Fritz Kunkel
In July 2022, I wrote about the Jungian analyst Robert Johnson and his encounter with the psychotherapist and psychiatrist Fritz Kunkel (and used the same photo). In the collection of writings that make up the book The Choice is Always Ours, Fritz Kunkel is quoted in the context of his understanding of stages of progression on the way. Following spiritual leaders throughout history, Kunkel calls this journey of conversion the ‘Great Turn’ or the ‘Great Way’, but he looks at the stages of this partly from a therapeutic perspective.
The first stage is to do with regression and reintegration, and in the religious context this corresponds to the ‘purgation’ of medieval mysticism. He sees this stage as about the collapsing of old ways of thinking about oneself, including the rigid structures that we set up: these include prejudices, resentments, desires, and fears. As this rigidity begins to open up and fall apart so does the censoring between the conscious and unconscious, which means that all the old stuff (my word not his) can come to mind: ‘Old images, forgotten emotions, repressed functions, come to life again.’ This stage is spoken of in psalms such as psalm 18: 4-5: ‘The cords of death encompassed me … the sorrows of hell compassed me about.’ The only solution is to turn to the real centre which is God.
Even the atheist, if anything disagreeable takes him by surprise, reacts with a superficial turn to the centre. He says “Oh God!” or “For goodness sake!” If the believer can do the same thing in a more serious way, even though in the moment of fear or pain his concept of God may be vague or childish, it will help him more than anything else.
The turning towards the centre is then the second stage. This involves leaving behind old images of what God is: the limitations that we inevitably impose on our projections of what God might be, or how God will fit in some way into an empty but restricted frame. Then we might feel fear, that turns into anxiety, and then finally to awe. Kunkel writes about the power of darkness that is now manifested as light, and how what he calls the ‘tremendum’ inevitably originates as a subjective human experience, so that any rigid theology or convictions are smashed by the Grace of God. ‘We live in a jail which we call our castle’, so the breaking through of our defences by this experience of God is an act of grace, and even if we initially reject this, Kunkel sees that this too is part of grace: “it shows that the Kingdom is there already and is working in spite of and even through the errors and felonies of its prospective citizens.”
The breaking through of the experience of God leads to the third stage, which Kunkel equates to the ‘illuminations’ of the mystics. This is characterized by both intellectual insight and emotional experience of utmost reality, and what he calls ‘a volitional change’, which gives us a new way of seeing and being in the world.
Deeper insight, more power, increasing responsibility, and above all a higher kind of love, more detached and more comprehensive … conditioned by the centre. It is creative power, using the images, now cleansed and timeless, according to its creative plans, which are our own unconscious goals … This transforms the individual … that is love; and proves to be also our relation to God … that is faith.