Jung's contribution to psychology of religion

Another giant figure in Psychology of Religion is C.G. Jung(1875-1961). Though originally a disciple of Freud he took a very different stance from his master's extreme individualism. He was more sympathetic to religion and had true appreciatioin for religious symbolism. One of his most important contribution to the field was The Terry Lectures, Psychology of Religion presented at Yale in 1938.

Jung defined religion as an 'expression of the tendency to regression, to the attitude of infantile dependence on the parent, which is characteristic of a unsarisfactory development of the individual's love-life'

Jung evolved a correlation between the symbolic structure and dreams. In his postulate he identified the exisence of two layers of the unconscious: individual and collective.

The beauty of Jung's system is that it allowed the scholar to treat mythology as something living. His appproach had a positive attitude to religious symbolism. He opened up an alliance between Psychology of Religion and Comparative religion which proved to be benificial to both the disciplines.