Psychoanalysis is a discipline which helps people reconcile the warring dimensions of themselves. Broadly speaking, the self, or the psyche according to Carl Jung, is made up of three parts. The conscious mind – which is that part of the mind we are aware of, where all our thoughts and knowledge reside; then at the next level down, we have the personal unconsciousness – all that stuff that makes it into our head without us being aware of it, either because it is too mundane for us to bring to awareness, or because it is too painful or visceral to bring to awareness; and then finally, and most interestingly, the collective unconscious – the illusive core of our psyche which Jung believed we are born with, which resides within us as a hangover of our evolutionary past. Jung often used the word ‘primordial’ when talking about aspects of the collective unconscious, meaning innate and ancient, a vestige of our pre-historic origins. As our prehistoric ancestors lived on the land, and communed with the spirits of nature as they perceived them, as they felt themselves at one with the ebb and flow of nature, at one with the cycle of seasons, the cycles of the moon, at one with the web of life in which they were intimately bound up – the very fabric of humanity’s psyche at its core took shape. A primordial religious mind became rooted within us. This is the ‘collective unconscious’, this is the aspect of the human psyche which we all share. Out of our collective unconscious strange forces and fantasies may surface. When there is great tumult within us, our unconscious mind rears up, and creative expression outpours from within - outpours from that primordial core at one with nature, as if we were spread across the landscape, and within the trees, the clouds, and within the seasons. In this way then ‘God’ – if that is an appropriate word – is a reality at the deepest core of our being. An inner core which nudges us down paths of spiritual fulfillment, nudges us towards a harmony between the inner and outer self; an inner reality we are made aware of through creative expression, be that religious or poetic, or artistic expression.
In Jung’s waning years he was asked in an interview ‘if he believed in God?’ He said it was a difficult question to answer... He paused, and then he said, ‘I know God. I do not believe, I know.’ Carl Jung was a Darwinian, he believed that the human mind was a product of evolutionary history, and that religion, the gods, were all of human origin, echoes and projections of humanity’s inner self. As such, unlike other contemporary atheists of his day, he regarded religious beliefs as glimpses into this inner world. In other words, Carl Jung was a religious naturalist, putting aside supernaturalism, and holding onto the mystical notion that the knowledge of God is the same thing as self-knowledge. Knowledge of God is about knowledge of self, harmonizing the components of one’s nature. The ‘collective unconscious’ in this way knows the blueprint for humanity. Our inner core is the physician we need, when the various stages of life confound us with its new set of existential crises. In this way a Bible passage such as: ‘For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the LORD, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope’ can be recalimed, and make more sense – talking of God’s plan for our lives makes more sense.