The Whole-Making Instinct
Carl Jung (1875–1961), the famous Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, was
highly critical of his Christian heritage because he did not find much
transformation—what he called “whole making”—in the Christians he knew.
Instead, he saw a religious tradition that had become externally focused,
moralistic, and ineffective in actually changing people or cultures. His own
father and five uncles were Swiss Reformed ministers, and Jung found them to
be unhappy and unhealthy men. I am not sure what his exact evidence for this
perception was, but clearly it was disillusioning to Jung. He did not want to end
up like the religious men in his life.
Yet Jung was neither an atheist nor anti-Christian. He insisted that each of us
has an inner “God Archetype,” or what he termed the “whole-making instinct.”
The God Archetype is the part of you that drives you toward greater inclusivity
by deep acceptance of the Real, the balancing of opposites, simple compassion
toward the self, and the ability to recognize and forgive your own shadow side.
For Jung, wholeness was not to be confused with any kind of supposed moral
perfection, because such moralism is too tied up with ego and denial of the
inner weakness that all of us must accept. I deeply agree with him.
In his critique of his father and uncles, Jung recognized that many humans
had become reflections of the punitive God they worshiped. A forgiving God
allows us to recognize the good in the supposed bad, and the bad in the
supposed perfect or ideal. Any view of God as tyrannical or punitive tragically
keeps us from admitting these seeming contradictions. It keeps us in denial
about our true selves, and forces us to live on the surface of our own lives. If
God is a shaming figure, then most of us naturally learn to deny, deflect, or pass
on that shame to others. If God is torturer in chief, then a punitive and
moralistic society is validated all the way down. We are back into problem-
solving religion instead of healing and transformation.
Wholeness for Jung was about harmony and balancing, a holding operation
more than an expelling operation. But he recognized that such consciousness
was costly, because humans prefer to deal with the tensions of life by various
forms of denial, moralizing, addiction, or projection. By the 1930s, Jung said
there was so much repressed, denied, and projected shadow material in Europe,