ABSTRACT
Freud’s end, however, was the beginning of Jung’s therapy. Jung believed “religion could only be replaced by religion,” and took an explicitly priestly role towards his patients. Their divergence on this question is striking and illuminates how we more broadly understand the religious impulse today. Jung saw himself as a direct spiritual ancestor of Nietzsche. Jung’s problem, just as it was Nietzsche’s, became the inadequacy and consequent decline of Christian belief. Experimenting in the realm of eternal myth, his psychoanalytic project moves towards theological categories. Jung wanted to give new life to old myths, to bring some of the intensity of that lost religious vision to life. But myth and metaphysics cannot be reinstated by the will of one individual. In his desire to reinstate the consolations of religious symbolism, Jung brings home decorative antiques from all cultures across the globe.
