ABSTRACT
Jung’s approach to religious experience has been creative and controversial, caught as it is in the task of being both phenomenologically respectful and psychologically insightful. Lionel Corbett’s paper is steeped in the classical epistemology of the Jungian tradition: he refuses to collapse that tension between the hermeneutics of Jungian theory and the attempt to speak about religious experience without violating its integrity. Purists in phenomenology will spot the epistemological tensions that remain in this example of classical Jungian thought, but the paper exemplifies the considerable degree to which Jung and Corbett are committed to the descriptive heart of phenomenology while not retreating from the “creative violence” of a psychological hermeneutics. Perhaps, if a Jungian interpretation of religious experience is violent-as is any creative reading of a text-it is a violence without which a phenomenology of religious experience remains psychologically naive, where concreteness and literalism remain insufficiently differentiated.
