Is God good?  This is the fundamental question that Carl Jung wrestles with in Answer to Job, a book he said is his only one that he would not want to revise at all. 

Jung’s psychoanalysis of the Old Testament Book of Job looks at questions such as the possible motivation of God to allow Satan to torment Job, even though Job was a good and pious man.  Jung maintains that his analytic framework here is not Christian theology but scientific psychology, seeking to see phenomena as they are rather than make any supernatural assumptions.  This method leads him to confront the psychological desire of human societies to construct their theories of God in their own image, as in the example of the comforting traditional belief that God is good.

This talk will open a discussion of how Jung handles these moral themes in Answer to Job, and how he extends this contested moral framework into a broader discussion of Christian cosmology.  Answer to Job is Jung’s sequel to Aion, which I discussed for Canberra Jung Society in 2017  (Available here).

Robert Tulip has Bachelors and Masters Honours Degrees in philosophy from Macquarie University.  After thirty years working for the federal government, he is now returning to focus on these intellectual interests, especially the philosophical problems of psychology and religion. 

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Friday 3rd August 2018

Dr Richard Barz:

"The Anima, the Animus and the Yoginis"

Of all of the concepts that Carl Jung has bequeathed to the world, none is more intimately accessible than the anima/animus.

On the subject of the anima, the feminine side of a man’s psyche, Jung wrote in his 1954 article “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious” that “Although she may be the chaotic urge to life, something strangely meaningful clings to her, a secret knowledge or hidden wisdom, which contrasts most curiously with her irrational elfin nature… This aspect appears only to the person who gets to grips with her seriously. Only then, when this hard task has been faced, does he come to realize more and more that behind all her cruel sporting with human fate there lies something like a hidden purpose which seems to reflect a superior knowledge of life’s laws. It is just the most unexpected, the most terrifyingly chaotic things which reveal a deeper meaning.”

As for the animus, the masculine side of a woman’s psyche, Jung describes him in “The Psychology of the Child Archetype” (1949/50) as the masculine personification of the unconscious which is confronted by a feminine consciousness. Since the anima and animus are universal archetypes, it is not surprising that both of them should be embodied in statues of ancient Hindu feminine spirits called yoginis.

In his talk Richard Barz will introduce some of these images, which he photographed on a recent trip to India, and the secrets of the anima/animus that they hold. One of these images is this portrayal of Śrī Vībhatsā ‘the cruel yogini’ seated on a prone male figure.

 
Bheṛāghāṭ, Jabalpur District, Madhya Pradesh, photo R. Barz

Dr. Richard Barz is a retired member of the Australian National University College of Asia and the Pacific.