Jung on Death and Immortality

By C.G. Jung and Jenny Yates

"As a doctor, I make every effort to strengthen the belief in immortality, especially with older patients when such questions come threateningly close. For, seen in correct psychological perspective, death is not an end but a goal, and life's inclination towards death begins as soon as the meridian is past."--C.G. Jung, commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower
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Here collected for the first time are Jung's views on death and immortality, his writings often coinciding with the death of the most significant people in his life. The book shows many of the major themes running throughout the writings, including the relativity of space and time surrounding death, the link between transference and death, and the archetypes shared among the world's religions at the depths of the Self. The book includes selections from "On Resurrection," "The Soul and Death," "Concerning Rebirth," "Psychological Commentary on The Tibetan Book of the Dead" from the Collected Works, "Letter to Pastor Pfafflin" from Letters, and "On Life after Death."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Jul 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9780691215990

C.G. Jung

C.G. Jung was one of the great figures of the 20th century. He radically changed not just the study of psychology (setting up the Jungian school of thought) but the very way in which insanity is treated and perceived in our society.

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INTRODUCTION

Death is psychologically as important as birth and, like it, is

an integral part of life. ... As a doctor, I make every effort to

strengthen the belief in immortality, especially with older patients

when such questions come threateningly close. For, seen in correct

psychological perspective, death is not an end but a goal.

C. G. Jung, cw 13, par. 68

This epigraph from Carl Gustav Jung’s "Commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life" (1929), speaks of the birth of the Self as a diamond body, the incorruptible body sought by alchemists as the philosopher’s stone—a symbol of immortality in the face of death. The selections in this volume contain several key themes: the correlation between Jung’s writings and the death of significant people in his life; the relativity of space and time in death and the afterlife; synchronicity surrounding death; archetypal parallels between the psychology of transference and death; and the journey of the soul after death. The selections begin with The Soul and Death, as Jung’s earliest thoughts begin with the influence of the dead on the living and the role of dreams about death.

DREAMS AND LIFE AFTER DEATH

Jung’s father died in 1896. Six weeks after his death, he appeared to Jung in a dream in which he announced that he would be coming home after a holiday. Jung pondered over the seeming reality of the dream, and thus began his reflections on life after death. Later, Jung sat in on a medium’s seances as part of his continuing interest in how the dead communicate with the living, which also became the subject of his medical school dissertation On the Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena.

In the context of World War I, Jung wrote Seven Sermons to the Dead (1916), noting the correspondence between the world of the dead, the land of the ancestors, and the collective unconscious. In his writings Jung explains how the soul/spirit descends into the unconscious or land of the dead and activates the contents, like a medium, giving those who are dead a chance to manifest. The seven sermons were spoken through the voice of Philemon, a wise old man archetype whom Jung called the two-million-year-old man within. Philemon merged with Jung’s dream of Elijah, the Old Testament prophet who raised a woman’s son from the dead and who, without dying, ascended into heaven in a chariot.

In 1922 Jung’s father again appeared to him in a dream, this time to ask about marital psychology; this was several months before Jung’s mother’s death in January 1923. This dream sparked a creative response; Jung wrote Marriage as a Psychological Relationship, which was first published in 1925. In this analysis, Jung revealed how the unlived lives of an individual’s parents are carried in the unconscious and later activate the choice of a marriage partner.

DEATH AND THE RELATIVITY OF SPACE-TIME

There is a correlation between the death of significant people in Jung’s life and his essays on death. For example, one year before his sister died, Jung wrote The Soul and Death (1934). In a letter dated July 11, 1944, following his own near-death experience, Jung recalled his sister’s expression of sublimity a few days before she died. He interpreted this to signify that the meaning of life never becomes more urgent than at the moment of death. In The Soul and Death Jung further reflected on death, both as the end of an energy process whose goal is rest and as the fulfillment of life. One’s wholeness is not always attained at the time of death, and thus one has dreams about continuing one’s work after death, or about changes of locality, going on journeys, or rebirth.

Also in The Soul and Death Jung began to articulate a theme that runs throughout his writings on death and immortality—the relativity of the space-time link to the psyche. In a letter dated February 25, 1953, Jung wrote, [I]t was Einstein who first started me off thinking about a possible relativity of time as well as space, and the psychic conditionality (Letters, Vol. 2, 108). Einstein and Jung had dinner together on several occasions in the early days of Einstein’s work on relativity. Einstein’s physics and Kant’s philosophy of space and time as categories of the mind were seminal influences on Jung’s thinking. In The Soul and Death he wrote: We are not entitled to conclude from the apparent space-time quality of our perception that there is no form of existence without space and time. . . . The psyche, in its deepest reaches, participates in a form of existence beyond space and time, and thus partakes of what is inadequately and symbolically described as ‘eternity’ (CW 8, pars. 814–15).

In 1935, the year Jung’s sister died, Jung wrote the "Psychological Commentary on The Tibetan Book of the Dead," a text that gives instructions for the dying and the dead, and the after-death experience. In 1953, the year a close colleague and companion Toni Wolff died, Jung revised the essay for its fifth edition. (This is the same year that Einstein greatly influenced Jung’s views on the relativity of space and time in relation to death.) The Tibetan Book of the Dead gives instructions for ridding oneself of karmic illusions; Jung saw this as parallel to withdrawing one’s projections. The teachings in this book serve as a guide to clear light or enlightenment during a forty-nine-day period between death and rebirth.

One can also make use of the instructions as a guide for a journey into the depths of the unconscious. The ultimate goal of the instructions is to recognize one’s Buddha nature, the nature of the Self beyond one’s karma or complexes. If one does not recognize the clear light of one’s own nature, the karma is recycled on the wheel of time, and one goes around again with the illusory projections. The seeing of the clear light at the time of death followed by a review of one’s karma is remarkably parallel to the phenomena related by people who have had near-death experiences. The third stage, if one does not recognize the light or recognize one’s own karma, is reincarnation.

Concerning Rebirth appropriately followed in 1939, first given as a lecture at Eranos (the same year World War II began). In part one, Jung spoke of the link between karma and transmigration of souls, reincarnation, resurrection, rebirth and transformation through rituals such as the Mass and the Eleusinian Mysteries. He explained ritual repetition as a way in which a moment of eternity enters time for the sake of transformation. In part two, in a discussion of the psychology of transformation, Jung noted the parallel between loss of soul and death; the return of the soul or reversal is the realization of the greater or immortal Self, the friend of one’s soul, such as Buddha or Christ.

A different type of psychological process of transformation is what was once called possession—the taking over of the ego by a dead ancestor, interpreted by Jung as a complex taking over the ego. Analysis, which is a form of psychological death and rebirth, involves making the complexes conscious in order to free the immortal Self.

The intuition of immortality which makes itself felt during the transformation is connected with the peculiar nature of the unconscious. It is, in a sense, non-spatial and non-temporal. . . . The feeling of immortality, it seems to me, has its origin in a peculiar feeling of extension in space and time. (CW 9i, par. 249)

This extension of the psyche in space and time was Jung’s hypothesis to account for telepathic, extrasensory, and synchronistic experiences surrounding death. In a letter dated January 10, 1939, Jung responded to Pastor Fritz Pfäfflin’s inquiries about a conversation the pastor had had with his brother at the time of his brother’s death, although they were separated by a continent. Jung wrote: It is very probable that only what we call consciousness is contained in space and time, and that the rest of the psyche, the unconscious, exists in a state of relative spacelessness and timelessness. For the psyche this means a relative eternality and a relative non-separation from other psyches, or a oneness with them (Letters, Vol. 1, 257). The timeless and spaceless relativity allows the continual presence of the dead and their influence on our dream life (Letters, Vol. 1, 257). After a few months this ceases; the danger of lingering too long can lead to dissociation. There are experiences which show that the dead entangle themselves, so to speak, in the psychology (sympathetic nervous system) of the living. This would probably result in states of possession {Letters, Vol. 1, 258).

NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE

In January 1944, Jung himself had a near-death experience following a heart attack. On July 11, 1944, he wrote: What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imagination and our feelings do not suffice to form even an approximate conception of it. . . . The dissolution of our time-bound form in eternity brings no loss of meaning {Letters, Vol. 1, 343). In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung described his out-of-body experience and his vision of the globe with its alchemical silver earth and reddish-gold hue. Jung’s near-death experience is in accord with phenomena recently discussed by doctors who have resuscitated patients after they have died (Bailey and Yates, 1996).

On February 1, 1945, Jung wrote to Dr. Kristine Mann about his near-death experience and how it gave him a glimpse behind the veil. Behind this veil, he wrote, there is a sense of peace and fulfillment such that one does not wish to return. He advised her: Whatever you do, if you do it sincerely, will eventually become the bridge to your wholeness, a good ship that carries you through the darkness of your second birth, which seems to be death to the outside (Letters, Vol. 1, 358–59).

TRANSFERENCE AND DEATH

In the autumn of 1945, Jung wrote the forward to The Psychology of the Transference, first published in 1946. He amplified the transference process in analysis with parallel alchemical symbols. In Alchemical Active Imagination (1997), Dr. Marie Louise von Franz revealed that alchemy was originally linked to preparing the corpse for life after death. The old alchemists, many of whom were physicians, were concerned with death and immortality.

In The Psychology of the Transference, Jung used only part one of the alchemical Rosarium pictures; in this part the image leaving the union is masculine. Jung spoke of the birth of the male divine child from the union of the conscious and unconscious. Significandy, he did point out that part two of the alchemical Rosarium text contains the female patterns of individuation. In the mysteries of Eleusis, the divine child was female as was Psyche and Eros’ child born after a descent to the land of the dead. When the anima soul in a man or the animus spirit in a woman is withdrawn from projections and reunites with the body, a bridge is formed for access between the conscious and unconscious, leading to the Self.

The selections included in this text begin with the union of the King and Queen in the tomb. If the inner union of the masculine and feminine parts of one’s Self is projected, one may confuse it with a love affair between mortals. The deeper path of individuation is the king/ animus/spirit in a woman’s unconscious united with the female ego in search for the wholeness of the female Self. For the man the union is between the queen/anima/soul and the male ego in search of the male Self. One danger in projection is loss of spirit or soul, the psychic death equivalent. A woman has to take care not to identify with the man’s anima to compensate for the lack of female Self symbols. Another danger is that, when integrated, the contents of the unconscious may so enlarge the ego that one runs the risk of an inflation.

In a letter dated July 25, 1946, to Margaret Shevill regarding her husband’s death, Jung referred to the problem of transference and its importance for the problem of death (Letters, Vol. 1). He added that he was about to publish The Psychology of the Transference. Jung addresses the idea of the link between transference and death again in a letter to Mary Mellon dated September 8, 1941. Mary had written to Jung about a dream she had had about him. Jung responded:

You probably have a very living image of myself and it might keep you too much away from yourself, no matter what I am. . . . There’s a living connection through the non-space, i.e., an unconscious identity. Such a thing is dangerous. . . . You know, we have to realize that no matter how much we should like to be able to talk to each other, we shall be separated for a long time, perhaps forever, if such a human concept can be applied to whatever happens after death. You know time and space are only relative realities, which under certain conditions do not exist at all. (Letters, Vol. 1, 303–05)

On November 27, 1955, Jung’s wife Emma died. In a letter to Erich Neumann, dated December 15, 1955, Jung wrote of the deep link between husband and wife at death and of the illumination he himself experienced (Letters, Vol. 2). Also in 1955, he published the Mysterium Coniunctionis, in which he spoke of the inner marriage that forms a window to eternity.

ON RESURRECTION VS. IMMORTALITY

Jung continued his discussion of the psyche’s transcendence of space and time as a clue to understanding resurrection in an article entitled On Resurrection, dated February 19, 1954. He placed resurrection in the archetypal context of the dying and rising gods, such as Osiris or Christ, seeing it as making possible a participation with one’s god in eternity, a symbol of the wholeness of the Self. Jung wrote the essay in response to a question about what he thought of Jesus’ resurrection. He focused on the way in which Jesus makes visible the image of God within all of us, the eternal Self in our psyches (CW 18, par. 1570). Jung’s thinking is closer to Platonic concepts of the immortality of the soul than it is to the resurrection of the body.

SYNCHRONICITY AND DEATH

In a letter to Frau N., dated May 30, 1960, a year before his own death, Jung wrote that the psyche exists in a continuum outside space and time. He wrote, we cannot exclude the possibility that there is an existence outside time which runs parallel with existence inside time (Letters, Vol. 2). The foundation of this phenomena is synchronicity. He recollected his early 1934–35 essay on The Soul and Death.

In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung wrote about a dream he had in which his wife was continuing her work on the grail after her death (309). In On Life after Death, recorded in 1958–59, Jung suggested that dreams are a clue to understanding life after death.

Jung’s last reported dream, a few days before his death, was of the philosopher’s stone, the symbol of immortality:

He saw a great round stone in a high place, a barren square, and on it were engraved the words: and this shall be a sign unto you of wholeness and oneness. Then he saw many vessels in the night in an open square and a quadrangle of trees whose roots reached around the earth and enveloped him and among the roots golden threads were glittering, (von Franz, 287)

Jung died on June 6, 1961.

Jenny Yates

Ithaca, New York

July 26, 1998

REFERENCES

Bailey, Lee and Yates, Jenny. (1996). The Near-Death Experience: A Reader. New York and London: Routledge.

Jung, Carl. (1973). Letters: 1906–1950, Vol. 1. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Jung, Carl. (1975). Letters: 1951–1961, Vol. 2. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Jung, Carl. (1961). Memories, Dreams, Reflections (with Aniela Jaffé). New York: Random House.

Jung, Carl. (1976). The Symbolic Life. Collected Works, Vol. 18, trans. R.F.C. Hull. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

von Franz, Marie-Louise. (1975). Jung: His Myth in Our Time, trans. William Kennedy. New York: Putnam’s Sons, for the C. G. Jung Foundation.

SUGGESTED READING

Eliade, Mircea. ( 1994). Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth, trans. Willard R. Trask. Dallas, TX: Spring Publications.

Kubler-Ross, Elisabeth. (1997). On Death and Dying. New York: Collier Books.

Sambhava, Padma. ( 1994). The Tibetan Book of the Dead, trans. Robert A. Thurman. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell.

von Franz, Marie-Louise. (1979). Time, Rhythm and Repose. New York: W. W. Norton.

THE SOUL AND DEATH

From CW 8, pars. 796–815

796 I have often been asked what I believe about death, that unproblematical ending of individual existence. Death is known to us simply as the end. It is the period, often placed before the close of the sentence and followed only by memories or after-effects in others. For the person concerned, however, the sand has run out of the glass; the rolling stone has come to rest. When death confronts us, life always seems like a downward flow or like a clock that has been wound up and whose eventual running down is taken for granted. We are never more convinced of this running down than when a human life comes to its end before our eyes, and the question of the meaning and worth of life never becomes more urgent or more agonizing than when we see the final breath leave a body which a moment before was living. How different does the meaning of life seem to us when we see a young person striving for distant goals and shaping the future, and compare this with an incurable invalid, or with an old man who is sinking reluctantly and impotently into the grave! Youth—we should like to think—has purpose, future, meaning, and value, whereas the coming to an end is only a meaningless cessation. If a young man is afraid of the world, of life and the future, then everyone finds it regrettable, senseless, neurotic; he is considered a cowardly shirker. But when an ageing person secretly shudders and is even mortally afraid at the thought that his reasonable expectation of life now amounts to only so and so many years, then we are painfully reminded of certain feelings within our own breast; we look away and turn the conversation to some other topic. The optimism with which we judge the young man fails us here. Naturally we have a stock of suitable banalities about life which we occasionally hand out to the other fellow, such as everyone must die sometime, you can’t live forever, etc. But when one is alone and it is night and so dark and still that one hears nothing and sees nothing but the thoughts which add and subtract the years, and the long row of those disagreeable facts which remorselessly indicate how far the hand of the clock has moved forward, and the slow, irresistible approach of the wall of darkness which will eventually engulf everything I love, possess, wish for, hope for, and strive for, then all our profundities about life slink off to some undiscoverable hiding-place, and fear envelops the sleepless one like a smothering blanket.

797 Many young people have at bottom a panic fear of life (though at the same time they intensely desire it), and an even greater number of the ageing have the same fear of death. Indeed, I have known those people who most feared life when they were young to suffer later just as much from the fear of death. When they are young one says they have infantile resistances against the normal demands of life; one should really say the same thing when they are old, for they are likewise afraid of one of life’s normal demands. We are so convinced that death is simply the end of a process that it does not ordinarily occur to us to conceive of death as a goal and a fulfilment, as we do without hesitation the aims and purposes of youthful life in its ascendance.

798 Life is an energy-process. Like every energy-process, it is in principle irreversible and is therefore directed towards a goal. That goal is a state of rest. In the long run everything that happens is, as it were, no more than the initial disturbance of a perpetual state of rest which forever attempts to re-establish itself. Life is teleology par excellence; it is the intrinsic striving towards a goal, and the living organism is a system of directed aims which seek to fulfil themselves. The end of every process is its goal. All energy-flow is like a runner who strives with the greatest effort and the utmost expenditure of strength to reach his goal. Youthful longing for the world and for life, for the attainment of high hopes and distant goals, is life’s obvious teleological urge which at once changes into fear of life, neurotic resistances, depressions, and phobias if at some point it remains caught in the past, or shrinks from risks without which the unseen goal cannot be attained. With the attainment of maturity and at the zenith of biological existence, life’s drive towards a goal in no wise halts. With the same intensity and irresistibility with which it strove upward before middle age, life now descends; for the goal no longer lies on the summit,