Ebook: Ancient Incubation and Modern Psychotherapy

What have ancient healing cults to do with modern psychology? In antiquity anyone dedicating himself to the cult of a particular deity was called a 'therapeutes'. This is what doctors claim to be. Later, in Hellenistic and early Christian times, some ascetics called themselves therapists without assigning any medical meaning to the term. This points to the close relation between cult and cure in antiquity.

But is modern psychotherapy a cult? This accusation has been raised against Jungian analytical psychology all too often. Even more it is accused of being an esoteric secret society. Any examination of Jung’s tremendous opus shows that, perhaps more than any other great man of our profession, he labored unremittingly to describe and elaborate the results of his research and practice. Truly Jung’s work is not willfully mysterious or esoteric. Anyone is of course free to believe this superstition and put Jung on his private Index.

Jung has empirically discovered something which offers a close point of contact with the ancient healing cults. He has established these two facts:

1. The human psyche has an autochthonous religious function.

2. No patient in the second half of life has been cured without that patient’s finding an approach to this religious function.

The original German-language edition of ANCIENT INCUBATION AND MODERN PSYCHOTHERAPY was published in 1949 by Rascher Verlag, Zürich, under the title 'Antike Inkubation und moderne Psychotherapie, Studien aus dem C. G. Jung-Institut, Vol. I, Zürich'.