A commonly quoted fact about astronomy is that the Universe is “expanding”, but that’s not really true. Our universe is nothing more than a giant ball of rules that we can measure. Rules like time, temperature, and distance. We say that the Universe is “expanding” because the amount of space we can measure inside it is increasing. We have no way of knowing what is outside of this ball of rules. It is doubtful that measurements like time and temperature would make much sense there. Ben told me an idea one time that comforts me. He told me that Jesus came from a realm of poetic anarchy into our world of rules and told us to break all of them. That none of them were real. The blind can see, the poor are rich, and the most vulnerable rule all creation. Even death was a rule he broke.

-The Spider and the Birdhouse

Is Religious Cosmology Just the Unlived Life of the Parent

Jungian psychology posits that the unlived life of the parent is the largest force in a child’s life. It encompasses all the things they don’t bring into therapy because they are off the map, a complete set of things that may contain the client’s shadow and possible potential but contain goals that they don’t even know were possible.

Freud’s life exemplifies this concept. His mother doted on him, believing he was destined for greatness from birth as he was born in a caul, which she took as a sign of his future renown. She delighted in his intelligence and told him from an early age that he would bring their family fame. He was her “little golden Siggy”. In contrast, Freud’s father was a hardworking but passive man who never strove for greatness himself. He recalls being shocked and ashamed as a boy when his father was mocked and insulted by anti-Semites, remaining implacable and positive in the face of humiliation.

From his mother, Freud learned that becoming brilliant made him lovable. From his father, he learned to be complacent in confrontation and avoid conflict at all costs. This extreme passivity led Freud to repress his competitive and aggressive energies, which became a major tenet of his psychology. He avoided asserting himself to such a degree that it is difficult to find a case in his biography where conflict with an equal does not result in the dissolution of the relationship entirely.

Carl Jung relived his own father wound through his tumultuous encounter with Freud. The two had initially formed a close bond, with Freud seeing Jung as his intellectual heir and the future of the psychoanalytic movement. However, their relationship began to fracture as Jung started to question and diverge from some of Freud’s core theories.

The breaking point came when Jung and Freud were analyzing one of Jung’s dreams together. Jung proposed an interpretation that differed from Freud’s, suggesting that the dream symbolism was not primarily sexual in nature, as Freud insisted, but rather pointed to deeper, more archetypal dimensions of the psyche.

Freud, who could not tolerate any challenge to his intellectual authority, reacted with a kind of psychological collapse. Jung recounts that Freud began looking at him with an expression of intense fear and mistrust, before finally fainting dead away on the floor. When he came to, Freud accused Jung of harboring a “death wish” towards him and abruptly cut off all contact with his once beloved protégé.

For Jung, this traumatic rupture was a recapitulation of his own father’s emotional abandonment and inability to hold space for his son’s developing spiritual and intellectual identity. Jung’s father, a pastor who had lost his faith, could not bear the intensity of his son’s religious questioning and metaphysical speculations, shutting down in the face of Jung’s precocious need for meaning and mythic embodiment.

In the same way, Freud could not accommodate Jung’s urgent need to expand the horizons of psychoanalytic theory beyond the confines of Freud’s own neurotic obsessions and reductive materialism. Freud’s insistence on the primacy of the sexual instinct and the Oedipus complex was, for Jung, a kind of intellectual cage, a refusal to grapple with the deeper, more numinous aspects of the human experience.

During one of their last moments, Jung and Freud found themselves examining the phenomenon of bog bodies – ancient human remains naturally mummified in peat bogs. Jung, ever attuned to the archetypal and mythological dimensions of such artifacts, saw in these preserved corpses a powerful symbol of the human psyche’s relationship to death and the unconscious.

For Jung, the bog bodies represented a kind of “sacral regicide,” a ritualized sacrifice of the king or ruler to appease the chthonic forces of the underworld. He argued that this motif of the “dying and resurrecting god” was a central archetype of the collective unconscious, one that found expression in myths and religious rites across cultures.

Freud, however, was deeply uncomfortable with Jung’s interpretation. As a committed atheist and materialist, he was loath to entertain any notion of a collective unconscious or archetypal symbolism. For Freud, the bog bodies were simply historical curiosities, their significance limited to what they might reveal about the specific societies and individuals that produced them.

More than that, Freud seemed to have a visceral, almost phobic reaction to the very idea of death and mortality. He had suffered from a morbid fear of dying since childhood, a fear that was only exacerbated by the loss of his own father and the existential upheavals of World War I. The thought of confronting death head-on, of staring into the abyss of non-existence, was simply too much for Freud to bear.

So when Jung insisted on the psychological and spiritual significance of the bog bodies, Freud responded with a kind of defensive dismissal. He accused Jung of indulging in “mystical nonsense” and of projecting his own neurotic obsessions onto the archaeological record. He simply could not countenance any challenge to his own theoretical framework, which posited the individual psyche as the sole locus of meaning and motivation.

But beneath this intellectual disagreement lay a deeper, more personal dynamic. Freud, like Jung’s own father, could not tolerate any questioning of his authority or any deviation from his own worldview. For Freud, Jung’s ideas were not just intellectually wrongheaded, but emotionally threatening – a kind of “death wish” directed at the father figure and the psychoanalytic establishment he had created.

In this moment, we see the full force of Freud’s own father complex coming to bear on his relationship with Jung. Just as Freud had learned to submit to his own father’s passivity and avoidance of conflict, so he now demanded the same unquestioning obedience from his “son” and heir apparent. Any challenge to that authority, any insistence on Jung’s own intellectual and spiritual autonomy, was experienced by Freud as a kind of psychological annihilation.

This dynamic came to a head in the famous fainting spell that Freud experienced during one of his last meetings with Jung. As Jung recounted the episode, Freud had become increasingly agitated and defensive as their discussion of religion and mythology grew more heated. Finally, overcome by some inner terror or revulsion, Freud collapsed to the floor in a dead faint.

For Jung, this dramatic moment crystallized the fundamental impasse between them. Freud’s inability to confront the deeper, more numinous aspects of the psyche, his refusal to acknowledge the reality of the unconscious and its archetypal manifestations, was not just an intellectual failing, but a symptom of his own unresolved trauma and spiritual arrested development.

In a sense, Freud was reenacting his own father’s abdication of spiritual and emotional authority, his capitulation to the “death” of meaningful religious experience in the face of modernity’s disenchantments. By fainting at the mere suggestion of a realm beyond the ego and its rational categories, Freud was revealing the depths of his own psychic wounds and the unlived life he had inherited from his father.

Jung wrote the Red Book as a way to contain his subsequent split with reality so that it did not devolve into full-blown psychosis or schizophrenia.

Jungian therapy itself started as a result of the father wound and the unlived life of the parent Jung watched his own father refuse to embody. Jung’s father was a priest who had lost his faith but had to continue in his role regardless. Jung developed his psychology partially to offer his father a pathway to meaning, wanting him to see that theology could be more like psychology – a living, symbolic experience rather than a set of empty doctrines. Jung spent his career arguing that psychology needed to understand why theology and mythology existed and repeated certain patterns.

Two significant dreams shaped Jung’s views on the limitations of traditional religion. In one, he saw a subterranean phallic god on a throne beneath a cathedral, revealing that religious experience had a profound psychological dimension beyond conventional Christian teachings. In another, he dreamt of God taking a large poop on a church, symbolizing for Jung the failure and decay of religious tradition in providing true transformative meaning to the modern person.

Jung encountered two warring personalities within himself, a reaction to the unlived spiritual life of his father who was radically repressing one element of his own psyche. Freud, too, could not accept Jung’s offering of a new psychological perspective on religion’s symbols and experiences, likely because Jung had developed his theory of psychological types (which would later become the MBTI) partially as a peace offering to Freud, in an attempt to explain how their minds processed the world so differently. But just as with Jung’s father, this gesture of reconciliation was rejected.

As a phenomenologist, Jung valued subjectivity and case studies over strict empiricism, believing that objectivity was worthless without a deep understanding of subjectivity and how it colors all of human experience. This is something academic psychology has failed to fully integrate to this day, often dismissing Jung’s work as unscientific without grasping his core epistemological argument.

So the provocative question remains – is Jungian psychology or depth psychology in general just a thinly veiled apologetics for a literal faith in religion and spirituality? Many Jungians were indeed raised religious and are pivoting to something that allows them to apply that familiar cosmology to psychology. They argue that at sufficient depth, the psyche reflects universal religious cosmology through the collective unconscious.

There’s a semi-serious joke often heard at Jungian conferences that Jungians are “nice people in recovery” – recovery from avoiding some threatening truth that would have caused major conflict with a parent, until that avoidance became overwhelming, putting them face to face with greater, repressed truths. To fully individuate requires encountering inconvenient, shadow material.

Jung’s radically phenomenological approach leaves all doors open, conceptualizing the raw matter of psychology as a kind of radio antenna that picks up archetypal signals without definitively confirming or denying their metaphysical origin. He used the language and concepts of his time, like the collective unconscious, emerging genetics, physics metaphors, but who can say with certainty where these patterns, archetypes, and perennial philosophies emanate from? Perhaps it’s in the quantum interactions of molecules, as neuroscience continues to speculate.

Critics accused Jung of sneaking metaphysics and literalized religion in through the back door of psychology, but he vehemently rejected this, despising those who retreated into comforting subjectivity as much as he criticized the strict materialists. He once scoffed disparagingly at the New Age as such: “What is the point in people just swaying and intoning ‘vibration’ over and over? That is nothing but ego-fascination and delusion!”

Jung was both limited and empowered by using phenomenology as a singular lens, collaborating with geniuses like physicist Wolfgang Pauli and Albert Einstein when he needed more technical expertise. Jungian therapy today is admittedly a bit of a mess, with some taking his metaphysics too literally and concretely, others rejecting all metaphysics and becoming nihilistic literalists, and most latching onto one aspect of his incredibly vast psychology while downplaying or ignoring the rest.

So, is Jungian psychology merely an eloquent apologetics for a faith-based, supernatural worldview? Is metaphysics always just a projection and argument with a long dead parent? Is it just Catholicism without the rituals? Most Jungian-leaning therapists feel that Jung arrived at the same experiential truths and psycho-spiritual topography that earnest introspection, intuition and inner work would have revealed regardless of creed. But they also acknowledge the impossibility of fully separating one’s familial and cultural religious background from the psychological individuation journey.

Once we leave behind the unlived life of the parent to the degree we can, what do we really see when we honestly look within? Are you living a life true to your own inner vision, however strange or terrifying, or are you still confined to the safe, narrow range that never occurred to you to question or reflect on, that your parents could not conceive of as valid? Are you the hero of your own unfolding myth, or a passive footnote in someone else’s? Are you reading this right now because of a genuine burning drive to understand your own mind, or because your family of origin could never truly consider or discuss these ideas? Whatever the answer, Jung would argue, at least you’re asking the question, which is where the real work begins.

“Ben, why did you become a priest?” I ask him.

“Why did you decide not to be?” he asks me. We both laugh at different jokes. Ben thinks for a minute. “Everything they say about Jesus is bullshit,” Ben tells me. “All the stuff about heaven, that’s just wish fulfillment”. It’s dark and his hair and collar glow white against the black space of his outline. “Jesus never told people they could have all of the stuff they want, or that they deserved all of it”.

He leans back. “All we deserve is love”. He looks at me for a second across the darkness. “It’s the other things that Jesus said that nobody talks about, the things nobody wants to hear.” Ben pauses a minute and continues quieter. “There would be no reason to say things like that unless you came from some kind of other place far away outside all of this,” Ben pauses and gestures around in the darkness presumably. “You would have to be able to see the hidden divinity in the world, in everything, or you would just have to be crazy,” Ben trails off and gazes up at the stars with me.

-The Spider and the Birdhouse