October, 2002

Jung and the New Age

David Tacey

Brunner-Routledge, Philadelphia, 2001, 218 pages

It was while on a pilgrimage to the Boston Jung Institute that I first heard of David Tacey. When the librarian heard that I was Australian, she produced an article by Tacey on the Australian psyche. For me, a long-time expatriate and Jungian, it was manna!

David Tacey is Associate Professor in Arts and Critical Enquiry at La Trobe University and is known to spiritual and religious groups in his native Australia for his writings on culture and spirituality. Internationally, he is known as a Jungian. He teaches at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich and his books are cited on American Jungian web sites.

Tacey describes his main interest as the recovery of meaning in the contemporary world. He is a creative thinker and an observer—“tracking the sacred in secular society.” His most recently published book, Jung and the New Age, is a natural progression in his thought from his previous books, Edge of the Sacred; Remaking Men: Jung, Spirituality and Social Change; and ReEnchantment: the New Australian Spirituality. In these works, he calls upon Australians to awaken from their spiritual torpor, to reconnect body and spirit via soul, to awaken to an identity that incorporates concern for community and respect for the environment and aboriginal culture. Little notice has been taken of these books in the popular press, probably proving Tacey’s observation that non-aboriginal Australians are embarrassed by spirituality and in general defend themselves from the unconscious by clinging to the tangible, just as they cling to the coastal fringes of this continent, leaving its vast internal areas unexplored. Thus aboriginal Australians, who are part of that vast Centre, fall into the collective shadow of non-aboriginal Australians.

In ReEnchantment, Tacey explains what he means by spirituality: it is a desire for connectedness, an entirely natural mode of being in the world if only we would open ourselves to it, a feeling of being connected to a greater or larger whole, relating our lives to the greater mystery in meaningful and transformative ways. He sees spirituality as being increasingly separated from religion and regarded as a reality in its own right.

Tacey’s reflections have inevitably led him to brush up against the phenomenon of the New Age. In Jung and the New Age, we follow him as he wrestles with the state of consciousness of New Age culture and its place in a paradigm of spirituality. The New Age, says Tacey, cannot be ignored because “although its expressions may be crude and untutored, it is able to tell us much about the spirit of the time, about what is being left out of Western consciousness.” In a materialist society, the New Age compensates for the repression of “powerful longings of the human spirit,” as well as for those elements ignored or repressed by established religion—“the sacred feminine …the body, nature, instincts, ecstasy and mysticism.”

However, says Tacey, although the New Age was born in response to these lacks, it is only a parody of the authentic spiritual life. It simply turns it into a commodity, creating spiritual consumerism, offering only fast food that cannot truly nourish.

C. G. Jung has been called the father of the New Age and Tacey points out that much of what the general public knows about Jung has come via simplistic and distorted New Age representations of him. Those, like Richard Noll, who wish to belittle and ridicule Jung, do so by identifying him with what the New Age has made of him. Tacey says that it is time this conspiracy was brought to light and his aim in this book is to redeem Jung.

The book is a richly woven exploration of the place of religion and spirituality in our society in relation to the ideas of Jung. Tacey sees Jung’s psychology as being a psychology of religious experience, and Jung’s spiritual intention as “not to bolster the status of mortal man but to challenge man to acquire a deeper and more abiding humility.” While Jung believed that the human ego must serve and attend a larger religious mystery, the New Age promotes the belief that the spiritual mystery must serve and attend the needs of the ego.

Tacey is not afraid to be controversial, giving no quarter when attacking what he terms the appalling state of archetypal theory (he is highly critical of post-Jungian archetypal psychology), Jungian fundamentalism, and the dangerous return to the masculine myth (Bly, Corneau) when we have hardly begun to open ourselves to the feminine. While exposing the phenomenon of best-selling books that exploit Jung’s insights for the inflationary purposes of advancing power and commercial success, he names a number of well-known Jungian analysts whom he believes have distorted Jung’s subtlety and complexity by attempting to popularize him, including the later works of his own analyst James Hillman.

Although Tacey’s criticism of the New Age is rigorous, he by no means dismisses it. He ends the book with a reflection on the archetype of the child. While the child sees religious products as objects for its own pleasure, to be sucked and spat out, the child also has importance for its prophetic role—what it will become. The New Age is prophetic, Tacey offers, of an authentic new age, which is a guiding myth and symbol of hope for human transcendence. It is the religious impulse learning again how to walk.

Jung societies everywhere make an important and serious contribution to the cultural life of their communities.

Tacey’s message is of tremendous interest in suggesting how we, as members of our respective Jung societies, could carry out our mission of making Jung’s ideas known and understood by the general public, presenting his work authentically, without treating it as a spiritual or psychological commodity, disentangling it from the “false Jungian.” Tacey casts his light to show us the quicksands and the snares. It is up to us to find the path through them.

—Anne Di Lauro