ABSTRACT
The Buber±Jung dialogue exposed the incompatibility of Buber's disjointed or supernatural transcendentalism with Jung's understanding of psychic containment. From Jung's viewpoint the interchange with Buber was never impolite. Yet the exchange did expose Buber's understanding of the I±Thou relationship to be simply a variant, expressed in poetic terms, of a very traditional monotheistic transcendentalism threatened by Jung's appropriation of the foundational gnostic insight that the experiential basis of the relation to the divine and to the depths of the human were, in fact the same relationship. Jung's exposure of Buber's inspired transcendentalism was the basis of Jung's linking Buber's thought with similar conceptions of the transcendent in mainstream Protestant circles as two forms of religious patriarchy. Though always mutually respectful, the exchange was throughout somewhat con¯ictual.
