Spengler, Ernst. (Zürich). ‘C. G. Jung's Religionpsychologie’ (C. G. Jung's psychology of religion), in Die Psychologie des 20 Jahrhunderts in 15 Bänden, Vol. III, pp. 245-58:  Freud und die Folgen. Dieter Eicke (Ed.). Zürich, Kindler Verlag (1977).

This is an excellent succinct account of Jung's psychology of religion in an encyclopaedic work. Fordham's and Frey-Wehrlin's contributions to the series were reviewed in this journal (1978, 23, 3). References are given to the appropriate paragraphs in the Collected Works in English.

Starting with Jung's statement that he had not treated a single patient in the second half of life whose problem had not in the last resort been that of finding a religious outlook on life, he takes the reader through fourteen pages under the following headings: early experiences, psychic reality, experience instead of belief, good and evil—the antinomy of Jaweh, union of opposites, the key for the religion of the psyche, and reactions.

Jung's youthful dreams led him to become aware of the awesome aspects of the Christian God: God can be loved and must be feared. Belief in God is not good enough, He must be experienced as a numinous dynamic reality. This makes Him the archetypal centre of the various world religions and the psychic energy experienced as the most significant is described