Comments on Storr's and Shamdasani's articles

Drawing on his years of clinical experience, Dr Anthony Storr observes that analytical psychology aspires not to eradicate neurosis but to enable human beings to accept themselves. In so doing, analytical psychology sets as its goal one akin to the religious goal of making peace with God. In both cases, the payoff is not perfection but self-acceptance. In its function, analytical psychology is therefore like religion, whether or not it qualifies as a religion. As appealing as this characterization of the goals of both analytical psychology and religion is, in religion the peace surely comes from surrender to something greater than oneself, and the peace gives one a place in the cosmos that transcends any peace with oneself. I do not see how psychotherapy of any stripe can provide this metaphysical payoff, which goes beyond a psychological one. Therefore for me no psychotherapy can substitute fully for religion or constitute a religion - neither of which claim, I realize, is Storr necessarily making. Furthermore, self-acceptance, involving as it does the acceptance of one's imperfection, is not the ultimate goal of all religions. In Christianity, what of the belief in the coming resurrection and judgement? Is the yearning for heaven or the dread of hell compatible with the acceptance of oneself as is? Is the awaited transformation of the frail human personality into a perfected one, one worthy of a place in the Kingdom of God, not more akin to the quest for the eradication of imperfection?

As a premier historian of Jung's life and thought, Sonu Shamdasani seeks to reconstruct how Jung himself saw the relationship between analytical psychology and religion. Shamdasani shows that for Jung the origin of religion is psychological: it lies in the experience of powers greater than oneself, which Jung translates into the experience of archetypes. Furthermore, Shamdasani, here like Storr, focuses on the analogy between the goal of psychotherapy and the goal of religion. In bo