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Barbara Stephens is to be commended for keeping alive the issues involved in the Jung-Buber dispute because these issues go so deeply into Jungian psychology and are so encompassing of cognate fields such as religious studies and theology. From a Jungian perspective the issues engage both Jungian therapy and theory in a number of crucial areas. The dispute clarified Jung's understanding of the intrapsychic origin of all religious experience and through such experience the creation of the Gods and Goddesses, including all variants of monotheistic divinity, through the process of projection granting them an autonomous and ontological existence beyond the psyche which, in fact, creates them. In doing this the dispute illuminated how Jung understood the relation of transcendence to immanence and how he confined both to the intrapsychic sphere, making of transcendence a function of an immanent power ever transcending its conscious expression while denying the possibility that anything could enter the psyche not native to it. Effectively this is to say that nothing knowable lies beyond the boundaries of the psyche, greatly extended as they are by Jung. The dispute further identified Jung's location of the origins of the Gods and Goddesses in the impact of archetypal energies on consciousness in the form of numinous experience. This location enabled him once more to make clear that such experience is the psyche's ultimate therapeutic resource as well as one of its greatest dangers when such experience escapes containment and pits communities possessed by such experience in the form of their presiding deity against each other.
The dispute is also of importance for those, like Buber, who are committed to monotheistic faiths and their attendant concept of transcendence because it made crystal clear to the disputants and to those who would follow them that Jung's understanding of the psyche and the therapeutic practice based on such understanding is