The first task of Jungian psychology is to identify and integrate projections. As the unconscious is always projected on the environment and onto others, people live in a state a participation mystique, a state where they always bath in themselves and do not see the world as it is.
When individuals see Jung as a god-like figure, the have missed their first obligation of the individuation process. Many Jungians have done that: Aniela Jaffe, Edward Edinger, James Hillman, Murray Stein, etc. Under their influence, Analytical psychology became a cult and a sect where any critic is forbidden and those who dare to do so are banned. I have experienced that a few times.
C. G. Jung was a man and not a god. Some of his ideas are extremely interesting, others are beginning of the XXth century views that have not aged well and, finally, a few are plainly false. I will give you an example.
Jung cheated his wife with multiple mistresses for more that 40 years. To justify that, he wrote that children are deeply affected by the unlived life of their parents. So, he was cheating his wife to save his children from his unlived life. Jungians generally think.: Wow! Jung was such a profound psychologist that he found that if a parent does not live his life according to his inclinations, his children will be strongly affected during their life.
Is it true? Let's put that to the test with equally morally questionable examples.
- If a married woman receives men in her bedroom when children are playing outside and her husband is at work, is she really protecting her children from her unlived life?
- If a man drinks alcohol and become drunk every night and weekend, is he protecting his children from his unlived life?
- If a woman steals meat when buying grocery with her children not out of necessity but from pure greed, is she protecting her children from her unlived life?
- If a man likes to molest and beat his son because he does not like him, is he protecting him from his unlived life?
I will let you answer these questions.
This does not mean that Jung's whole theory is bad or incorrect. It means that when you integrate your projections, you see the man as he was, a normal human being with numerous flaws, not a god.
The authors cited above have done an important damage to Analytical psychology because of their incapacity to apply the basic rule of questioning their projections on Jung. As I say to my students, individuation is for the sicks, not the analysts. Their readers then see Jung's psychology as a cult where everything that Jung has said, wrote or done is a revelation from a god. This is the central problem of Analytical psychology today, it's cancer. This state is rarely if not never seen in a normal scientific field.
Let's hope, one day, a Jungian influencer will develop a "Scientific Analytical Psychology" devoid of its cancer.
********************
To learn more, please refer to my book
The KEY to Understand C. G. Jung,
available HERE on AMAZON.