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John Dourley, Response to Barbara Stephens's ‘The Martin Buber–Carl Jung disputations: protecting the sacred in the battle for the boundaries of analytical psychology’ (Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2001, 46, 3, 455–91), p.479 Warren Colman, A response to Barbara Stephens, p.492 David Tresan, Response to Barbara Stephens's paper in JAP, 46, 3, p.494 Barbara D. Stephens, Patterns at play: my response to respondents, p.498. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the role of trinitarian symbolism in human consciousness. Link of the archetypal grounding in the psyche of trinitarian symbolisms to the individuation process and the development of the self; Relation of Christ to the self as an integrate of conscious life with its unconscious matrix; Incorporation of religious factor in the fabric of life itself.

Endemic to Jung's understanding of the psyche is an elaborate theory of the universal psychogenesis of religion. This theory, coextensive with his psychology itself, would contend that the ground movement of the psyche is one in which the unconscious and its archetypal energies seek realization in consciousness. These energies carry with them a numinous power that, when experienced, creates the sense of the divine and so the religions. The process is a wholly self-contained dialectic whose main polarities are the conscious ego and the archetypal unconscious. This paradigm excludes agencies approaching consciousness from beyond the psyche as transcendental and particularly monotheistic religions would propose. Jung's dialogues with Buber and White failed because both realized that Jung understood divinity and humanity to be engaged in a mutually redemptive process as binary poles within an all encompassing psychic dialectic. Jung's psychology also contains a philosophy of history with religious consequence. He would argue that, since the 13th century, an examination of mystical experience reveals a process in which humanity is becoming progressively aware that divinity seeks its completion in it as the base meaning of history and of individual life. Hegel brought this developing religious sense to full consciousness philosophically and Jung psychologically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jung's thought does, indeed, contain a metaphysics, even though he claimed he was an empiricist. He would argue that God necessarily creates the psyche in order to become conscious in it. But all reality is, thereby, psychic and thus, incompatible with monotheism. Jung moves from a trinitarian to a quaternitarian position because he felt that traditional dogma missed the bodily, the demonic, and the feminine. He felt that conventional religion militated against the internal dialogue that he felt was necessary to true faith. To bypass this essential psychological process by reference to a transcendent divinity who evokes a moral consciousness is inappropriate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]