Abstract

Carl Jung (1875–1961) was a pivotal figure in modern Western psychology. He understood the malaise of the modern world from its loss of religion, and the resulting mental health crisis it brought in its wake. He countered the dominant scientific reductionism pervasive in his time, and pursued a more holistic form of treatment when this was not popular. He treated his patients as real people rather than merely objects of diagnostic interest, and promoted a more expansive understanding of mental illness. At the same time, Jung remains a controversial figure within and beyond the discipline. His purported alliance with religions, and his efforts to introduce a spiritual dimension into modern psychology, have arguably led to deleterious consequences. By attempting to construct a psychological system that spiritualizes the human soul without any reference to the transpersonal dimension of the psyche, Jung replaced sacred tradition with a secular psychology that offered a new—yet fundamentally misguided—path of salvation for seekers in a post-Christian world.