this second approach.

Theologians made use of Jungian reflections in three ways. The first group of theologians want to make some kind of psychological enrichment of their theological thinking. They made use of psychology in doctrinal thinking while maintaining a clear separation between psychological science and theology. They saw the centrality of the archetype as an imaginative structure which organizes religious experience and the process of human development. But they did not recognize the priority of psychology in the formation and functioning of the archetype. The second group of theologians relied on Jungian psychology only for the therapeutic process. They see Jungian portrayal of the individuation process mainly as a secularized experience, which has nothing to do with the transcendental reality. The third group of theologians are those who are interested in the way Jung tries to locate the archetypal dimensions of theological doctrines and religious myths. (to be continued)

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