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 [2]

What is it that makes the intellectual world believe without scrutinising ideas such as Freud’s? Is it a force which acts as a sort of “prestidigitation” on the brains even of great men like Jung? There would be several objections to Freud’s idea about the child’s wish to re-enter the mother’s womb, yet Jung accepts it as a premise and builds upon it his theories of religion and God and gods. According to Jung [as presented by Thorburn, p. 59] : “The idea of God ... or of the gods, is such a bondage in so far as it is supposed that God exists or that there are gods.” It would, thus, be very ignominious to believe that God or the gods exist — much more ignominious than believing a hypothesis (and an absurdity) which has no historical or biological basis — whereas the fact of God existing can be found in all the literature of the past and the present! It seems it is less the correctness of an idea than the novelty and extravagance that appeals to the modern mind.

At present in the European world it is novelty and extravagance in ideas that are run after.

I don’t know anything first-hand about Jung but the two extracts from him you have given do not encourage me to make {{0}}acquaintance.[[The correspondent did not make it clear that the extracts he quoted were from Thorburn’s book and not from the works of Jung and Freud. — Ed.]] Why on earth should the idea of God or gods be a bondage? I suppose it is the Semitic idea (common in Europe) of God as a terrible gentleman upstairs, emperor, law-maker, judge and policeman who sends you to Hell at his pleasure. To the Indian mind the gods are friends and helpers.

2 June 1936