The Resurrection of the Dead: A Jungian approach to the mourning process

Psychic existence and above all the inner images … supply the material for all mythic speculations about a life in the hereafter, and I imagine that life as a continuation in the world of images. Thus the psyche might be that existence in which the hereafter or the land of the dead is located (Jung 17, pp. 319, 320).

Different ontological assumptions, different assumptions about how reality is to be defined, wear their mourner's bands on different sleeves. Although Freud and Jung both referred in their writings to an order of reality which they called ‘psychic’ or ‘psychical’, each meant something quite different by that term. For Freud, psychic reality was a secondary reality, an epiphenomenon which is reducible in its every aspect to biology. Jung, on the other hand, viewed the psyche as an order of reality in its own right. Though he did not deny the existence or importance of physical reality, nor did he devalue the psyche by looking outside it to biology for substantiation. For Jung, Freud's translation of the psyche's images into bio-sexual terms was unnecessary since images, in themselves, are already psyche. Indeed, from Jung's perspective, any psychology that grounds itself in an order of reality outside the psyche's own images has committed the categorical error that Whitehead called ‘misplaced concreteness’. Jung's famous phrase— ‘image is psyche’—means that the psyche manifests itself most concretely in images (Jung 9, par. 75). The psyche, for Jung, is ‘an ousia’, a ‘substance, essence’ (Jung 18, p. 540). Regardless of whether the opinions, ideas, fantasies or feelings among which we live, move and have our being are ‘true’ or not when judged in accordance with the truth criteria of other sciences, they are still ‘entities’ for Jung, ‘like animals and plants’ (Jung 12, par. 742). As he puts it:

‘Physical is not the only criterion of truth: there are also psychic truths which can neither be explained nor proved nor contested in any