Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Philosophers, Intellectuals, Novelists and Musicians

Carl Gustav Jung [1]

Jung [according to Thorburn, pp. 58 – 59] accepts Freud’s view, and considers religion as something to be escaped from. “The primal desire for re-entrance to the womb, never expressing itself nakedly, but veiling itself as Freud had supposed under all kinds of symbolism, gives us in this very symbolism what history has called religion.” This is what I should call “mental aberration and encephalitis” as a result of biological psychology.

It is part of the general “aberration” that has beset the modern world owing to the descent of the vital world into the physical — cubist and surrealist painting, modernist poetry, Nazi politics, psycho-analysis — the more extravagant the thing, the greater its reputation and success.

1 June 1936