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Jung and Steiner: The Birth of a New Psychology Our May eletter the first part of Robert Sardello's introduction to a book that will be published next year on the relation between C.G. Jung and Rudolf Steiner. This book, written by Gehard Wehr, which is beautifully translated by Magdalene Jaeckel, will be published by Anthroposophic Press and carry the title: Jung and Steiner: Toward a New Psychology. The title may change, so keep an eye on the listing of new books on the Anthroposophic Press web site. A catalog of the publications of Anthroposophic Press and Lindisfarne Press may be seen online at <http://www.anthropress.org>.
The relation between the "inner worlds" and the "outer world" is another tension to be worked through. Steiner belongs more to the Aristotelian line, Jung to the Platonic. Thus in setting the work of Jung and Steiner side by side, as Wehr has done, we have to hold this tension and try to see into it as clearly as we can. For Steiner there are three domains to research with respect to the human being: the realm of the senses; how sense experience lives on in soul life; and how the human being knows. This approach seems decidedly different from Jung's. Jung is far more interested in preexisting patterns, traced back to the acts of archetypal beings who still live on as contents in the soul. The contrast between the Aristotelian and Platonic points of view could not be greater, except that Steiner's approach to working through his three domains of research is wholly and entirely internal. It is not subjective, but inner. He may, for example, start by describing the senses and their functions from an external point of view. But he never stops with the external. He goes on to explore sensing from an inner point of view, skillfully taking us further and further into an inner view of the human being and of the whole of the cosmos from within. He is no simple Aristotelian. As he moves us gradually inward, it is done with impeccable logic. Mysticism is not an option. The inner way of working that characterizes anthroposophy is completely free of dualism. Approaching the human being's physical innerness does not mean "inside" versus "outside." The "outside" too can be approached in an inner way. For example, among the most important researches of Steiner into the inner physical being are his studies of human physiology. He avoids dualism by seeing that the whole human being participates in three worlds-the physical, soul, and spirit worlds. Each of these worlds can be explored with equal precision, but only through the development of the capacity of nondualistic perception and thought, the I. Dualism is founded on the mistake that there is only one world. Thus it separates mind from body, locating the body as part of the physical world. It also separates soul and spirit from body and from world, and then searches for peculiar connections, such as parallelism or reductionism. Jung is also completely faithful to the inner world. Strictly speaking, he is not Platonic but Kantian (it is the archetypal psychologist James Hillman who emphasizes Jung's Platonic side, minimizing his Kantian side). His emphasis on soul is somewhat misleading because he does not and cannot reach the cosmological level of soul with his psychology. He is always concerned with the contents of the soul and steers completely away from saying anything about whether the contents reflect the actions of "real" spiritual beings. This is important because, with the help of Steiner, it is possible to reset Jung into more of a Platonic imagination. It is simply a matter of taking the archetypal figures as real, as existing in themselves. But it takes Steiner to make that move because it is not sufficient to simply state that this is so. Capacities of consciousness have to be developed that reveal the nature of spiritual beings. Steiner developed such capacities and wrote extensively concerning how others can develop them as well. Kant stated that the object, the transcendent, the thing-in-itself is absolutely inaccessible, so that you have to confine yourself to the empirical world, to the finite, to appearances. Jung adopted as his own unshakable foundation for psychology the restriction of Kant's phenomenal world and the closing of the door to the noumenon. This is why Jung posited the existence of the archetypes but would never say anything of their reality beyond what could be said "psychologically." Thus, for Jung, the question of truth is closed, or at best we have a special notion of truth, easily susceptible to being completely misused-"the truth within." Once we have exposed Jung's decision to remain completely empirical, confining his work to inner soul images, it may seem that the comparison between Jung and Steiner must cease. Steiner says a lot about the reality of spiritual beings; they are, in his view, completely autonomous, and we are required to develop the soul as the organ for the perception of these realities. The tension, though, needs to be maintained because of the phenomenological acumen Jung brings to the inner life. Steiner does have a clear notion of the transcendent and goes after it with incredible descriptive capacities along with the accuracy of observation equal to any scientist. In addition, he develops the capacities for making observations of the invisible spiritual realms. He goes about this in such a way, however, that he reports what he saw, not as interior conversations with the spirits, but as ideas- the closest we can come with our consciousness to the realities he experienced. We have no direct reports of Steiner's immediate experiences of the spiritual worlds. We have the ideas he gives as descriptive of those realms. However, because the spiritual realms remain closed for most people, there is an extremely strong tendency to take Steiner's ideas at face value, even though he himself says over and over again to test them. But to test them requires the capacity to enter into the interior of those ideas. Rather than merely examining them with our ordinary consciousness, we must experience them within; we must enter into the soul of the ideas. This is where Jung comes in as absolutely necessary. He shows how to find the way into and inhabit the interior of things. Without Jung, I propose, anthroposophy all too easily becomes the dogmatic application of the ideas of a remarkable individual without inner understanding. The application of these ideas, without the capacity to discover their soul nature, becomes the imposition of those ideas onto others. In the long run, such imposition can fare no better than, say, the imposition of the technological worldview on us because it will supposedly make life better. A number of years ago I spoke to a large gathering of anthroposophists, introducing a basic view of spiritual psychology as being founded in Jung and Steiner. The address was met with little enthusiasm; in fact, I could hear a number of stomachs turning over. One person forcefully stood up and said something to the effect that because of Steiner we have absolutely no need for psychology. Many of those gathered agreed with this naïve view. Nevertheless the fact that Steiner explored soul does not acquit us of the need to be present to soul realities from within rather than accepting Steiner's findings. Steiner shows us much concerning the ways of soul, but then there is the problem of living them. This can only be done by finding the way into the interior of soul, which is Jung's forte. A significant question arises at this point. If Jung's reliance on Kant confines him to immediate appearances, why go to Steiner for the way through to the reality of spiritual beings rather than someone like Hegel, as the very astute Jungian Wolfgang Geiegerich has done? (See his book The Logical Life of the Soul.) The answer is that while Hegel perhaps provides a better philosophical basis for Jung than Kant, his approach would be devastating to soul. Image- consciousness would be lost to abstract thinking. Only Steiner provides the needed basis capable of comprising both soul and spirit, and as such is a basis within psychology itself. The very fact that Wehr can put the work of these two individuals side by side and make a meaningful comparison of them is due to their shared basis of soul and spirit. The problem of seeing soul in terms of the picture-contents of myths, memories, and stories is unfortunately perpetuated somewhat by Wehr, who often uses content-oriented language in his text. Speaking of the soul as having contents gives the impression of some kind of container filled with images. Yet soul, at least in part, concerns the act of picturing, not the picture-contents. Myths too are not picture-contents, but worlds of picturings; that is, if you take myths as still living. If myth are now completed and dead, then indeed all we have left are the corpses, the picture-contents. Learning to imagine in terms of picturing rather than pictures is one of the most important things I have learned from Steiner. In his most profound work on the soul, A Psychology of Body, Soul, and Spirit, he describes how soul functions. Among the most significant aspects is the soul's apprehension of a time current from the future. This is the picturing act I am talking about. It does not concern a content, because the future coming toward us has no content. The moment it does have a content, it is necessarily from the past; this is a reflection occurring in the etheric body, where there is something like pictures from the past, both personal and archetypal. But this time current from the future is something real and actual. The future here concerns the possibilities of our being. While the notion sounds remote, it is not. We experience this time current with every movement we make. I get up and go to the door. Within the deep will, what is to come is already happening before it happens. I could not get to the door if it were only a mental idea. Getting to the door is already in my movement as I approach the door. This little example is but a shortened version of how our whole life approaches us from out of the future. Each act that we do is internally connected with the whole of our life and expresses itself as belonging to the whole. But much of that whole has not yet happened. This is the time current from the future, and in A Psychology of Body, Soul, and Spirit, Steiner calls this current the astral body of the soul. It is picturing in the process of coming-to-be. The life of the soul is being formed out of the whole of the cosmos: "astral" comes from a root meaning "star." This world is whole, but it is open, unfinished. The pictures as content-memories, but also archetypal images-these are from the past, from what has already happened. Steiner speaks of this current as the etheric body of the soul. The pictures of the etheric body are completed, done. They are not necessarily dead and gone; they still live on but are closed to new meanings. I thus make a distinction between the soul's immersion in fate-how we are shaped by the past-and the soul's immersion in destiny-how we are shaped from the future. Jung's psychology belongs more to the former, anthroposophy more to the latter. Spiritual psychology works with both at once, but tries to be conscious of the difference. For example, when in our lives we encounter a real deviation from our usual experience, is this fate or is it destiny? The words are often used interchangeably, but they are definitely distinct experiences; if you know how to be present to each, the difference is very clear. Here depth psychology has a lot to learn from anthroposophy. It is as if half of psychology has been neglected because of the discipline's bias toward explanations in terms of the past. It is a matter of looking at images, even archetypal and mythic images, in terms of what they intimate about what is coming rather than looking backward to their past. Methods of individual inner development reveal another area where it is fruitful to hold both Jung and Steiner together without seeking resolution. Jung speaks of analysis as the only initiatory path available in the modern Western world. He either was unfamiliar with Steiner or scornfully chose not to acknowledge that Steiner's work is above all a path of individual inner development. The methods of Jung and Steiner seem at first unrelated. For Jung, the method is analysis of others (though one must have gone through analysis oneself). And, then, within analysis, it is constant inner work with dreams, trying to get close to the images, feeling their living presence, amplifying the images through myths, and, most of all, engaging in the transference, where the real transformation occurs. For a few, there is the work of active imagination, which is the work of those initiated into the process of individuation. Steiner's method is meditation, which focuses on developing the capacity of remaining in full control of consciousness, not allowing anything to enter consciousness that is not put there deliberately by the meditator. And what is supposed to be put there is a thought or an image of something unrelated to the sense world. One might, for example, meditate on the Rose Cross, which does not exist in the sensory world. After holding this in consciousness for a while, letting nothing else enter, the content focused on is erased, creating an empty consciousness. Then one waits, as the consciousness does not remain empty. An image, a thought, an insight enters, a response from the spiritual worlds. Steiner recommends a host of other exercises, such as the backward review of the day, exercises for controlling thought, feeling, and will, and special meditative practices for developing the capacity to experience karma. Steiner's recommendations for each area he worked in-such as medicine, agriculture, and education-also include particular meditative exercises. A primary difference between these two methods is that Jung's meditative work takes place primarily in the presence of another person, the therapist, while Steiner's takes place in private. In anthroposophy, group meditative work has been discouraged and even disparaged. In looking at the methods of Jung and Steiner, what is most important is to look at the capacities that are being developed, not the way the meditations are structured. Steiner is actually very clear about this. For example, in such practices as the Rose Cross meditation described above, it is the force of building up the thought and the force it takes to erase it that is central. Here it is as if the soul is a muscle that is being exercised to build up its strength. This makes it possible for the practitioner to be in soul in a conscious way. For Jung, if we look at his methods closely, what is most essential is the relation between the individual and the therapist. This is where the strength to go on with analysis, dream work, and active imagination is centered. Much, of course, comes from working the material, but the soul transformation has to do with the transference. And transference is a name for the capacity to feel the autonomous presence of love without acting it out, without reducing it to something personal. There is actually an element of something like transference in the methods of Steiner. This element is Steiner's insistence that all meditations be done with a strong sense of reverence. Here a relationship of love is established with an as- yet-unknown other. It is, I think, going in the wrong direction to say that Steiner's mediations are solitary while Jung's are communal, though that is what strikes one most at first. If we hold both of these methods together, we come to the method of spiritual psychology. Spiritual psychology values group meditative work, recognizing, mainly from Jung, that the element of feeling is as important as the element of thought in meditative work. At the same time, following Steiner's lead, spiritual psychology refuses to literalize therapy but sees individual meditative work as inherently therapeutic. It is perfectly possible to do individual meditative work in a group context. Here the exercises are like those proposed by Steiner, so that building up inner strength of soul is what is most important. The results of the exercises are discussed in the group, which develops the feeling dimension of the soul, and also serves as a way of doing soul research together. The method of spiritual psychology is a new form of therapeutic work that takes therapy away from concentration on the personal, which easily becomes ego-centered, and yet strengthens the soul and spirit forces that are, in any case, central to any therapeutic healing. The valuable lectures by Hans Erhard Lauer, printed here as an appendix, look at the relation between Jung and Steiner from a slightly different point of view. I want to mine this material, too, for what it contributes to spiritual psychology with depth psychology and anthroposophy as a base. The first essay gives a good picture of how an anthroposophist who is sympathetic to depth psychology interprets the vision, meaning, and methods of the latter. At first the essay may seem to resemble what one might find in a textbook about depth psychology. Notice, however, the inner clarity of the thinking and how Lauer slowly builds his theme. Lauer first finds within the stream of depth psychology the play between individuality and collective forces. The polarity of that play is represented by Freud at the collective end-with his emphasis on the collective force known as sex-and Adler on the end of individuality. Jung lands right in between. For Jung, illness manifests when these polarities conflict. His depth psychology explores the collective forces of the soul and the archetypes, as well as how autonomous symbolic forms seep into consciousness, producing illness when there is no capacity to receive these forms consciously. Lauer sees Jung as helping to prevent a total split between collective inner forces and individuality. Steiner also wishes to heal this split, but from an entirely different angle than Jung. His work consists of developing the capacities of individuality to the point that the ego becomes the conscious I, the spirit-individuality that can make spiritual sense of what comes from the depths while doing practical spiritual work in the world. This is a very large order indeed. When these capacities are not developed spiritually, the split widens. For the many anthroposophists who work to develop the practical cultural forms Steiner initiated-education, medicine, agriculture, painting, science, drama, movement, and so on-there is the inherent possibility of developing severe disturbances that go unnoticed. The content of the various areas of Steiner's work is taken up, but often not the meditative work. Even those who do practice the meditative work do not reckon with the size and degree of the split in the culture between the individual and the collective; or perhaps they somehow feel exempt from this split. In actual fact, the split has proceeded so far that it is highly dangerous, I think, to do spiritual practices without accompanying soul work. There is a notion in anthroposophy that the content of what Steiner created can be beneficial in the world on its own. But taken alone, without conscious connection to soul life, and without inner connection to the activity of conscious life, not just its contents, anthroposophy is just another content, operating out of the same sleepy consciousness as the world at large. Further, evoking spiritual authority that has no actual basis in oneself is deadly when accompanied by upsurging forces that leak into consciousness. This stance of authority can lead to abuse, cruelty, dogmatism, false superiority, and a self- isolation of anthroposophical communities from the rest of the world. According to Lauer, depth psychology works out of the same kind of consciousness as modern science: it makes theories and hypotheses concerning the human soul that are then investigated through therapy. Lauer here misses Jung's phenomenological basis as well as the central significance of the transference. On the other hand, according to Lauer, those who take up anthroposophy can, through meditative work, come to experience the soul inwardly, independently of the body. This meditative work potentially leads to a fully conscious I. It is the fully conscious I that is supposed to be able to meet whatever rises from the collective forces of the soul. Much of ego life is not conscious. This is the real discovery of anthroposophy, but one that goes unnoticed, often even in anthroposophy. There is always an inner collusion going on between the unconscious aspects of the ego and the collective realms of the soul. Our ordinary ego is filled with pride, self- aggrandizement, anger, envy, and much besides. Most of all, the ego is the structure of fear. Freud's wonderful list of some fifty ego defense mechanisms are very descriptive of the unconscious aspects of ego life. Ego defends itself, but in wholly unconscious ways, such as denial, projection, introjection, and so on. For the very few people who do follow through with the meditative regimen recommended by Steiner, there is the possibility of doing conscious spiritual work of a practical nature in the world, with the capacity of meeting whatever comes from the depths. However, anthroposophical training often goes on without any guidance in inner soul work, with no recognition of the importance of depth psychology, and almost no guidance in the meditative work recommended by Steiner. In these matters the student is left to fend alone. The ego is thus left isolated from the usual forms of ego gratification and development. It is cut off from help from finding a healthy connection with the collective forces of the soul; it is also cut off from guidance in coming to the I. The anthroposophical path, taken alone, requires one, through meditative exercises, to experience the soul as independent of the body. It requires one to be able to enter into the activity, not the content, of thinking. This development opens imaginative consciousness. This path then requires one to go through exercises that make it possible to enter into the activity, rather than the content, of feeling life, where inspiration is experienced as the activity of actual spiritual beings. Then one goes through exercises that make it possible to enter into the activity, rather than the content, of the will, where intuition is experienced as direct participation with spiritual beings. All this, it is expected, can happen in a culture in which the most severe split has occurred in soul life, a split in which individualism reigns and there is no connection to the collective forces of the soul. Spiritual psychology, a creative synthesis of depth psychology and anthroposophy, sees inner soul work as a necessary preliminary to any kind of spiritual work. Preliminary, here, is meant as something akin to doing warm-up exercises, as for example, done by a musician. You can be a very advanced musician, but you cannot do away with finger exercises. That is, in our time, it is utter foolishness to try to take on meditative exercises without coming into healthy connection with one's soul life and doing a lot of work to keep that connection. How to keep open and keep these connections, and how to do so specifically within the kind of work one does in the world, is the work of spiritual psychology. Spiritual psychology as a practice, a doing, I suggest, would benefit every Waldorf training program, every anthroposophical medical training program, and all other anthroposophical endeavors. In contemplating Lauer's essays, it might occur to the reader that the body must be gotten away from in order to work within the spiritual soul. Lauer strongly implies this is so. Lauer does not mention (nor does Wehr) that there is a whole dimension of Steiner's work that concerns developing the capacities to enter into imagination of the organs of the body and through those imaginations enter into the soul and spirit worlds underlying them. Anthroposophy mostly touts body-free meditation, but this is not the direction that is necessarily required. It would be extremely fruitful to develop a synoptic comparison of Jung and Steiner by going to Steiner's meditative exercises and the results of those exercises reported in his book Occult Physiology. We would have, I think, a different outcome than we have in Lauer's essays, which easily lead to misunderstanding Steiner as Gnostic. Jung, it seems, is far more Gnostic than Steiner. The term is so misused, however, that another essay would be needed to tease out this issue in both Steiner and Jung. It would probably conclude that neither are Gnostic and both are Gnostic-like, something which we all need to work toward. I do not want to avoid contemplating the most difficult issue of all in this synoptic comparison of Jung and Steiner and the forming of spiritual psychology. This is the placement of Christ at the center of anthroposophy and the importance of Christ in Jung. Unfortunately, in anthroposophy this focus is almost always sentimentalized, although Steiner does not sentimentalize it. He underwent a profound spiritual experience that showed him something of the true mysteries of Christ, reorienting the direction of anthroposophy. But when the meditative side of Steiner's work is not practiced, the central freedom of the human being slides into a veiled religion, justified by Steiner's esoteric Christian viewpoint. Anthroposophy is often unconsciously practiced as if it were a Christian religion (although this is vehemently denied). Many anthroposophists want to have it both ways. They want to experience themselves as completely free "I-beings," but they also want to believe that Christ is working in them-without working through all the baggage of Christian belief that each and everyone lives, whether Christian or not. Neither Jung nor Steiner asks for Christian belief. But both realize the utter foolishness of speaking of a psychology of the dead, the gods, and the spiritual worlds without coming up against the status of Christ. Jung clearly emphasizes the religious character of the psyche, but wants to hold that soul is influenced by many archetypal myths besides the Christian myth. He does, however, see the Christian myth as the future of the psyche, that is, individuation as realization of the Self and Christ as the archetype of the Self. If one does not just accept Jung's view, but meditates on it deeply and on Jung's writings concerning Christ, then what he says makes good sense and provides a way through the barrier encountered by anthroposophists. This barrier is simply that there is no other way to apprehend Christ from the consciousness of the ordinary ego than through what we are given from outside, by others. In anthroposophy, the risk is that of forming a relationship to the religious notions of Christ, thinking that it is an immediate experience of developed spiritual consciousness. The development of the true capacity of the I would be needed, and if that takes place, we might well have Christian spiritual psychology. Steiner's writings have disseminated concepts of Christ that are more powerful and astute than religions that either completely humanize Christ or completely elevate him into a pure cosmic being. But to simply accept what Steiner has to say would be falling into religion. (Actually, there is nothing wrong with falling into religion. Far worse is doing so without knowing that has happened.) The concern here is whether there is or can be such a thing as a Christian spiritual psychology that is something other than imposing a certain belief structure onto a discipline. Here Steiner is more helpful than Jung, but the whole of Steiner has to be worked through. This means coming to see that the very structure and meaning of consciousness, of the natural world, of culture and civilization, of the earth, of the human being in body, soul, and spirit, is permeated with the forces that are Christ. Thus it is impossible not to have a Christian spiritual psychology. It is only possible to deny the fact that spiritual psychology is completely the same as Christian psychology. Speaking in this way, at the end of this introduction, is not intended to be a pronouncement. It is deliberately provocative, a call for the working through the details of Christian spiritual psychology without falling into institutional religion, actual or veiled.
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