Jung Christian Psychological View

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) is a famous Swiss psychologist, one of the representatives of Psychoanalysis School, the founders of Analytical Psychology. Jung was once appreciated by Freud and designated as the"successor"and"crown prince"of him. However, Jung parted ways with Freud because of opinion differences years later and founded his own Analytical Psychology. He proposed the approach of overall psychological structure, especially introduced the concepts of collective consciousness and archetype, which had important far-reaching influences on psychology, religion, literature and other fields. Nowadays, the domestic scholars on Jung's research mainly focus on the field of psychology, while the researches on Jung's views on religion are very few. This paper briefly introduces Jung's life and works, sums up his theories of analytical psychology and religion, his psychological views on Christianity on the basis of the image of God and his psychoanalysis on the Trinity doctrine, and finally discusses the contents and characteristics of his psychological views on Christianity and evaluates its contributions and limitations.This paper includes six parts. The part of Introduction puts forward the theoretical and practical significances and reviews the previous researches and points out their limitations, which is the starting point of this study. The first chapter briefly introduces Jung's life and academic development, divides the academic development of Carl Jung into five stages, briefly introduced and analyzes the experiences in his youth, and the relationship with Freud and academic development and achievements. Chapter two summarizes the system of Jung's analytical psychology and his views on religion, including the origins, formation and development, and its theoretical structure. Chapter three discusses Jung's point of view on the image of God based on the effect of religious experiences in his childhood, the theories of collective unconsciousness, archetypal theories and individuation. Chapter four describes Jung's psychoanalysis on the Trinity doctrine from the aspects of the archetypes of Trinity in ancient civilizations, the archetypal theories of the Trinity, the psychoanalysis of the three persons of Trinity, and the problems of the fourth, and etc. Chapter Five is the overall assessment of Jung's psychological views on Christianity, which summarizes and evaluates the contents, characteristics, contributions and limitations of Jung's psychological views on Christianity. The above are the main contents of this paper, which are also the innovation points of this study. This thesis holds such an opinion that although Jung has a Christian identity, he is not a Christian but a psychologist with spiritual pursuit. His psychoanalysis on traditional Christianity is only views of psychologist of his own. Of course, we should not criticize his psychological views from theological point of view. And we need pay much attention to the practical meanings of his psychological views on Christianity based on his own experiences and those of his patients.