The Kabbalah and Jung’s Final Metanoia

ABSTRACT

Sanford Drob’s Kabbalistic Visions: C. G. Jung and Jewish Mysticism examines the parallels between Kabbalistic spiritual practice and Jungian analytic work, including the conjunction of such opposites as male and female and especially of light and dark. The Kabbalah is presented in its historical evolution from an exoteric Jewish tradition to an esoteric interior process that is mirrored in Jungian analysis. This enables us to understand how Jung’s late visions were rooted in his controversial but evolving attitude toward Jewish psychology, resulting in the widely noted deepening of his last major works.

KEY WORDS:

• Adam Kadmon
• antisemitism, C. G. Jung
• Gershom Scholem
• Jewish mysticism
• Joseph Henderson
• Kabbalah
• Sanford Drob

Notes

1. Scholem’s eleven Eranos lectures are found in On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (1969) and On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead (1991). Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1961) presents the Kabbalah’s development in chronological order and is considered a classic in the field.

^2. “This is gold!” Freud exclaimed after his encounter with Chayyim Vital’s Kabbalistic text, asking why it had not been shown to him earlier (Drob 2023, 16).

^3. Scholem’s anachronistic usage of “unconscious” in an eighteenth-century context is his translation of the Hebrew Kadmuth-ha-Sekhel (“preconscious origin of intellect”) (Scholem 1991, 293, n. 107).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Flanagin

MICHAEL FLANAGIN, PhD, is a former curator of ARAS at the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco (1988–2002) and a main contributor to The Book of Symbols (Taschen, 2010), with a special interest in the interplay of perennial mysticism and the archetypal unconscious. Correspondence: [email protected].