SOURCE: Rowland, Susan. “The Body's Sacred: Romance and Sacrifice in Religious and Jungian Narratives.” Literature and Theology 10, no. 2 (June 1996): 160-70.

In the following essay, Rowland discusses the novels Wild Girl and Chymical Wedding, by Lindsay Clark, in terms of Jungian psychology.

What is distinctive about Jungian psychology is Jung's refusal to divide off psychology from religion or to privilege one over the other as a mastering discourse. To Jung, psychology cannot ‘explain away’ religious feeling nor can theology authenticate subjective psychological intuitions. He believed that primary reality is psychic reality: we experience nothing outside the processes of the psyche so that images, dreams, feelings, words are firstly about the psyche. Therefore, for Jung, all experience and all words about experience have a subjective referent, are psychological but he also believed that words about transcendence have an objective reference as well, are theology.¹ In his system psychology and theology...