This was originally presented at a conference on the Symbolic Way in Spirituality, Analytic Practice and Culture, AGAP Forum, July 16, 2006, Zurich, Switzerland.

I highly recommend that anyone interested in the topic of Jungianism and religion/spirituality read this essay. In fact, it is better if you read this essay before reading Part 2 of my piece on the Jungian Problem of Religion. Dourley provides the scholarship behind my claim that there is a significant precedent for a Jungian atheism (which I, perhaps unwisely, took for granted was largely known by the well-read Jungian audience). As another service “to me”, Dourley goes on to construct a psychologized spirituality that (although interesting and compelling on some levels) demonstrates (somewhat unwillingly) a number of the pitfalls I described in any such imagination of a Jungian religion or spirituality (in Part 2 of my essay).

In essence, my essay has begun to propose answers to some of the questions Dourley asked in 2006 . . . and has begun to provide analyses or deconstructions of some of the constructions he suggested for a kind of future Jungian “religion”. Of course, these are immensely complex topics, and what I have proposed is the roughest of rough outlines on what we need to consider in order to proceed and to understand our Jungian religiosity.

Still, Dourley’s paper is a welcome synchronicity.