Christian spirituality has a tremendous need for a partnership with an empirical psychology, a natural science of the psyche, for where else does the life of prayer take place but in the soul or psyche? Spirituality is in the midst of fulfilling that need in a variety of ways, one of which is by using Jung’s psychology. At first glance this meeting of Christian spirituality and Jungian psychology can appear innocent of complications. Aren’t there a growing number of clergy and religious with a deep grasp of Jungian psychology? What difficulty could there be in the use of a psychological type test and discerning in this way different styles of prayer?

Yet we have only to remember the story of Victor White, the Dominican theologian, and his close but stormy friendship with Jung to be reminded that the Jungian-Christian dialogue has never fulfilled the golden expectations that its participants often held out for it and, in fact, has often ended in bitter conflict. Out of these struggles has emerged a spectrum of opinions that range from the outright rejection of Jung’s psychology as a danger to Christianity to an identification of the Jungian process of individuation with the Christian mysteries themselves. And these radically divergent opinions have come from people who can claim a more than superficial knowledge of both Jung’s psychology and Christianity.

What is at the root of such short and intractable divergences? We have, in large part, failed to come to grips with the philosophical presuppositions or substructures in which Jung’s psychology is wrapped. Jung set out to create an empirical science of the psyche in which his careful and attentive observation of psychic images would lead him to hypotheses which would attempt to explain the phenomena he was examining. Thus, for example, the observation of recurrent patterns of images in myths and fairy tales and dreams from all ages and from around the world eventually gave rise to his theory of archetypes. All this is relatively straightforward, even when applied to religious matters, for it is legitimate for the psychologist to look at religion from his distinctive point of view. And if this were all there was to Jung’s psychology, the decades of debates about it would be inexplicable. There is, of course, something more, and this something more is quite elusive. Jung at once looked at Christianity from his distinctive scientific perspective in which it became a storehouse of images that illustrated more or less adequately the fundamental process of individuation, but that is not all he did. Then he more or less unconsciously extended this legitimate scientific attitude so that it took on a quasi-philosophical character that said that "Christians may believe that they know something more than what my psychology reveals, but in fact they don’t." In short, Jung denied that philosophy, faith or theology were legitimate ways of knowing; they do not have their distinctive methods and objects, but rather reflect, often deficiently, what Jung’s psychology knows in a more scientific and less pretentious manner. There is, therefore, an ambivalence in Jung’s writings that leaps from its pages once we have become sensitized to it. While it in no way invalidates his properly psychological work, it does wrap it in adventitious philosophical garments of a Kantian variety. What we can know becomes the image that points to the archetype, but never the thing in itself. Theology is, therefore, still living in a pre-Kantian world and presumes to knowledge that it cannot attain. When such an attitude is brought to bear on Christian spirituality it evacuates what is distinctively Christian and retains whatever reflects Jung’s psychology. What is needed, instead, is a genuinely interactive approach in which philosophy, theology and psychology all retain their distinctive natures and make their own contributions. Then the way is opened for an enriched Christian spirituality in which the life of prayer and the process of individuation, while viewed as distinct processes, are also seen as interpenetrating and vitally interacting in the one concrete psyche.

Such an interactive approach could be brought to bear with good effect on many pressing questions in the spiritual life, for example, our understanding of the inner nature of charismatic experiences such as speaking in tongues, healing and the falling phenomena. While it would be unfair to fail to recognize the real good that the charismatic movement has done by bringing people to a serious dedication to the life of prayer, it has sometimes suffered from a lack of awareness of the role of the unconscious in these experiences. Another way of putting the matter is that it is by no means necessary to canonize all the phenomena of the charismatic movement as being produced by the direct working of the Holy Spirit. The role of the unconscious immediately leaps out at psychologically trained observers when they witness the dynamics of charismatic gatherings. An interactive approach embracing both Christian spirituality and Jungian psychology would allow us to begin to see the unconscious not only as the locus of natural psychological processes, but also as the arena in which and through which God can act and the life of prayer can manifest itself. Then we would begin to understand why the tongues spoken have no connection with actual languages and why the urge to speak them can diminish and even disappear, matters that would be less comprehensible if we were constrained to admit that these tongues were always a result of the direct working of the Holy Spirit. Such an interactive approach puts the charismatic movement on firmer psychological and theological foundations.

Our second conclusion is that we have only just begun to enrich Christian spirituality with the fruits of a natural science of the psyche, and this process will greatly accelerate if we can see the promises and problems of the partnership between Christianity and psychology more clearly.