Jung and Kierkegaard: Researching a Kindred Spirit in the Shadows by Amy Cook (review)

When the psychological features of Kierkegaard's writings are studied, they are usually compared to Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). Cook thinks that is not right because Freud views religion "with a jaundiced eye," arguing that it is "infantile," "obsolete and an obstacle to scientific progress" (64). She believes Carl Jung (1875–1961) is a better choice, since he "objects to Freud's reductionist orientation toward religion. Far from being a primitive attempt to explain things, Jung's understanding of religion affirms the presence of the idea of God; furthermore, he regards it as having healthy elements rather than solely pathological ones" (64).

Cook also notes commonalities between Jung and Kierkegaard. Indeed, she says that Jung, "our Swiss-born psychologist is a good accompaniment to our spiritual physician," Kierkegaard (124). "They are both dialecticians of existence, who share a strong commitment to the central position of the individual; the fundamentally religious nature of the psyche; the limits of rationality; the development of personality and subjectivity; and finally, of salvation through psychological insight—whether this involves the aid of an interventionist God, [or an] ethical code. . . . What Kierkegaard and Jung really bring to life is the profound relationship between human and eternal realities; in fact we could say that their very existence was devoted to understanding the conflict between our immediately given nature and our capacity for transcendence—of finding that tenuous connection with a sense of infinite reality" (17).

Given these similarities, you would think Jung would appreciate Kierkegaard, but he does not. He called him a "neurotic grizzler," or chronic complainer (130). Cook believes that Jung rejects Kierkegaard, in spite of the "strong overlaps" (114) between them, because Kierkegaard "neglected the bodily aspect of life" (152)—resulting in a "disharmony between spirit and instinct (soul and body) and its relationship with the oppressive melancholic and agitated introversion" that characterizes Kierkegaard's work (155). This made him "misanthropic" because of his attending "monocular focus on the New Testament Christ, whom one is to imitate to the exclusion of almost everything that is earthly" (168). In contrast to "Jung's joyous, life-affirming archetypal Christ, Kierkegaard's emulation of the historical Christ becomes inevitably and overwhelmingly life-denying" (201). It is this "genuine piety of Kierkegaard's religious belief" that is "at the heart of Jung's rejection" of Kierkegaard (228). And it is a piety that Kierkegaard believes should not be "cluttered up with finiteness" (Journals, trans. Hongs, 5:5891).

Even though Cook believes this is the best account for Jung's rejection of Kierkegaard, she does not believe it holds water. In the end, she believes they both need each other: "Ultimately, Kierkegaard and Jung each lack something crucial required for the other's conception of authentic religious feeling; in Kierkegaard's case he lacks the dark weight of the world symbolized in the form of a Lutheran opponent whilst Jung is lacking in that which was so fundamental to Kierkegaard, a devoted faith" (223).

But Kierkegaard is more Lutheran than Cook lets on—since Kierkegaard believed that Luther was the "master of us all" (Journals, 3:2465). So, on the matter of God and evil, or the dark weight of the world, Luther teaches that "God wants us to regard the evils that we experience as coming to us with His permission" (LW 13:135). Kierkegaard elaborates on this conviction arguing that God is the unconditioned and so "God makes us unhappy [and] he is evil." For "the unconditioned is a real plague for . . . human mediocrity, which egotistically wants an easy life of sensate enjoyment and does not want to learn from the unconditioned [that it] is indeed sheer restlessness, strenuousness, and torment" (Journals, 4:4911).

Cook skips over the fact that Jung claims greater autonomy than Kierkegaard. But she should have noted that claim when recounting Jung's rewrite of John 14:6—"Within us is the way, the truth and the...