Jung - Plato Case

When discussing about Jung's work, it is very hard to find the intersection of his psychological thought and religion, which gets obvious when we notice, that religiosity is in fact essential 'ingredient' of his points of views. He thus sees religion as one of the first and most common manifestations of human's soul and it is natural, that any kind of psychology will not be able to ignore or skip the fact, that religion is not only a sociological and historical phenomena, but has in many people's lives a very personal meaning. In the following paper I will try to describe his visions regarding psychology and religion (in, as he called empirical and fenomenological way) through terms of archetypes and 'numinosum', which will in the continuation lead me to the comparison of his and Plato's views of unconscious/pre-given knowledge. The reason that lead me to this kind of discussion simply lays in my existing knowledge of some segments of Plato's thoughts, which were rising over and over again during my reading of Jung's theories about archetypes, so I decided to draw clear parallels between these two authors which will somehow lead to an interesting conclusion.

As mentioned above, Jung's standpoint is exclusively phenomenological: it is concerned with occurrences, events, experiences ... in short - with facts. When psychology discusses about e.g. the motive of the virgin birth, it is not interested in the (in)correctness of the mentioned idea, but is concerned only with a fact that such an idea exists; and when some idea exists, it automatically becomes psychologically real. In the case of religion - it is obvious that this kind of idea is broadly objective, as it appears in the collective, in group and is by this group strongly accepted. Religion is a clear proof for the statement, that some ideas appear almost everywhere and in every time and that they can also be spontaneously self-created, not matter the migration or tradition. And this is exactly what the empirical psychology is talking about.

Under the term 'religion', Jung understands a "dynamic and scrupulous observation of /.../ 'numinosum', that is a dynamic existence or effect not caused by an arbitrary act of will, /but in contrary/ it seizes and controls the human subject, which is always rather victim than its creator," even though it is always created by the human. 'Numinosum' is thus (whatever it's cause really is) an involuntary condition of a subject: "The numinosum is either a quality of a visible object or the influence of an invisible presence causing a peculiar alteration of consciousness." Religion is thus (in Jung's perspective) a special statement of consciousness, that has 'changed' through an experience of numinosum: All religious beliefs are codified and dogmatized forms of primary religious experiences, while the contents of those experiences are promulgated as 'sacred' and are normally hidden in complicated 'mind' structures, whereas manifestation and repetition of the original experience have become a ritual an unchangeable institution.

Mentioned manifestation and repetition lead us to Jung's theory of archetypes, which will be in the continuation described with a help of a terms of psyche: "/it is/ exceedingly hard to believe that the psyche is nothing,