May 2001 ::: School of Spiritual Psychology eLetter

Jung and Steiner: The Birth of a New Psychology

This is the first of a two eLetters introducting a wonderful book on C.G. Jung and Rudolf Steiner that will be published early next year. Robert Sardello was asked to do the introduction, which is presented in these two eLetters. As these two pieces are somewhat more complex than that usually contained in the eLetter, you may want to print out these two articles for further study.

Spiritual Psychology is a creative synthesis of the depth psychology of C.G. Jung and Archetypal Psychology and the Spiritual Science of Rudolf Steiner. Along with phenomenology, the attempt to simply describe human experience without theorizing and letting phenomena reveal themselves rather than imposing an interpretation, Jung and Steiner provide the basis for the birth of spiritual psychology.

Gehard Wehr's book is a valuable contribution, bringing together the central thoughts of two of the greatest thinkers of our time.

A catalog of the publications of Anthroposophic Press and Lindisfarne Press may be seen online at <http://www.anthropress.org>.

Jung and Steiner: The Birth of a New Psychology
By Gerhard Wehr
Appendix by Hans Erhard Lauer
Translated by Magdalene Jackel
Introduction by Robert Sardello
Published by Anthroposophic Press, January 2002

For the past fifteen years I have worked to institute a new orientation in psychology. This effort has centered on bringing the soul psychology of C.G. Jung into a relation with the spiritual science of Rudolf Steiner. This creative synthesis would, I believe, give birth to a new psychologyone that is fully cognizant of the spiritual and soul worlds and how human consciousness forms in association with them.

Imagine, then, my excitement in learning of this book by Gerhard Wehr, the author of an important biography of Jung, and an anthroposophist. Reading and rereading his book, I felt assured that these years had not been wasted, for here at last was a linking work, one that would be appreciated by anthroposophists and depth psychologists alike. Even more, the concerns addressed in this remarkable book were living questions that applied to everyone, not just to the practitioners of each of these movements: How can we live and be open and receptive to the spiritual realms? How can we know what is going on in the depths of our soul? How can we approach others and our work and the world soulfully and with spiritual intent?

Psychology is vastly misunderstood in our time. It is taken to be either a therapeutic endeavor or as a rather meaningless scientific discipline that tries, mostly unsuccessfully, to model itself after the physical sciences. Thanks to Jung, the field has been ennobled, and the word "psychology" has been somewhat restored as the discipline of the soul. A true discipline is far more than an academic area of interest. One takes up a discipline, enters itone becomes it. It then becomes a way of knowing oneself and knowing the world. Thanks to Steiner, the possibility exists of taking this discipline of the soul and placing it within the context of understanding the place and work of the human being in the whole cosmos. The kind of psychology that could come from working through the whole of Jung and Steiner in an inner, experiential way is a practical psychology. It is not confined to the therapy office but is rather the work of living a conscious soul life.

If one goes even a little way into the labor of self-knowledge, it soon becomes necessary to re-imagine one's place within whole world and indeed the whole of existence. Most of us do not have the capacities to do this on our own. Thus many of us find ourselves in a liminal place. No longer dominated by mass consciousness, we are left on our own, without ground or the capacity to steer a course for ourselves. Then we find we no longer belong to the guiding myth of the timethe technological myth, the myth of materialism. Where do we go? We need a new myth, a large imagination within which understanding of who we are makes sense. In medieval times, Dante offered a whole soul cosmology of this kind. He couched it in Christian tradition, language, and practice, because that satisfied his need for a means to convey a large picture within which we can find our place. Such a cosmology interprets us; it tells us who we are, what we are doing, where we came from, where we are going.

Both Jung and Steiner have given us a cosmology within which we can see ourselves soulfully. That is why both are worth lifetimes of study. We should not make our task easy by considering these two individuals as only providing systems that agree in certain ways and diverge in others. Nor should we try to simply determine which one to follow. Both decried followers, but hoped to see independent workers inspired by their efforts.

Jung and Steiner does not merely offer a comparison of two creative individuals, each of whom has brought something decidedly new to the world. That approach might be interesting, but it would create nothing more than another academic study. This book goes much further, and its reach has to do with the method employed, which Wehr calls the "synoptic" method. Rather than setting the externals of two systems side by side and looking at each for similarities and differences, Wehr sets the core meaning of each beside the other. Out of the tension something new comes into being. Jung himself knew that this method belongs to the very nature of the psyche. He employed it many times. It requires developing the capacity to hold two irreconcilable positions together without seeking resolution. Something new will then emerge. Steiner advocated something similar when he advised developing the capacity to hold twelve different views on the same issue. Moreover, Steiner's lectures are full of contradictions, demanding that one enter into his work with an awakened imagination in which these contradictions become pregnant with new meanings.

Jung and Steiner, for all its merits, does not push this method as far as it could. In this introduction, I want to push it even further to begin to show the outlines of a new psychology, a spiritual psychology that emerges from holding the tension of the opposites of depth psychology and anthroposophy without seeking resolution. The opposites involved here are extreme. They consist of setting into relation the greatest possible development of waking consciousness with the deepest level of unconsciousness. The tension is exacerbated by the fact that these two ways of viewing the human being are separated by no more than a thin veneer. When we go into that seemingly thin separation, we find two sides of the same thing. That is to say, there is a central element that unknowingly joins depth psychology and anthroposophy. This union is the image of the Grail as the central myth of each of these cultural creations.

In An Outline of Esoteric Science, Steiner spoke explicitly of anthroposophy as a Grail science. He meant that if anthroposophy is a science of the cosmos working into the earthly and the earthly working into the cosmos, then the human being is at the very center of this relation. Jung for his part had a very clear dream of the Grail, described in chapter eleven of the present volume. He had this dream when he was on a long journey in India and when everything in this environment seemed to verify all he had to say about culture, symbolism, and myth. Jung was through and through a Westerner, and his central myth was the Grail. (He woke up feeling out of place in India; this mythical place was not his myth).

The new psychology that begins to emerge from the flying sparks of a path founded in the reality of soul and a path founded in the reality of spirit will, then, be one that is symbolized by the Grail cup. Among its many other aspects, this symbol gives us a picture of the spiritual soul. The vessel itself symbolizes the soul, open and receptive, receiving whatever it needs from the spiritual worlds. This image perfectly represents the spiritual psychology of which I speak. It also represents the current of psychology that comes about by holding in tension a love for the soul and a love for the spirit. I define that psychology as follows:
Spiritual psychology is an active practice that develops embodied, conscious, soul life to make that life open and receptive to the spiritual realms. This is done as an act of love toward ourselves, others, and the world.

Steiner followed the spirit side of the Grail myth; Jung, the soul side. The great appeal of both is the quest. We cannot undervalue the tremendous motivating power of an image of questing. Thus, in both Jung and Steiner, we find a continual criticism of the way things are in the world, an urging to throw off the immediate past and to seek to establish both a soul and a spirit perspective for the future of humanity. But unless their endeavors are seen as quests, each of these two very strong conceptions of the human future is bound to gather dogmatic disciples. The content of the Grail cup must be taken into account as well. It is blood, which is an image of the very essence of desire. Desire is essential. So if the desire of soul or the desire of spirit is not addressed, then it gets at you from behind. It is mistaken for what we think the founders wanted, which will be confused with our own unexamined desires. But the blood of the Grail is also the blood of Christ. Thus, it represents purified desire, which can be wholly oriented toward the divine rather than becoming confused with personal desires.

Both Jung and Steiner went through personal transformations that ensured as much as possible that the desires they followed were free of personal taints. There is no doubt that both individuals were also tremendously ambitious, wanting to see their views adopted in the world. But their followers tend to foolishly ignore the factor of desire in themselves, and the necessity of working with this before all else. They think they are being good anthroposophists or good Jungians if they adopt the master's content, oblivious of how their own desires figure in. In anthroposophy, the follower's desire tends to be falsely purified. Anthropsophists often act as if they had no bodies and were already pure spirits, bringing the world exactly what it needed. In depth psychology, there is often a reveling in the experience of following soul down into the depths, completely unaware of anything like a need for purifying desire. There is a temptation to allow the content of those depths to take hold, in the foolish belief that because it is soul, it has to be good.

Working with desire requires holding irresolvable tensions without seeking resolution. Our main cultural model for working with the desire of the blood, placing that desire within the Grail cup, may be neither Steiner nor Jung, but Dante. The whole of the Purgatorio is explicitly concerned with holding opposites together without resolving them. Remorse is held in tension with joy; pride with humility, contemplation with action, responsibility toward the timeless with responsibility toward timely need. This play of opposites finally opens the soul to the spiritual realms. So perhaps we have a greater psychology in Dante than can be found in either Jung or Steiner. Or perhaps we can follow the lead of Dante, whom Steiner quite seriously called "the greatest man." This would mean holding Steiner and Jung in a tension of opposites, noticing that the inherent reason for such tension is that, as Dante shows, this is the one and only way that love enters, a love that is greater than any of our desires. We do not do love, in spite of our glorification of the possibility of loving. Our desire is too confused for us to love otherwise than out of our own self-oriented desires. The purifying power of love enters through the opening, the soul space created by holding impossible contradictions.

Love enters the discussion here because it is the central dimension of the spiritual psychology that emerges from holding Jung and Steiner in tension. Love is not mere feeling, but the very essence of the action of the spiritual soul. It is what the spiritual soul does. Love is not desire already purified; it is desire in process of being purified. Jung had little to do with the world beyond his circle and his soul interests. Steiner had a great deal to do with the world. He created new systems of education, medicine, and agriculture and new forms of painting, dance, architecture, drama. He inspired a religious movement known as the Christian Community, thought through a new social order, and engaged in many other cultural endeavors. Jung is characterized by an innerness without which dedication to soul life is impossible. His whole autobiography is written as an inner biography, an entirely new form of biography, a memoir of the soul. Steiner's biography, on the other hand, is completely external, so objective that it is downright dull. It belongs to the genre of esoteric spiritual biographies where it is not uncommon for the writer to speak of his own life in the third person. So here is one tension to hold: soul as inwardness, spirit as being out in the world. Soul as where we have been, the depth of memory, and memory as imagination. Spirit as where we are going, the not-yet, the yet to-be-established in the world.

When read closely, Wehr's chapter comparing the biographies of Jung and Steiner reveals something amazing about the inner origins of spiritual science and depth psychology. Both Steiner and Jung had a particular and profound relationship with the dead. When he was a mere four years old, Steiner was visited by a woman who had diedan experience that made a lasting impression. He later gave numerous lectures on the importance of remaining in connection with those who have died, even providing methods for doing so. Jung also had experiences with the dead. Wehr points to Jung's experience (also at age four) of seeing a funeral over which his father presided and the strange impression it made on Jung. His depth psychology began with association experiments he carried out with his cousin, who had contact with the dead as well.

The mysteries of death impress themselves on both of these figures, but in different ways. In Steiner's vision, the dead woman asks for help. The experience originates a scientific interest in him: what are the methods for remaining in connection with the dead? Jung leaves the impression of having a simultaneous fear and attraction to the realm of the dead. For him, there is more of a sense of a struggle against the mysteries of death, characteristic of one who is fully aware of the tragedy of death, the leaving of life.

The death experiences of these two individuals, when held in inner tension, open the way of spiritual psychology. It is the way of a double consciousness that characterizes both Steiner and Jung. They both lived an ongoing relation with the dead, a relation of actual presence, but one that must be understood as an act of the active imagination, not of ordinary consciousness. And they both lived an ongoing connection with the world (albeit Steiner seemed to do this more effectively). In both we observe two forms of consciousness side by side: for Jung, personality 1 and personality 2; for Steiner, ordinary consciousness and clairvoyant consciousness. This dual consciousness is the consciousness of the future. It belongs to the Grail myth, and is what we are all being asked to develop. We are asked to be consciously open, in soul, to the spiritual realms and to work effectively in the world.

If we look at these two individuals as initiates, forerunners for the rest of humanity, this is what they introduce as a human possibility. We can work for the world and work for the soul and spirit at the same time. That is the kind of consciousness spiritual psychology encourages. Jung and Steiner were born into this consciousness and lived with it in different ways. The next step is to develop this consciousness in full awareness. This is now possible because of the initiation experiences of these two individuals. We can say that twin consciousness was initiated in both of these individuals by the dead. The real founders of spiritual psychology are those who have died and have a continuing interest and love for the world; they are tremendously interested in what happens here. They concern themselves with whether we can meet the challenge of living as soul and spirit beings housed in earthly garments.

The way of twin consciousness is well-known in the mystery traditions. We see it, for example, in the Bacchae of Euripides. When Pentheus, who is one-sidedly rational, is overtaken by Dionysus, the god of embodied imagination, he looks up into the sky and suddenly sees two suns. The two suns signify a consciousness of earth alongside a consciousness of death. While this doesn't do much good for Pentheus (who ends up torn to pieces by Maenads), it does renew the community. We need Jung's psychology in order to remain imaginal. We need Steiner's spiritual science in order to apply this imagination to the forming of the world. These two together make possible a conscious, imaginal sun alongside the sun of our usual earthly consciousness.

In the past the experience of two suns signified extreme danger. Like Pentheus, one might go off the deep end. The right capacities must be formed. We cannot jump into this kind of consciousness. We need to undergo the throes of transformation, and the way to go about radical change of capacities is found in the written work of Jung and Steiner. Their writing is completely unlike other writing. You can't go through it and come out the same. However, they need, to be read together, or in tandem, and read with the whole of one's being, not just through the intellect. Spiritual psychology is a result of working this tandem approach. It is founded in the consciousness of death, and signifies the importance - and even the method - of working toward something without doing so for our own benefit. We know, of course, that even when we seem to be generously working for the benefit of others, our own self-interests are involved; usually they are at the forefront. The spiritual-psychological perspective, a mode of consciousness rather than a theory, operates within a continual undoing of itselfdying as a way of living. This is the only way to allow soul to be genuinely open to the spiritual worlds and serving those worlds truthfully.

Closely related to the presence of the dead as a central factor of human consciousness is the problem of the term "the unconscious." For Steiner, there are many kinds of consciousnesswaking, dreaming, sleep, trance, to name but a few. There is no unconscious: that is only the way waking consciousness speaks of other forms of consciousness. Furthermore these different consciousnesses are not states but rather beings. Psychological symptoms that appear seemingly out of nowhere, for example, are sometimes due to the living presence of the dead who have not been remembered. That is to say, one of the worlds of consciousness is the spirits of the dead. This is a much more forceful way of speaking than Jung's references to a psychic structure that has a certain content, much of which remains under the surface. The right and proper field of psychology includes not only the dead, but all sorts of other beings who are not in the unconscious, but are different worlds of consciousnessspirits, angels, gods.

If we try to speak of these different worlds of beings without developing the capacity of the spiritual soul, we run the risk either of completely literalizing them (when approaching them in terms of anthroposophy) or of regarding them as mere images in the soul (when working from a depth-psychological perspective). The spiritual soul, the goal of spiritual psychology, does not make a sharp division between what is literal and what is imaginal. Are these beings real? Yes. Are they physical, affecting us in terms of the laws of cause and effect? No. When the beings of a certain world of consciousness affect us, we are that consciousness. It is not a matter of something external impinging on us like rocks hitting the flesh; nor is it a matter of their imaginal presence acting as content of the soul. Soul is not a container of contents but the inherent capacity for perceiving spiritual realities. We are soul and spiritual beings, not beings with a soul and with a spirit. We are also embodied, but even so soul and spirit do not hover around phantomlike within our physical being. Rather than being caught by the laws of cause and effect, as Jung still was to a greater or lesser extent, we have to grow accustomed to working within the laws of sympathetic and antipathetic currents. The presence of such currents creates a resonance within us. We are like harps, sounding when the beings of the soul and spiritual worlds sound. And this resounding is possible only because we are of the substance of those beings.

There is a differentiation in understanding the structure and functioning of the body in anthroposophy that makes it clear how something completely immaterial, such as the dead, or other spirit-beings affect us in such a way that physical symptoms would arise. The living body consists of matter, but also of subtle, etheric forces, which provide a link with the immaterial. There is nothing theoretical about the etheric body. It is recognized by all spiritual and esoteric traditions; moreover it can be quite easily experienced through the life-forming processes of the physical body. When Steiner criticizes psychoanalysis, saying that it lacks the proper tools to address the kind of reality that it is trying to, he is, among other things, referring to the absence of an understanding of the etheric body. The concept of the etheric body makes for completely different understandings of psychological symptoms in Jung and in Steiner. Jung always traces a symptom back to an archetypal image, looks for the gods or spirits or dead in the disease, and speaks always of such figures as images in the soul. Steiner looks at the same symptoms and also traces the symptom back to the gods, the spirits, or the dead, but he takes these spirits as directly acting on the human being. Without Jung's perspective, these acts by spiritual beings would be taken literally, as if they were just like earthly beings, except perhaps a little more shadowy. Without Steiner's perspective, on the other hand, the truth of the actual presence of spiritual beings is sidestepped.

Another expression of the irresolvable tensions of opposites between Steiner and Jung concerns soul and spirit. Everywhere I have taught for the past fifteen years, someone inevitably asks me to define soul and spirit and tell how they differ. Such a question goes nowhere because it shifts something known and felt to the level of the ordinary intellect, where it cannot be answered. The question assumes that there is some way out of the confusion rather than finding deeper ways into the question's substance.

This book takes us further and deeper into the tension between soul and spirit. Here also the two are sometimes interchanged. This confusion persists, for example, in the essays by Hans Erhard Lauer in the second part of this book. But holding the tension begins to bring some clarity. For example, we find that both reveal themselves as inner experiences, even though the "inner" of soul is different than the "inner" of spirit. Jung speaks how, at an early age, he was initiated into the earth mysteries. Steiner speaks of being taken into the cosmic mysteries. Both speak of archetypal realities. However, Jung is always concerned with the archetypal patterns and figures that reveal themselves as contents of soul life. Steiner is always concerned with the archetypal beings that shape the human being and the earth.

Another difference: for Jung, psyche is image, and image is understood as a particular content, whether dream content or mythic content. Jung, of course, is more sophisticated concerning image than this, and we have the distinct feeling in his work that image, more than picture content, is that through which content appears. In Steiner, image is activity, the pure activity of forming or coming into form of the actual presence of spiritual beings. Image is the first way in which we can be present to the activity of spiritual beings. Image, in Steiner, is a decidedly spiritual notion, while in Jung it is the very heart of soul.

We can focus on the fruitfulness of keeping these two orientations in relation rather than on the divisiveness that arises by dividing soul and spirit too sharply. Taken alone, the soul perspective leads to a forgetfulness of the human being in the context of the world. Jung seals soul off from the world and unwittingly promotes self-absorption. Taken alone, Steiner's perspective leads to a literalizing, unimaginative, sometimes manic working to bring practical endeavors of a spiritual nature into the world, expecting that artistic endeavors, rather than conscious soul work, will answer the soul's needs. When we hold both the spirit and the soul perspectives together, we have spiritual psychology. This new psychology, which has its precursors in Jung and Steiner, places the spiritual soul at the heart of its endeavors. Holding the tension between soul and spirit is the attempt to provide the practical way of working in the world that is the forming of a spiritual culture. Our task concerns developing the capacities of allowing the spiritual realms to work through us into the world, and keeping this conscious. How this work happens remains open to inspiration; it is not a work of applying what Steiner said to the world.

The two perspectives of soul and spirit show up in another wayJung's notion of the goal of inner development as the awakening to the Self and Steiner's call for the development of the I. Are these two goals the same? Wehr puts them together, but I think it might be better to avoid collapsing them and keep the inherent tension between the two. The Self can be imagined as soul at the border of spirit. The I can be imagined as spirit at the border of the soul. The I is the Self from spirit's point of view. The Self is the I from the soul's point of view. The Self is the collective soul raised to the level of individuality. The I is individuality in connection with the whole. Holding this tension between Self and I can help anthroposophists, who are forever confusing Steiner's understanding of the I with their own egotism because they often lack a sense of soul. (Steiner also uses the word "ego" in multiple ways. Sometimes he is speaking of the I when using the term "ego." Sometimes he is speaking of ego in the ordinary sense.) Similarly, this tension can help those in the Jungian stream because the notion of the I, while somewhat linguistically awkward, has a solidity about it that prevents the misconception that adhering to soul life leads to mysticism.

The knot holding together I, Self, self, and ego still persists. Neither I and Self, it seems, ought to be collapsed, nor should self and ego. Nor should we try to untie the knot with definitions. The value of seeing these notions collide in Jung and Steiner is precisely so that they collide in us. We have to find the way into the problem, which is a living problem for each of us. For example, in light of the spiritual individuality that is described as I, a specific relation to ego has to be worked through. Ego is not quite the same in Jung and Steiner. For Steiner, ego would be the reflection of the spirit individuality within us, a kind of a shadow of our true spirit being. It takes conscious inner development to come to the I; it takes a long process of the purification of desire, developing a presence to creative thinking, a conscious awakening to imagination, inspiration, and intuition. For Jung, ego is a part of the whole of soul life that takes itself to be the whole. Consciously entering the whole process of individuation, something that is never complete, is required for coming to the point of a presence of the Self. It is of vast importance, both personally and culturally, to know when we are in ego and when in Self. It is vital to have a clear sense of the kind of experience characterizing the I and the kind characterizing the Self.