Could C.G. Jung and Karl Stern ‘go a stretch together … with mutual profit’?

Abstract

This article offers a commentary on a recently discovered letter from Jung to Karl Stern. Jung's hopes for a fruitful dialogue with Stern are based more in Jung's own long-term desire for dialogue with theology than in Stern's use of Jung in his own version of a Freudian approach to psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, there is common ground in a shared sense that this is an ‘imperilled age’. The possibilities for dialogue are set within a heuristic frame that reads Stern's Christian personalism as a contextualising theology and Jung's dialectical psychology as a reinterpretative project in relation to theology. This facilitates a discussion of the issues of metaphysics and psychology, teleology, and analogy. Whatever mutual benefit they might have derived from these areas of dialogue, their journey together might well have foundered once Jung's own theological commitments had become clear.