The young Carl Jung

It’s been suggested that each of us arrives in this world with the potential for faith. How this is activated and developed depends largely on how we are welcomed into life, and the environment in which we are raised. Faith and trust are closely linked. So, trust is acquired through our experience in earliest infancy, where we need a reliable and kind care-giver. Faith which is relational and interactive is a more general and universal human characteristic that the future holds promise and possibility.

In recent posts I wrote about how Wilfred Bion and Donald Winnicott saw faith as a developmental psychic function that helps us create belief and hope, and indeed a sense of self. Bion saw faith as a fundamental emotional truth that enables us to tolerate uncertainty and the unknown. Whilst Winnicott used his concept of ‘transitional objects,’ and how the earliest mother-infant relationship forms the root of a child’s capacity for symbolic thought, imagination, and ultimately, belief.

In my recent book Night Sea Journeying I wrote about what happens to our souls when there has been trauma in childhood, how we develop a self-care system in order to cope, and how faith and trust can be painfully regained later in life. Inevitably, our earliest experiences shape (for better or worse) our later relationship (or not) with God.

In this and the next post, I return to Carl Jung and his early experiences of growing up in a very strait-laced, religious Swiss family (Jung’s father was a pastor), where feelings were never discussed, and his parents’ relationship was estranged and awkward, leading to a time of separation when Jung’s mother spent time in hospital. As an imaginative and sensitive child, Jung reacted to this environment by having nightmares which left him feeling ashamed and lonely. He was encouraged to say this prayer before bed:

‘Spread out thy wings, Lord Jesus mild, and take to thee thy chick, thy child.

“If Satan would devour it, No harm shall overpower it,”

So let the angels sing.’

From this, Jung surmised that Lord Jesus who began as ‘comforting, a nice, benevolent gentleman’ became the eater of ‘chicks’ [children] to stop Satan, and, this equated with clergymen in black burying people in the ground and the frightening Jesuits also dressed in black. Some of this fear emerged in a nightmare when Jung was 3 or 4, a dream that haunted him for years and influenced his later understanding of God:

In the dream the little boy is in a meadow when he discovers a hole in the ground. Curious, he descends a stone stairway leading deep into the ground. Frightened and hesitant he goes through a doorway at the bottom – a round arch with a heavy green brocade curtain. Pushing it aside he enters a long chamber with a red carpet running towards a low platform on which is a magnificent throne. On the throne is a strange object like a tree trunk made of flesh, with an eye at the top ‘gazing motionlessly upward,’ and above it an aura of brightness.

‘I had the feeling that it might move at any moment …and creep towards me. At that moment I heard … my mother’s voice. She called out, “yes, just look at him. That is the man-eater!’ That intensified my terror even more and I awoke sweating and scared to death. …decades later I understood it was a ritual phallus.’

Jung later surmised that the dream was of the subterranean God. ‘Lord Jesus never became quite real for me, never quite acceptable, never quite loveable, for again and again I would think of his underground counterpart.’ Decades later he saw the dream as an initiation into the world of darkness that began his lifetime’s task to bring the greatest possible light into the darkness.