ABSTRACT
A religion can contain and express a person’s spirituality. It might limit it, but also it might make it safe. In 1940, C. G. Jung wrote that by believing in a religious creed, authority, and sacred writings, “people are effectively protected against immediate religious experience”, and, in 1946, he considered the world’s religions as “great psychotherapeutic systems”. Brian, who took the name Buddhananda when he became a Buddhist at thirty-one, had spent a distracted, wandering youth. Jung often used the terms “spiritual” and “psychic” interchangeably, and thought the religions of the world were symbolic representations of a psychological process. Jung was primarily interested in the Christian story, and most subsequent analytical psychologists have come from a Judaic or Christian background. There is also a recent surge in publications by people trained in both Freudian and Jungian traditions examining the connections between depth psychology and Buddhism. Many of these papers explore the symbolic meaning of Buddhist stories and practices.
