Betrayal is a hard topic to look at and hold onto for any length of time. It engenders some of our most intense emotions. In this week’s blog, Murray Stein dives into the Christian Scripture and how it deals with betrayal in the Book of Job and the Gospel story. The following is an excerpt from Dr. Stein’s recent lecture at Jungian Odyssey 2010 in Switzerland:
We should not be so surprised by the behavior of the current bankers and money people. In the Christian scripture, the most infamous example of betrayal is Judas, the disciple who handled the finances for the devoted group of disciples around Jesus. In his act of betrayal, when he “delivered up” (in Latin this is expressed by the word tradere, from which descends the English word “betray”) the Lord to the Romans, he displayed for posterity the archetypal image of the flawed Moneyman. Wisdom counsels caution when sitting with people who deal with money.
It can be a short step from trust to cynicism when one considers the betrayal behavior of human beings in possession of power through the ages. Power corrupts integrity, as does money, and so does desire in all its forms and manifestations. Desire reaches for gratification, and all too often it abuses the trust placed in position and authority. The current fierce controversy burning through the Catholic Church regarding the trust misplaced in predatory priests, who have abused their sacrosanct positions for sexual pleasures at the expense of children, has led more than a few people to question clerical sincerity at all levels and in all places. Many are leaving the church as a result, and with feelings that can lead to cynicism, sneering angrily at all allusions to any possible goodness in human motives. Especially the abused who have now risen up and are calling for transparency are filled with rage. Will the traumas inflicted upon them as children and youths drive them ineluctably into sheer cynicism?
We must recognize that the benefits of the idealizing transference are hard to resist by its beneficiaries, whether they be priests, analysts, weather newscasters, a Miss or Mister Swiss (or America), golf champions, or just simple men or women who are admired and loved too well. Transference objects, be they gods or humans, are dangerous to keep around because of the trust we place in them. The cynic is one who knows this all too well, having been deeply wounded and unwilling to let go of the pain inflicted, but rather hangs on to it and reinterprets the world through the eyes of mistrust, even paranoia.
Is there another possible outcome? Can betrayal lead to wisdom instead of to cynicism? This is a possibility I wish to consider, and to that end propose the following:
Betrayal shatters images that consciousness has built up into seemingly reliable structures in which one can place faith and trust. Out of this shattering of trusted images, which leads to profound darkness and despair, a light of new consciousness may emerge that we would call wisdom.
“In God We Trust”
If we take betrayal to the ultimate – its archetypal apex – we have to consider the greatest betrayal of them all, the betrayal of a blameless man by God Himself. I must confess that it will forever remain a wonder to me that the Biblical redactors would allow what appears to be such a subversive work into the canon. Doesn’t this book blatantly question the faith and trust the community is supposed to place in the Lord with whom they have an agreed upon Covenant, a sacred contract of mutuality?
Here is the problem. In the fifth Book of the Pentatuch, Deuteronomy, the Lord swears for all to hear: “And because you hearken to these ordinances, and keep and do them, the Lord your God will keep with you the covenant and the steadfast love which he swore to your fathers to keep; he will love you, bless you, and multiply you; he will also bless the fruit of your body and the fruit of your ground, your grain and your wine and your oil, the increase of your cattle and the young of your flock, in the land which he swore to your fathers to give you. You shall be blessed above all peoples.” (Deut. 7:12-14). This is the promise made by God to Israel.
In The Book of Job, however, the Lord unaccountably takes a contrary position. First he praises his servant Job as faultless, hence his enviable prosperity as represented by his ten children, his thousands of sheep, camels, oxen, and she-asses, and his many servants. He is the richest man of the east, and the Lord is pleased to have kept his promise as stated in the Covenant above. But when the wily Satan challenges Job’s sincerity, God easily yields to his doubting thoughts and to Satan’s seduction: “Behold, he is in your power; only spare his life” (Job 2:9). Therewith he delivers his faithful servant Job over into the hands of the archetect of ruin and destruction who is now going to put him to the test. Job has done nothing to call for this unfair trial. Is this not a betrayal of the Covenant?
So what is the Bible trying to say with the inclusion of The Book of Job? Let’s remember that The Book of Job belongs to what in Biblical Studies is called Wisdom Literature. We need to consider, therefore, the role of betrayal in the attainment of wisdom.
Jung’s “Answer to Job”
In his astonishing late work, Answer to Job, Jung draws some startling conclusions from the placement of The Book of Job in the Biblical canon. Jung puts himself in the position of a psychotherapist listening to a patient’s story.
The protagonist, Job, presents himself as an utterly pious man, innocent of any conscious or unconscious faults or sins whatsoever. God agrees with this assessment. As He looks down upon his servant from his heavenly throne, He praises him as a perfect example of virtue and obedience to the laws of the covenant, a wholly pious and blameless man. Satan, the Lord’s sly interlocutor, challenges this perception and offers to put it to the test. He claims that if God’s servant Job is stripped of his possessions, his cozy family, his health and all that has gone into his rich and successful life he will turn cynical, he will curse God, and he will betray his faith and turn his back on the Lord. So God takes the bait and lets Satan do his worst, save only that he spare Job’s life. And thus the horrible story unfolds. Job loses his children, his entire wealth, his very health, and at this point his wife tells him to curse God and die. He refuses and declares in the famous lines: “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destoryed, then from my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not another.” (Job 19: 25-27) To his friends who come and advise him to confess his sins, arguing that he is being punished for some breaches in his supposed righteous conduct, he turns a deaf ear and stubbornly defends his innocence and faultlessness.
Finally the Lord Himself steps into the picture and puts on a great display of majesty and power, showing Job his pitiful smallness as a man compared to His supreme authority as God Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth. Job is silenced. He does not raise the slightest protest or objection to what the Lord has done to him and in no way does he voice an accusation of betrayal on God’s part. Rather, he silently receives this show of power in all humility, after which God restores his wealth, gives him a set of new children, and puts things back in order for him.
As Jung the psychotherapist listens to this story, he becomes enraged. He experiences what Michael Fordham called a syntonic countertransference. He speaks up for Job’s repressed feelings of anger and outrage at being so unwarrantedly played with by God. As a deeply tuned and empathic psychotherapist, Jung registers the unconscious feelings of Job, and in his impassioned text he voices them boldly and without reservation. Going a step further in his role as psychoanalyst, he diagnoses this Deity as being dissociated from his omniscience, as split off from his anima (“Sophia”) and from Eros, and as abysmally unconscious and lacking in integration as a personality. Basically, he depicts the Lord of The Book of Job as exhibiting the features of a narcissistic or borderline personality, lacking in reflection and the capacity to contain his impulses, and totally incapable of empathizing with the troubles inflicted by his own left hand (aka Satan) on his victim. In other words, the Lord is made out by Jung to be the Great Betrayer and Job, an innocent victim, the betrayed. And this makes him very angry. He is in the grips of a profound countertransference reaction, and he lets fly with all his emotion. (For this display of raw emotion, Victor White took Jung to task and called it “childish” and a “venting of spleen.”)
What happens to Job is not fair, so how can justice be served? Jung asks. God must be held to account. This is the surprising turn of events, unanticipated by the Lord who thought that only Job was being tested, whereas in reality He too is under scrutiny. Justice is demanded, compensation, a balance of accounts. Yes, Job has a replacement family and a new fortune, but this can hardly make up for what he lost. Job may have survived, but now justice must still be done and a new consciousness born. To this end, God the Betrayer must be made to suffer precisely what He has inflicted on the human being, Job. God must become conscious, and the only way to consciousness is through an equivalent experience. Therefore, God must suffer what Job has suffered, namely betrayal of the deepest and most devestating sort. And God must do this to Himself, since no-one could of course do this to Him.
Consequently, God incarnates Himself in a man, as Jesus of Nazareth. Jung interprets the story of the New Testament as a direct reaction to the betrayal inflicted on Job. Jesus, the incarnation of God, will experience what Job was made to experience, and through this suffering God will satisfy the requirement of justice and also become conscious. The experiences of betrayal that Jesus is put through – not only that of Judas, which is quite minor by comparison to the betrayal by God as expressed in the words “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” uttered on Golgotha – are God’s sufferings in parallel to Job’s, and these comprise the “answer to Job.” Jesus is the Savior of God in this reprise of the story, not mankind.
Like Job, Jesus survives the betrayal in that he resurrects and ascends to heaven. So in neither case does the story descend into cyncism and to complete breakdown of faith and trust, to a vision of reality that is devoid of trustworthiness and in which there is no redemption. According to Jung, God should have attained to wisdom through this experience of betrayal.
A psychologist, however, must ask: Are these outcomes satisfactory? Do they convey psychological truth? Or are they illusory, defensive, and a mere flimsy patchwork placed over the deep wound of betrayal? Jung the psychotherapist does not buy into the view that all ends well in these parallel narratives. The betrayal is too deep. (In his writings, Jung rarely speaks of the resurrection and the ascension. Easter is not his favorite holiday. Good Friday is more convincing.) For Jung, who is listening to the story of the Bible unfold from his psychotherapeutic chair, the story of Job ends with the revelation of God’s awesome power that silences the human, and the story of Jesus concludes on the note of betrayal cried out from the cross. He will not be drawn into an illusory solution, a folie a deux with the patient that says everything is OK when in fact it is not. As a psychotherapist, he insists on staying with the nigredo state until it transforms from within. No magical solutions allowed, no easy escapes, no defensive flights into fantasy. The tragedy of betrayal must be fuly digested before it can transform into wisdom.
So Jung presses on – again, not as a theologian but as a clinician. One has to come to a state of consciousness that can positively accept and contain evil alongside the good. To simply flee into the good is to set up what Don Kalsched, following Fordham, has called a defense of the self, that is, a defensive structure that is meant to protect the soul from the insult of deep betrayal but does this job at a price too high. The naïve believer in this story’s happy outcome gets stuck in the defense of religious belief in the Good and so cannot cope with the evil within and without. This is a trap with enormous consequences for the individual and for society, as we see in our fundamentalistic age. It isolates the soul from life and from further experience. The consequence is in this sense suicidal. Jung wanted something better for his patient. He wanted to preserve the possibility for life, and to that end he advocated going further into the suffering.
Betrayal shatters the precious and often sacrosanct images a person has lived by, hoped in, found guidance from, and trusted. The idealized transference object is broken, and another reality is presented, a reality that shows the shadow beside the persona, the depths of pathology in the human condition alongside its nobility and glory, the destructive element in God beside the creative, the hateful beside the loving. It is a hard vision to bear, but it is the only way to go on from betrayal toward wisdom and to further life.
The theological image resulting from this psychotherapeutic analysis and treatment as espoused by Jung is a vision of God as a union of opposites. God is to be seen as a complexio oppositorum, a unified complexity that includes good and evil.
I will close with a story that for me illustrates so well the passage from betrayal through darkness to wisdom.
“By the time he was fifteen, Elie Wiesel was in Auschwitz…[where a] teacher of Talmud befriended him… One night the teacher took Wiesel back to his own barracks, and there, with the young boy as the only witness, three great Jewish scholars – masters of Talmud, Halakhah, and Jewish jurisprudence – put God on trial, creating, in that eerie place, ‘a rabbinic court of law to indict the Almighty.’ The trial lasted several nights. Witnesses were heard, evidence was gathered, conclusions were drawn, all of which issued finally in a unanimous verdict: the Lord God Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, was found guilty of crimes against creation and humankind. And then, after what Wiesel describes as an ‘infinity of silence,’ the Talmudic scholar looked at the sky and said ‘It’s time for evening prayers,’ and the members of the tribunal recited Maariv, the evening service.” (Brown, p. vii)
References
Brown, R.Mc. 1995. Introduction to The Trial of God by Elie Wiesel. New York: Schocken
Books, pp. vii-xvix.
Jung, C.G. 1952. Answer to Job. In CW 11.
Lammers, A. (ed.) 2005. The Jung-White Letters. London: Routledge.
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What is the evidence that Job & Jesus did not “stay within the nigredo state until it transforms from within”? Job, especially, is really portrayed as sticking with his experience and not giving up on the idea that he is being treated unjustly. Isn’t it a bit unfair to say that he opted for an easy escape, that he escaped into some kind of denial of the evil he was experiencing? Couldn’t his final “giving in” to Yahweh be taken as an acceptance of the fact that life is not fair, that he was wrong to expect that it was? Having been confronted with the amoral power of Yahweh, he is now sadder but wiser.
The Book of Job and Jung’s “Answer to Job” tell us nothing about God but much about the men who wrote them. In “Answer,” we see the long term effect Calvin’s double-predestining God had on little Carl: anger and distrust. C.G. was not about to let go of that last millimeter. . . .
Ed, Robert & William,
Thanks to all 3 of you for very thought provoking comments. Murray’s piece certainly does stir the soul some…
Thank you for a profound and illuminating post by Dr. Stein. He captures a feature of God that too often is brushed aside, God’s contradictory nature. It is in the effort to reconcile opposites male and female, trusted redeemer and betrayer, omnipotent sovereign and broken man upon the cross, and many other examples, that God offers examples of God’s nature. If we are truly made in God’s image then this includes an image of ‘complexio oppositorum’. The Talmudic Scholars would find a friend in C. S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters). In that book Satan’s agents recognize their ‘patient’ is nearly lost (turned to God) when the patient comes to the end of their rope and squarely facing the loss of all reason for faith, acts faithfully anyway.
Dr. Cruz should stick with psychotherapy and leave theology to others, seems to me. If he wants to talk about God, he should use “God-image” not “God.” Ditto for what Jung should have done. There’s a sacred space, an experience of God, that Jung never reached, because of his inability to trust—opening up without reservation to being penetrated by the divine, and the love/oneness/unitive consciousness that ensues. Parroting Jung doesn’t cut it, theologically/spiritually. My two cents.
Jung says many times, in Answer to Job and elsewhere, that he is a psychiatrist, not a theologian, and is not competent to make metaphysical (or theological) statements. Being by training a philosopher I take notice of that, and take Jung at his word, though some say privately he was less cautious. I think Jung has a lot to say about the experience of God, especially how the dynamic experience of opposites reaches even into this realm. Psychotherapists, quite naturally, are also focused on the experience of God, and tend to use ‘God’ as shorthand for ‘God as we experience God.’ I thought Dr Stein’s discussion of Answer to Job was perhaps the best short summaries of Jung’s views that I’ve run across, and I’ve been working on Answer to Job for a long time. But Jung’s way of interpreting Job is not the only way. Stephen Mitchell, who has published a translation of Answer to Job, takes Job’s final giving way after the experience of Yahweh’s power as a kind of Buddhist enlightenment experience, a giving up of ego in that sense. Mitchell points out that the Hebrew text around Job 42:5-6, where Job “repents” is an incomplete, defective, sentence. Depending on how you reconstruct the sentence, you come up with a different interpretation. That to me seems like a situation ripe for projection. It would not surprise me that Jung, Luther, and other Germanic types, would see in the situation a power struggle. If that were true, bowing the final millimeter would be masochism. Viewing things this way Jung seems to be warning Job not to give in to Yahweh—advocating for Job more than Job advocates for himself. The projection of power play may not totally fit, given that whatever Job did it brought about restoration of peace and harmony. You might say that the peace is illusory, but then you’re not taking the story on its own terms, you’re interpreting. This is not to say that Jung does not have a lot to tell us. Geniuses have the capacity to find themes of universal significance in their own points of view. So I am grateful to Dr Stein for the insight and clarity of his presentation.
Thanks William. There certainly are some power dynamics evident in some of the views.
Murray, as usual, has nailed the subject matter. He understands Jung. But, the question arises: if I were a psychotherapist (instead of a retired lawyer), would I be content to leave patients hanging on a cross at Good Friday? Is that all there is? Or is that all there is, for Jung?
Compare Jung’s experience of God with Fr. Richard Rohr’s (http://cacradicalgrace.org/) experience (mentioned in one of his recent daily meditations):
“Clearly, you are participating in a love that’s being given to you. You are not creating this. You are not generating this. It is being generated through you and in you and for you. You are participating in something larger than yourself, and you are just allowing it and trusting it for the pure gift that it is.”
Suppose Rohr’s experience of God is just as real, just as valid, as Jung’s. How does one understand that, understand the difference? Does it have something to do with surrender, with letting go of that last millimeter (letting go of Siegfried, “the hero ideal of my efficiency”)?
I dont’t think Jung covered the waterfront—as heavily indebted to him as I am, and I am very heavily indebted. I don’t even want to think where I would be now without him. But there is more than Good Friday; Rohr gets it, as I see it anyways.
Thanks Ed. Rohr is a profound man. I participated in a week long initiation rite led by him at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico. He is one of my favorite speakers. He and Murray hold my strongest admiration. I personally find myself holding both of their polarities in an attempt to transcend in my own individuation path.
Excellent discussion about betrayal and the pitfalls lying between theology and analytic psychology. I am deeply inetersted in the role of betrayal in our lives as it seems to emerge at the end of life as if each of us reenacts the Job story in review of those aspects of our lives we have kept in shadow. In a way none of us can escape being betrayed or becoming the betrayor and in the end we are betrayed by the very promise of culture which, according to Ernest Becker, led us to believe we would live forever. The question posed by Dr. Stein is an important one. Does betrayal lead only to cynicism or does it also lead to wisdom? I am recalling a movie I just saw last night in which betrayal plays an important role in the education of an adolescent girl as she confronts important life decisions. The move is called “An Education”. I am also reminded of James Hillman’s extraordinary essay called Betrayal. Hillman proposes that love can only emerge when we risk betrayal. That trust and betrayal are inseparable and the only pathway to authentic love is coming to terms with the possibility of betrayal as Job came to terms with his love for the God-image who betrayed him and by owning the betrayal as well as the trust he was transformed inside and out.
Hillman, J. Betrayal (essay)
Becker, E. 1974. Denial of Death
Thanks Donato,
Hillman does do a fabulous job in that essay. I’ll never forget his opening story about the Jewish father teaching his young son about betrayal. There is something archetypal that betrayal generates in us.
Fascinating discussions and so very timely. Noting the day to day reactions of people who tend toward faith in a rather concrete/childlike way led me to thinking this weekend. This line of discussion reinforces my thoughts and gives more food for thought. The point of the complexio oppositioriom is missed by many. Wisdom can indeed be honed from betrayal in my opinion. The first betrayals of birth and the many subtle betrayals that happen , in even the best parenting, lead to a call towards adulthood and potentially individuation. Otherwise one would remain in the womb-like comforts of childhood. This is mirrored in peoples approach to their religion. Is it growing or regressing? I especially love the note re: Ellie Wiesel. One of my greatest respects to Judaism is the ability to dialog and question and seek. Thanks for all the wonderful thought provoking discussion!!
Thanks for your intriguing comments, Steve, re Fr. Rohr and Murray Stein. Very appreciated.
Has there been to your knowledge a Jungian/Christian dialogue focused specifically on the wisdom of Surrender (Rohr) vs. No Surrender (Jung—-not letting go of that last millimeter, etc.) as the way in which one should live one’s life, as the way in which one should relate to our Maker?
I would be very interested in getting my hands on the dialogue if such exists.
Thinking about this blog I recalled recently that Robert Bly treats the theme of betrayal. This is one of the themes that comes out of his work with men’s groups. (This is discussed in two cassette tapes, both copyrighted 1988: “The Naive Male” and “Male Naivete And Giving The Gold Away.”) Bly’s men’s groups are directed toward what he calls the “soft males,” the more sensitive counterparts of macho men. Soft males tend to be naive. Bly says this happens because they have never fought with their mothers. Their sisters, in contrast, have. They have learned, Bly says sarcastically, that: “The one who brought you into the world may want to kill you. It’s no big deal. That’s just the way it is.” Coming out of this, the naive male projects the idealized mother (my language) onto the women they become involved with, and the world in general. Their experience sets them up for betrayal. Lambs attract wolves. I personally found this analysis so compelling that I took these cassettes with me and listened to them when I visited my parents around the time they came out.
Could this dynamic apply with regard to God? Could naive males (and females) presume that God, who brought me into the world, has only my best interests at heart? The naive person’s presumption could be intensified in regards to God because God, by definition, is supposed to be all good. Even if everyone else betrays me, God would not. Jung, of course, strongly disagrees with this view. To him psychological experience shows that God is not all good. But the theologian could raise two questions: 1. Whose problem is this? Is Job, religiously speaking, a naive male? “If I’m just a good boy, and follow all the rules, God will love me.” In the context of the interplay of opposites the image of God, the Self, is correlative to the ego. If the ego is naive does it evoke betrayal from the Self? Some Jungian analysts have said that Job has a shadow problem. Perhaps if he assimilated his shadow, and gained the strength and maturity that comes from this, he wouldn’t need to be betrayed. Bly says that if the naïve male works through his betrayals he is more able to love. One of Bly’s primary interests in this discussion is naive males’ relationships with women. The second theologian’s question: 2. Are we speaking of God or of the God image? If we are speaking of the God image, as Jung contends, then the process of betrayal could be a corrective to the person’s God image, along the lines of the book Your God is Too Small, part of a never ending process of correction as we try to grasp the meaning of a God who can never be fully comprehended.
I don’t understand to my satisfaction the Jungian concept of archetypal evil. So I’m not completely happy with this personalistic interpretation of the Job experience. I’m sure the correction process described above happens in many cases. But is that all there is to say? Important questions would be: “Can a fully mature person be betrayed by God?” “Is the Job experience a correction of cultural inadequacies in the conception of God, inadequacies for which Job has no personal responsibility?” “Can purposeless evil come from the God image, beyond any purposeful corrective function?” “Jung would say that the purposeful correction involved in the Job experience is the correction of the God image’s consciousness. But if the ego and the Self are correlative, isn’t this more the correction of a relationship?”
I too am familiar with Bly’s audio recording regarding the naive male. Bly also refers to Hamlet as the ultimate naive male who purges his naivete by confrontation with his father’s shadow. The naivete seems to be connected to the feminine or maternal realm such is the terrible fate of the women surrounding Hamlet. But I am intrigued by the idea that Hamlet is everyman inheriting his father’s (Father’s?)shadow and needing to own it, swallow it, purge it much as Job does, perhaps without the trickery, to become fully human. And isn’t betrayal at the core of the Hamlet story? Are we naive thinking there is a way to avoid betrayal?
Dear Murray
Thank you so much for this lucid portrayal of this complex topic. It provided me with a further depth of ‘understanding’ while leaving intact the Mystery under scrutiny by your final quotation.
Warm and grateful best wishes.
PS it is possible to get a copy of the full text of your lecture?