Graham Pemberton
11 min readOct 6, 2024

Why ‘Jungianism’ is Alive and Well —

despite what Matthew says.

Carl Jung

This is a response to and a critique of a recent article by Matthew entitled ‘Why Has Jungianism Failed?’ I am supposed to be temporarily retired from Medium (see this article). However, as he has over 11k followers (including me), and is obviously seeking to be what is known as an ‘influencer’, I don’t think he should be allowed to get away with this one without some kind of challenge.

I find his article so off-the-mark that it’s hard to know where to start. A good a place as any is that the term ‘Jungianism’ seems to have been coined by Matthew himself — an internet search reveals no results. Given his use of this term, you would think that Matthew’s primary criticism is aimed at Jung’s followers rather than Jung himself — who actually wrote: “Thank God I am Jung and not Jungian” — and they are indeed the target of much of his vitriol.

Matthew writes that “ if you buy a book today on Jungianism what you will find is a bundle of woo woo, a mixture of things from the superstitious to the weird”, and later that “most of his apparent followers seem to stumble into thickets of woo woo and cod psychology”.

This is not a new theme of his. In an earlier debate I had with him he referred to “the absolute mess of woo woo produced by many ‘Jungian’ scholars”. I responded: “I don’t know which Jungian ‘scholars’ Matthew has been reading, but if he has only found an ‘absolute mess of woo woo’, then he has obviously been reading the wrong ones”. In his subsequent response he chose to ignore my comment and not to identify any of them.

Matthew is obviously very keen on the term woo-woo, but has not offered one name of a Jungian follower who produces it, nor one example of the woo-woo that is being produced. So, is Matthew therefore an authority on what and what is not woo-woo? We are invited simply to take his word for it.

In my opinion this is a ridiculous term — it is used in a similar way as ‘pseudoscience’, i.e. by those who seek to dismiss ideas with which they feel uncomfortable without actually bothering to discuss and refute them. That is what Matthew seems to be doing here, making the accusation without offering even one example (apart from a casual reference to Jordan Peterson, hardly a Jungian scholar) or relevant quotes.

Since Matthew doesn’t name any of the Jungian scholars that he finds so objectionable, I’ll recommend a few that he should read. If he thinks that these are woo-woo or cod psychology, then that would be his problem, not theirs. The most obvious example is Marie-Louise von Franz, the greatest of Jung’s immediate colleagues, and a prolific and profound writer. Other noteworthy examples would be: Esther Harding, Erich Neumann, Joseph Henderson, and Aniela Jaffé. I could of course go on.

A relevant question is this. If Jungian followers and scholars are all producing woo-woo, superstitious and weird ideas, then this suggests that they must have got all this to some extent from Jung himself. Could they all have got things so completely wrong by misinterpreting the great man? Since Matthew doesn’t name any examples, nor offer a single quote, it’s hard to know. One wonders why he makes some complimentary remarks about Jung and his prolific writings, if this is what it has led to.

He does praise Jung and his intellect to some extent but fails to mention Jung’s greatest achievements. He makes a passing reference to introverted and extraverted types, but not Jung’s extensive work on the collective unconscious (a term which he coined) thus the nature of the psyche, archetypes, and the concept of synchronicity (another term which he coined), and much more besides.

Matthew does make some critical remarks about Jung himself. In what follows I’ll extract what I consider his three key points. His main objection seems to be Jung’s attitude towards symbolism. He says that Jung claims to give a definitive meaning to symbols:

  • “…a habit of implying that interpretation could be scientific. His schemes for interpreting dreams involved him stating what things in dreams meant”
  • “his attempt to lower this language to psychological heuristics”
  • “the idea that a psychologist, or indeed anyone can simply state what these symbols mean is to lose the sense of what a symbol actually is and what it is doing”.

As I’ve said, Matthew offers no quotes to back up his claims about Jung’s supposed beliefs. I wonder how much Jung Matthew has actually read. One can be forgiven for not having read such works of monumental scholarship as Symbols of Transformation or Mysterium Coniunctionis. However, since Jung considered much of his writing to be too complicated and technical for the general reader, he was persuaded towards the end of his life to publish Man and His Symbols, which was intended for the wider public. (He contributed the first part, and the rest was written by some of his closest followers.)

Has Matthew even read that? If he has, he would within the first two pages find the following passage by Jung. Discussing the difference between signs and symbols, he wrote: “a word or an image is symbolic when it implies something more than its obvious and immediate meaning. It has a wider ‘unconscious’ aspect that is never precisely defined or fully explained. Nor can one hope to define or explain it. As the mind explores the symbol, it is led to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of reason… Because there are innumerable things beyond the range of human understanding, we constantly use symbolic terms to represent concepts that we cannot define or fully comprehend. This is one reason why all religions employ symbolic language or images” (my italics).

So what Matthew claims is actually the opposite of what Jung believed.

Matthew’s next objection is that he sees Jung’s work as “an attempt to essentially characterize religion as a kind of recipe book for psychological transformation, called in his language ‘individuation’ ”. He doesn’t elaborate, however, on what he means by this or why he thinks this is a problem.

Matthew is a Christian, so presumably has a particular view of what religion is. All true religion, however, is or should be about the transformation of consciousness, whether you call that psychological or more commonly spiritual. Obvious examples are Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sufism. The ultimate goal is to find the divine within us, whatever words are used in the language of the different traditions to describe that. Jung is in line with this idea, given that the goal of his individuation process is the self, which he calls the God-image in man (obviously not intending to exclude women).

Jesus, as recorded in the gospels, was also preaching the transformation of consciousness, and was actually a precursor to some Jungian ideas. In Luke’s gospel (17.21), he says that the kingdom of heaven is “within you”, is therefore a state of consciousness, not some blissful existence in the afterlife. (Admittedly some translations read “among you” — the Greek term must be ambiguous. ‘Within you’ makes more sense in the context of spiritual traditions.)

Jesus also knew what it means, to put it in Jungian language, to repress the shadow — the dark unacceptable (evil?) side of our nature. In Matthew 23 Jesus is extremely critical of the Pharisees. Especially noteworthy are verses 25–28 where Jesus makes his complaint against them crystal clear, that their practices and lifestyle lead only to making clean “the outside of the cup and the plate”, while all the “greed and self-indulgence”, “all kinds of filth”, and “hypocrisy and lawlessness” remain on the inside. Jesus makes it clear that he stands for inner transformation of this darkness: “You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup, so that the outside also may become clean”.

Of course, in order to transform the shadow side, one first of all has to become aware of it. Thus Jung writes: People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious”. Jesus and Jung seem to be on the same page. I wonder therefore why Matthew is so opposed to Jung.

An interesting example on this theme is the Sufi teacher, the late Irina Tweedie, author of Daughter of Fire. She was a big influence on Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, a modern Sufi, and wrote the foreword to his book Catching the Thread: Sufism, Dreamwork and Jungian Psychology. In a chapter entitled ‘The Alchemical Opus I: The Transformation of the Shadow’, Vaughan-Lee uses that quote from Jung as his epigram, which continues: “The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular”. (It certainly wasn’t popular with the Pharisees.)

Vaughan-Lee quotes Tweedie, describing what this process was like for her when she first met her Sufi teacher: “I had hoped for instructions in Yoga, expected wonderful teachings”. (This is presumably a reasonable expectation when enlisting with a guru in India.) However, “what the Teacher did was mainly to force me to face the darkness within myself, and it almost killed me. In other words he made me ‘descend into hell’, the cosmic drama enacted in every soul as soon as it dares lift its face to the Light”. This introduces a strong connection between Sufism and Jung since the descent into the Underworld (Hell) or ‘confrontation with the unconscious’ is an essential ingredient of his individuation process.

Jesus also seems to be familiar with the psychological phenomenon of projection, which is a term coined by Freud and adopted by Jung. As I’m sure most readers will know, projection is a psychological defence mechanism where individuals are hostile to others who exhibit the characteristics that they find unacceptable in themselves, and therefore repress. In Matthew’s gospel (7.3–5) Jesus says: “Why do you see the speck in your neighbour’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? … You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye…” What a perceptive therapist Jesus would have been, albeit somewhat aggressive.

This is Matthew’s third objection to Jung: “Because his scheme lacked actual artistic representation itself, it did not itself carry its own set of symbols and so people today seeking to be ‘Jungian’ can either simply glean the odd insight from his work, or else simply give up and return to the religions Jung was piecing together from”.

A minor point is that symbols are not made up by humans; they seem to be products of the unconscious, hence they are the natural language of dreams and mythology. It is therefore missing the point to suggest that Jung’s theory “did not itself carry its own set of symbols”. Is Matthew expecting Jung to make some up?

The second and more important point is that to say that Jung was piecing together elements from various religions is a complete misunderstanding of what Jung was doing, getting things back to front. Jung was not studying various religious texts in order to piece together a system of his own. He was a psychologist, and adopted an empirical approach to his work, i.e. he observed and studied the material produced spontaneously by his clients, especially the archetypal. These were therefore psychological facts which then needed interpreting, and this sometimes proved challenging so that Jung did not always reach a satisfactory conclusion.

To take one example, although others are possible, I’ll focus on Taoism. Jung had a deep friendship with the distinguished sinologist Richard Wilhelm. They collaborated on two books, Wilhelm’s translation of the I Ching, and The Secret of the Golden Flower which I’ll focus on here.

Their relationship had a profound effect upon Jung. He wrote: “what I had to tell him about the results of my investigations of the unconscious caused him no little surprise; for he recognized in them things he had considered to be the exclusive possession of the Chinese philosophical tradition”. There was therefore a meaningful connection between Jung’s psychological discoveries and the ancient wisdom of Taoism. He did not make the connection by reading Taoist texts. We can assume that what Jung calls the collective unconscious was responsible for this.

Jung calls The Secret of the Golden Flower “this unique treasure”, and says that this text was “critical for my own work. I had been occupied with the investigation of the processes of the collective unconscious since the year 1913, and had obtained results that seemed to me questionable in more than one respect… My results, based on fifteen years of effort, seemed inconclusive, because no possible comparison offered itself. I knew of no realm of human experience with which I might have backed up my findings with some degree of assurance”. It’s clear therefore that he was dealing with original material and was not piecing things together by reading Taoist texts.

He further says: “I did not have a knowledge, however inadequate, of a Chinese philosophy as a starting point. On the contrary, when I began my life-work in the practice of psychiatry and psychotherapy, I was completely ignorant of Chinese philosophy, and only later did my professional experience show me that in my technique I had been unconsciously led along that secret way which has been the preoccupation of the best minds of the East for centuries… Richard Wilhelm, that great interpreter of the soul of China, fully confirmed the parallel for me. This gave me the courage to write about a Chinese text which belongs entirely to the mysterious shadows of the Eastern mind. At the same time, and this is the extraordinary thing, in content it is a living parallel to what takes place in the psychic development of my patients, none of whom is Chinese”.

It is clear from all this that Jung was not piecing together elements from various religions in order to create his own system. It was only after contemplating the material produced by his clients that he noted the similarities with the material from other religious and mythological traditions.

(For more about Jung, Wilhelm, and Taoism, please see my two articles here and here. The above is based on some of the content of the second one.)

This article is already long enough so, without going into details, for anyone who has read his article, let me just say that in my opinion Matthew doesn’t have a great understanding of dreams and their interpretation.

In conclusion, Matthew declares that Jungianism has failed. He writes many thought-provoking articles bemoaning the state of modern culture, saying that it is seriously in decline. He appears not to want to contemplate the possibility that ‘Jungianism’ might actually be the solution to the problem.

Towards the end of his life, Jung wrote in a letter: “I have failed in my foremost task, to open people’s eyes to the fact that man has a soul, that there is a buried treasure in the field, and that our religion and philosophy are in a lamentable state”. It is somewhat disconcerting and depressing to hear that Jung, after everything he had achieved, thought his life had been a failure. It is not too late, however. As long as ‘Jungianism’ is alive and well, which it is contrary to what Matthew says, our current generation may be able to fulfil his task for him. Unlike exoteric Christianity, Jung’s ‘system’ of individuation offers a personal and meaningful connection with the soul, the Divine, the Holy Spirit — whichever term you prefer to use.

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For all my articles about Jung, please see these lists: Jungian Themes here, Psychology and Religion here, his Confrontation with the Unconscious here.

Recommended reading

If you want to know what Jung was really all about, I highly recommend Catafalque by Peter Kingsley. His style can sometimes be a little irritating, but you will learn a lot.

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I hope you have enjoyed this article. I have written in the past about other topics, including spirituality, metaphysics, psychology, science, Christianity, and politics. All of those articles are on Medium, but the simplest way to see a guide to them is to visit my website (click here and here). My most recent articles, however, are only on Medium; for those please check out my lists.

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Rip Parker

Armand Diaz

Geoff Ward

Shoshana Kaufman

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Prudence Louise

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Jon Canas

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Marcus aka Gregory Maidman

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Graham Pemberton
Graham Pemberton

Written by Graham Pemberton

I am a singer/songwriter interested in spirituality, politics, psychology, science, and their interrelationships. grahampemberton.com spiritualityinpolitics.com

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