So his work has much more affinity with my suggestion that a person’s attitude in the conscious world depends on their unspoken and usually unconscious assumptions, than it has with Jung’s exploration of the structure of a person’s unconscious psyche. Nevertheless I think it a valuable contribution, and something which the alchemists may have intuitively recognised too.
Yet even while I acknowledge my view that Jung is pre-eminent in being the first to synthesise a comprehensive and comprehensible structure for the unconscious, I would not contemplate saying that he wrote the last word on the subject. Indeed I do not think he was all that good at making his ideas intelligible to the non-specialist. So for that reason alone, there is room for others to interpret him. Nor would I suggest that his work should be free from criticism. One obvious gap in his thinking is that he ignored or disregarded the ability of people to communicate with each other, and the extent to which their ability to communicate depended on their relationships with each other. For example, his idea of “individuation”, that is of the human character reaching the fulfilment of its potential, ignores the limitation that one can only fulfil one’s potential in the society in which one lives; one does not fulfil it in some society which is yet to come into existence. So one pays Jung no compliment, nor confers on Society any benefit, by saying that he wrote the last word on his subject.
Similarly with Jesus; one pays him no compliment, nor confers any benefit on Society, by saying he was never in error, and that what he said was the last word on his subject, despite the huge social changes that have taken place since he lived. To my mind it is obvious that he spoke to the people round about him. To take a simple example, they thought in terms of possession by devils, as most primitive people do today; we think of mental disturbance in terms of neuroses and complexes. There may be some truth in each thought discipline; but you do not talk to people today in the thought discipline of 2000 years ago, unless there is some compelling reason for doing it. So what Jesus said needs at least to be re-interpreted in the light of modern knowledge, and modern thought processes; and there is no harm either in considering whether he made mistakes, and what they were. For example, choosing Judas as an apostle was surely a mistake, and by all accounts rather a bad one?
So if the “conversation” which Jung proposed in the late 1940s had taken place, would his hypotheses of “Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious” qualify the Ministry of Jesus; or would the Ministry of Jesus limit the validity of archetypes and the collective unconscious? The first dramatic conflict lies in the fact that Jung insists one should never identify oneself completely with an archetype, and this is exactly what Jesus said he did. Like everyone else, Jesus will have had the archetype of the creator in his unconscious: for many of us it is the figure of the wise old man or sometimes the perpetual youth.