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The question ‘Is Analytical Psychology a Religion?’ is not only relevant for Jungians but also has broader implications for the way we think about the psyche, mental illness and religious truth claims in the modern world. These three papers all demonstrate that the issues are far more important than merely attacking or defending Jung's memory. Storr is absolutely correct, in my view, in calling for an urgent revision of the medical model of mental illness. I also think Shamdasani is right to make a specific link between Jung's religious thought and the practice of Jungian psychotherapy. Segal makes the further important point that Jung did not replace religion with analytical psychology. Indeed, from my reading of Jung, replacing religion was very far from his aim:
… perhaps we could say with Nietzsche, ‘God is dead’. Yet it would be truer to say, ‘He has put off our image, and where shall we find him again?’ The interregnum is full of danger …
It is difficult to talk about the psyche and it is difficult to talk about religious experience. It is also important to remember that all language about the psyche (particularly the unconscious) and about religious experience (particularly God) is necessarily metaphorical, since what is being described is essentially indescribable: ‘One cannot speak of the intellectual or the spiritual without falling back on metaphor’ (Soskice 1985, p. 75). Soskice defines metaphor as ‘that figure of speech whereby we speak about one thing in terms which are seen to be suggestive of another’ (Soskice 1985, p. 15). However, the metaphorical nature of psychological language is not exclusive to analytical psychology. It applies no less to the psychoanalytic language of Freud and Klein. Indeed, we might say that in Jung's writing it is clearer that