Jung and is he acceptable?

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For a little while, for both personal interest and research for fiction I might write; I’ve been reading Jung’s Man and his Symbols. I’m wondering: Is it acceptable for a Catholic to practice Jungian psychology?
 
Jung was a very creative thinker and says some interesting things and like any other person it needs to be taken with a grain of salt and weighed and measured.
 
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The Church document “Jesus Christ The Bearer of the Water of Life- A Christian reflection on the “New Age”” explains how Jungian psychology is completely irreconcilable with Catholic teaching:

http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/p...s/rc_pc_interelg_doc_20030203_new-age_en.html

See also an article from EWTN, “Jung Replaces Jesus In Catholic Spirituality":


From Catholic Culture, “Jungian Psychology as Catholic Theology”:

 
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It has been a long time but as I recall, he makes some pains to avoid claiming anything about God. Doesn’t he? He tries to stay firmly in psychology.
 
He does try, @Shakuhachi.

The problem is that he tried hard to be an empirical scientist; but he seems to have also been a mystic.
 
Yes, I thought he had some good stuff on self awareness, animus/anima and all that. Collective unconscious, etc.
 
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J.Cornelius said:
his god is not the Christian God — for one thing, he is a being in whom both good and evil meet.
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The criticisms of Jung are strawman arguments from what I have read. Take this example. God is the creator of all things visible and invisible. Jung’s “good and evil meet in God” can be read as a restatement of that creed. There is no evil that exists except it has its existence from God. Shadows only exist where there is a substantial presence of something real.

Jung has plenty of flaky ideas that need to sorted out from his brilliance, but it certainly is possible for a Catholic to be a Jungian psychologist.
 
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Dovekin said:
Jung has plenty of flaky ideas that need to sorted out from his brilliance, but it certainly is possible for a Catholic to be a Jungian psychologist.
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A good psychologist is just a psychologist. They don’t need to copy/paste all of somebody else’s ideas. They should be reading a lot of stuff from a lot of people.
 
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I think, with regards to Jung, we must take a “Spoils of Egypt” approach. During the Exodus, the Israelites brought with them gold, silver and precious gems on their journey out of Egypt. They used these spoils, despite having been already consecrated by the Egyptians for their pagan gods, to gild the ark and create the instruments of the meeting tent and the priest’s breastplate. They took valuable things from other religions and culture and turned them toward the worship of the one true God.

So too, does this concept come into the modern life of the Church. Yes, to accept Jung’s psychological theories wholesale and without question goes against the Church’s teachings. That does not mean, however, that there aren’t gold and gems hidden within Jung’s psychology which can be extracted and turned to the greater glory of God.

It all hinges on a constant discernment. Does this exalt God or demean Him? Does it uplift man to his Creator or demean man’s dignity? When it comes to psychology, we must always have the attitude of a prospector. We must sift out all the obscuring sand, murky water and dangerous jagged rocks before we come to the nuggets of gold lying in the bottom of our pan.

Just like the prospector, if we totally reject Jung we throw out any gold that it contains. If we totally accept Jung, then we are overwhelmed by the worthless sediment in which the gold lies.

It is always in the middle ground that we find the true worth of something.
 
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