: Reflections on “spirituality in the consulting room” as introduced by David Henderson in an online discussion (beginning April 19, 2008) sponsored by the International Association for Jungian Studies (IAJS).
When a client starts to use the word “spiritual” my heart sinks. It feels like something immune to understanding has entered the room. After some time I may say, “When you say “spiritual,” I am not sure what you mean. I am not sure what the word means to you. Many people are amazed at my ignorance. To them its meaning is obvious.
I share the “sinking feeling” described by David Henderson and Jean Lall, perhaps especially since I live in Boulder, Colorado, which, together with Taos and Big Sur/Esalen, forms the New Age equivalent of the once famous “Bermuda Triangle.” I am comfortable working as an analyst with spiritual or religious experience but the issue raised in this discussion refers to the word, “spiritual,” not the spiritual experience. The problem occurs when the word is used as an incantation, a charm that feels like a substitute for lived experience, or an unconscious attempt to transcend the vulnerabilities of human experience, especially in relationship to others.
The mostly delusional assumption of New Thought and New Age spirituality is that the world we inhabit is our creation, that we create our world with our thoughts, including our vulnerability. Those who were in New Orleans when Katrina hit chose that experience. The corollary is that we can cure ourselves with our thoughts–hence, the “mind-cure.” As The Secret argues, we can imagine the money we want and our thoughts will attract it to us (money is considered a spiritual need, by the way).
When Robert Chalmers interviewed Esther and Jerry Hicks (and Abraham), he questioned Abraham about “the secret” of our “vibrations” which attract our fates to us:
“When you suggested, in Fort Collins yesterday, that if you think about a thing it will come to you whether you want it or not, and that a person draws their destiny to them; when I heard that, the words that came into my mind were: Auschwitz, Bialystock and Dachau. Are you saying that six million Jews invited extermination upon themselves?”
“We would never say they invited it wantingly or knowingly. But we unequivocally say that nothing happens to anyone without a predominant vibration that matches it.” Just before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, she says, “the people who did not want inconvenience left right away. People who are not accustomed to managing their life well, stayed.”
“The poor people stayed.”
“They are poor in vibration before they are poor in manifestation.”
Contrary to the New Testament, the “poor in vibration” are not blessed.
The precursor to the New Age spirituality of our time was the New Thought movement that took off in the 1860s with Phineas Quimby. Quimby had experimented extensively with mesmerism prior to the 1850s when he began to practice “mind-cures” that did not rely on hypnotic suggestion (Thanks to Chris Locke for this and so many other leads and unexpected revelations). Quimby concluded that disease is no more than a thought that we believe. The New Thought movement inspired Mary Baker Eddy’s creation of Christian Science (1875ff), Charles and Myrtle Fillmore’s creation of Unity Church (1889; now international), Norman Vincent Peale’s publication of The Power of Positive Thinking (7 million copies), and influenced Helen Schucman who channeled “A Course in Miracles,” followed by J.Z. Knight channeling Ramtha, Esther Hicks channeling Abraham and the “Law of Attraction.” Most recently, New Thought stands behind the production and immense success of The Secret–as book, website, film, and DVD.
American psychiatrists and neurologists in the 1800s resisted all but somatic interpretations of emotional disorders just as did their counterparts in Europe. However, facing indisputable evidence of psychological factors in human suffering on the one hand and on the other, the fast growing popularity of “mind-cures” promoted by New Thought and its cousins, physicians slowly began to recognize the influence of the psyche and the importance of rapport between doctor and patient. The word, “psychotherapy,” was virtually unknown in those days and only in 1906 did it enter the Index Medicus (replacing “suggestion”).
Despite medical prejudices against psychology, psychiatrists and neurologists hoped that psychotherapy would become a credible discipline and shield doctors and the public from “charlatans” for whom mind was the first cause rather than matter (pathogens, brain lesions, etc.). Of course, the same doctors were also looking for ways to protect their income from the popularity of “mind-cures.”
The following quote advocating psychotherapy comes from Richard C. Cabot M.D., a respected Boston neurologist in 1908:
Psychotherapy is a most terrifying word, but we are forced to use it because there is no other which serves to distinguish us from Christian Scientists, the New Thought people, the faith healers, and the thousand and one other schools which have in common the disregard for medical science and the accumulated knowledge of the past.
Psychotherapy had arrived. A year after Cabot’s proclamation, in 1909, Freud and Jung arrived in the U.S. and were greeted by G. Stanley Hall who was the first person to receive a Ph.D. in psychology (1878).
Just as there was tension between Freud and Jung regarding the “black tide of mud of occultism,” so there was an urgent attempt in America to distinguish scientific psychotherapy from its rivals in the spiritual camps and in the New Thought movement. The same tension persists today as evidenced in this discussion forum [International Association for Jungian Studies—IAJS], in the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts to which I belong and in other Jungian societies and training institutes. Though most Jungian training institutes contain this tension far better now than in the 1970s and 1980s, some societies continue to fracture along such theoretical lines. As far as I know a book has yet to be written that satisfactorily explores the psychological split between contemporary psychoanalysis (Jungian and Freudian) and the many therapies derivative of the New Thought and New Age movements.
Those of us who experience the “sinking feeling” in the presence of, especially, New Age spiritual psychology can take heart from comparable suspicions voiced by Jung:
The passionate interest in these movements undoubtedly arises from psychic energy which can no longer be invested in obsolete religious forms. For this reason such movements have a genuinely religious character, even when they pretend to be scientific. It changes nothing when Rudolf Steiner calls his Anthroposophy “spiritual science,” or when Mrs. Eddy invents a “Christian Science.” These attempts at concealment merely show that religion has grown suspect — almost as suspect as politics and world-reform. (para. 170, “The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man”).
Jung articulated the problem very clearly and concisely in the same essay :
Our age wants to experience the psyche for itself. It wants original experience and not assumptions” (para 173).
Isn’t this exactly the discomfort addressed by David Henderson, Jean Lall and others in the IAJS discussion?
In an emotional vein, Jung wrote in a November 1935 letter:
I have read a few books by Rudolf Steiner and must confess that I have found nothing in them that is of the slightest use to me. You must understand that I am a researcher and not a prophet. What matters to me is what can be verified by experience…. I have no prejudices against the greatest marvels if someone gives me the necessary proofs…. But I shall guard against adding to the number of those who use unproven assertions to erect a world system no stone of which rests on the surface of this earth.
Unfortunately, Jung also contributed to the problem we experience as Jungian analysts. By focusing much of his writing on spiritualism, séances, religious symbols, Eastern spirituality (Taoism, Buddhism), Christian mysticism, spiritual rebirth, astrology, Gnosticism, synchronicity, divination, UFOs, and perhaps especially alchemy, he made it easy for New Age writers of every persuasion to claim a kinship with him and to borrow his established prestige. To the extent that the word, “Jungian,” is identified with New Age spiritual interests today, then some of us will inevitably feel the discomfort of being “Jungian” and at the same time “not-Jungian.” It just goes with the territory.
The above doesn’t clarify how we will work analytically with the spiritual positions of our analysands. In training groups, journals, and other Jungian forums we have ample opportunities to reflect on analytic technique, on narcissistic defenses against vulnerability in relationship, on the uses of spiritual attitudes or practices to manage affect, on spiritual transferences and countertransferences, on what psychologically drives today’s “spiritual but not religious” New Age pursuits, on the psychological, social and economic consequences of New Thought, etc.
I hope the “sinking feeling” described by David Henderson and others will be better understood and appreciated in the historical context outlined above. I must add, however, that the “sinking feeling” is also exacerbated in ongoing ways
- by the growing number of New Age permutations,
- by how Jung’s work is appropriated by the New Age and other “spiritual but not religious” persuasions and voices, and of course
- by the ways in which C.G. Jung richly prepared ground for the New Age (despite his protests),
- and by how some Jungians today actively till a mixture of Jungian and New Age soils.
Note: Four of the valuable resources I found earlier this year for thinking about these themes are :
- Eric Caplan, Mind Games: American Culture and the Birth of Psychotherapy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
- Robert Chalmers, “Interview: The couple who claim they can make you rich beyond your wildest dreams,” The Independent, UK/July 8, 2007. Archived at the Rick A. Ross Institute of NJ : http://www.rickross.com/reference/general/general946.html
- Chris Locke’s “Mystic Bourgeoisie” ( http://mysticbourgeoisie.blogspot.com/ ) devoted to exploring “Numinous Lunacy & the Sanctimonious Narcissism of the NewAge++” — along with attachment theory, Harry Harlow, John Bowlby, psychoanalysis, the shadows of C.G. Jung, Abraham Maslow, eugenics, Martin Seligman, positive psychology, CBT, authoritarianism, political conservatism, fascism then and now, and a long list of other themes and unexpected associations.
- Eli Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (New York: Vintage Books, 2004).
Tags: C.G. Jung · Christian Science · Jungian · New Age · New Thought · Psychoanalysis · Spirituality
