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AbstractJohn Dourley, “C.G. Jung, S.P. Huntington, and the Search for Civilization,” The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, 2006, 25:4, 29-48. The paper appreciatively presents Samuel P. Huntington's thesis that future wars will be fought between civilizations bonded by differing religions. It goes on to show an extensive initial agreement between Huntington and Carl Jung, whose ideas of participation mystique, représentations collectives, the “isms” and the collective shadow jointly contend that civilizations are bonded by archetypal powers, the same agencies that generate religious bonding. Consequently the more archetypally based and so forceful the bonding, the less conscious and so less morally sensitive are those bonded in relation to the differently bonded. But Jung goes beyond Huntington in contending that the psyche itself moves to a conscious and historical actualization of human commonalities that Huntington acknowledges in passing as the distant solution to the clash of civilizations. By identifying psyche as the source of these commonalities, Jung completes Huntington by envisaging a humanity cognizant that its cultural/religious differences derive from a common human source, the archetypal unconscious. This realization would relativize religious/cultural differentiation and so contribute to a global myth which would foster the embrace of differentiated cultures beyond their current concretions, and negate the threat they currently pose to the continuance of the species.

For Carl Jung, the imagery depicting religious experience represented a valued extemalization of the deepest energies and structures of the psyche, energies and structures in which humanity universally participates. In reference to what he considered to be his discovery of the psyche as author of religious experience, Jung refers to his ‘demonstration of the psychic origin of religious experience.’ In continuity with his understanding of the intra-psychic origin of religion, his fascination with mystics of many traditions was grounded on his conviction that their experience and imagery were immediate and particularly intense experiences of the archetypal, and thus religious, depths of the psyche itself.

Stefan Heym, The King David Report, reviewed by Robert W.E. ForrestC. T. McIntire and Ronald A. Wells, eds., History and Historical Understanding, reviewed by Joanne McWilliam DewartJohn P. Dourley, The Psyche as Sacrament: A Comparative Study of C.G. Jung and Paul Tillich, reviewed by Schuyler BrownJohn P. Dourley, The Illness That We Are: A Jungian Critique of Christianity, reviewed by Schuyler BrownAntonio R. Gualtieri, Christianity and Native Traditions; Indigenization and syncretism among the Inuit and Dene of the Western Arctic, reviewed by Hugh D. McKellarJoan E. O'Donovan, George Grant and the Twilight of Justice, reviewed by David TurnerJohn Kirby and William M. Thompson, ed., Voegelin and the Theologian: Ten Studies in Interpretation, reviewed by Don WiebeWerner H. Kelber, The Oral and the Written Gospel. The Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul and Q, reviewed by John S. KloppenborgJeremy Walker, Kierkegaard: The Descent Into God, reviewed by Abrahim H. Khan

At the core of Jung's psychology is the process he calls individuation. It is a process in which the ego consciousness of the individual is progressively pervaded by the truth and power of the self. As Jung describes it, the process of individuation, to the extent that it is realized in any life, carries with it both a sense of personal wholeness, understood as the unification of the many and often conflicting components of one's personal being, and a broadened empathy for all of life beyond one's personal being. Thus understood, the process of individuation grounds the individual in his or her deepest personal truth while relating the individual to ever widening spheres of empathy with all that is.