Reply to Roderick Main and George Hogenson

I much appreciate the vigorous and incisive responses to my article from Roderick Main and George Hogenson.

To begin with, I grant rather than deny a relationship for Jung between his psychology and his philosophy. I assert that Jung's ‘philosophy… influenced his psychology, not least his psychology of religion’. What I deny is that the relationship was reciprocal. More precisely, I deny that Jung himself deemed the relationship reciprocal. I argue that Jung's psychology of religion could have borne on his philosophy of religion but that for him it did not.

Main, who knows the Jungian corpus at least as well as I do, does not counter my reading of the passages I cite. Instead, he cites other passages that, together with mine, present a more ‘ambivalent’ Jung.

Since, again, I acknowledge the dependence for Jung of his psychology on his philosophy, the first passage that Main cites, the one beginning ‘philosophy and psychology are linked’, is not at odds with my chosen passages. But in the subsequent four passages Main chooses, Jung undeniably goes far beyond what I assert. Jung subsumes philosophy under psychology (‘I always think…’ [passage 2]), and uses psychology to support both Christian beliefs (‘I endeavour…’ [passage 3]) and the belief in ‘spirits’ (‘The psychological foundations …’ [passage 4]). Finally, Jung enlists the functions of feeling and intuition, not just of intellect, to make his claims (‘a complete picture…’ [passage 5]).

If space permitted, I would seek to figure out how for Jung psychology subsumes philosophy rather than vice versa, how ‘empirically graspable facts’ support Christian ‘dogma’ rather than challenge it, and how feeling and intuition justify beliefs rather than merely identify aspects of experience that require intellectual justification. Still, these four passages do show that Jung takes a stand more mixed than the rigid one I claim for him. Of course, one