Aum Shinrikyo and Spiritual Emergency

Abstract

This article investigates the phenomenon of the dark night of the soul and how it has developed into a serious spiritual emergency in Japan. Japanese society is highly interdependent, which prevents people from developing a strong sense of individuality. For Japanese people, social harmony has the highest priority, and they are pressured to sacrifice their individuality to maintain that harmony. In psychodynamic terms, they develop a strong group ego to compensate for their vulnerable individual ego structure. When a Japanese person recognizes that group ego is an unsatisfactory construct, he or she faces an existential isolation of his or her vulnerable ego. Some cannot put up with the fear of the dark night of the soul and look for an alternative group ego on which to depend. They tend to embrace this new group ego as a way to resist fear from deep unconscious realms. If this alternative group ego is not accepted by mainstream society, it may become radicalized and even hostile to society. The Aum Shinrikyo cult, which in 1994 and 1995 killed many people in poison gas attacks, provides an extreme example of an alternative group ego. In this article, the author explains the mechanism of how individuals came to embrace a radical group ego by applying Washburn’s developmental model to this particular cult.