Hope for an Afterlife:
A Depth Psychology Point of View
Perhaps the most prodigious of all hopes in life is our preoccupation
with what comes after we have lived our life in full. We hope there is
something more, something that transcends all the materialistic
facts about our molecules and atoms and the ultimate death of our
brains, something beautiful and meaningful that our conscious and
unconscious minds have been touching upon throughout our days
on Earth.
Simply speaking, we hope for life after death because we cannot see
it; there is no overwhelming concrete proof that it exists. We pray for
it, and by honoring our religion and spirituality, we attempt to
prepare for it. A quote from Romans 8: 24-25, as noted in a Bible.org
article on hope, is illustrative of hope as anticipating the unseen:
For in hope we have been saved, but hope that is seen is not hope;
for why does one also hope for what he sees? But if we hope for
what we do not see, with perseverance we wait eagerly for it. [i]
Most People Believe
According to an Ipsos for Reuters News poll of 18,829 citizens in 23
countries, 51 percent of people worldwide believe in a “divine entity,”
while 18 percent do not believe, and 17 percent say they do not
know. Regarding life after death, the same poll showed that 51
percent believe there is an afterlife; while 23 percent think we simply
“cease to exist” and 23 percent say they don’t know about an
afterlife. [ii]
So, we can safely say the majority of mankind believes in an afterlife,
despite the credible scientific explanation that once our brains stop
firing off neurons, we are kaput forever and don’t know it.
Depth Psychology
There is, however, one class of science, called Depth Psychology
(some argue that it is not a science), that offers a unique approach to
notions about what may exist beyond our everyday experiences,
offering keen, hopeful impressions of transcendent realms
concerning life, death, and the soul.
The extremely short definition of Depth Psychology is that it is
concerned with the unconscious mind. PhD in Depth Psychology
Bonnie Bright describes how Depth Psychology was first coined by
Swiss Psychiatrist Eugene Bleuler in the late 1800s and was seriously
taken up by another Swiss Psychiatrist, Carl Jung, who ultimately
brought many of its tenets into psycho-therapeutic practice under
the banner of archetypal psychology. [iii]
James Hillman is another well-known and influential depth
psychologist and psychotherapist. Today, Thomas Moore, author of
“Care of the Soul” and most recently “Ageless Soul,” can be
considered a significant contemporary depth psychologist and
psychotherapist. Jung, Hillman, and Moore consistently and movingly
wrote in-depth about metaphysics. Hillman and Jung were often
ambiguous with their thoughts about hope and life after death,
vacillating between atheism and agnosticism, while Moore was
definitely hopeful, as well as agnostic with a leaning toward the
supernatural, about such hypothetical thinking.
Bright added that “the Depth Psychological view focuses on mystery
and the creativity and potentiality that resides in the unknown. The
mysteries of the unconscious manifest when they are ready.” She
wrote that Hillman professed how man “is pulled toward a telos, a
whole and complete finished product, each unique, like an acorn that
turns into a massive oak tree. This is also the call of the Self to which
Jung refers.” [iv]
According to the C.G. Jung Center, the Depth Psychology approach,
Focuses on the psyche, human development, personality formation,
and individuation. Individuation is a process of bringing our
unconscious potential into a concrete living reality. This process
helps to secure a bridge between an individual and the unconscious
as well as the individual and his/her wider community. By
incorporating both an inner and outer exploration, one discovers a
more potent sense of meaning and purpose in life. [v]
Jung’s POV
In the chapter titled “On Life After Death,” in Jung’s “Memories,
Dreams, Reflections,” he presented personal ideas concerning the
possibility of immortality, pointing toward an examination of our
unconsciousness and dreams. He wrote that unconsciousness and
dreaming give man “hints” of what may be beyond logical
consciousness, not solid insights, adding that man cannot deny that
paranormal events and experiences do indeed happen. Jung
elaborated as follows:
Critical rationalism has apparently eliminated, along with so many
other mythic conceptions, the idea of life after death. This could only
have happened because nowadays most people identify themselves
almost exclusively with their consciousness and imagine that they
are only what they know about themselves. Yet anyone with even a
smattering of psychology can see how limited this knowledge is.
Rationalism and doctrinairism are the disease of our time; they
pretend to have all the answers. But a great deal will yet be
discovered which our present limited view would have ruled out as
impossible. [vi]
Jung also addressed how old age contributes to beliefs in the
existence of an afterlife:
In old age one begins to let memories unroll before the mind’s eye
and, musing, to recognize oneself in the inner and outer images of
the past. This is like a preparation for an existence in the hereafter,
just as, in Plato’s view, philosophy is a preparation for death. [vii]
Such Jungian thoughts on death promoted hope that an afterlife
exists, although Jung also wrote that “it is not that I wish that we had
a life after death. In fact, I would prefer not to foster such ideas.” [viii]
Despite his preference to not nurture thoughts about whether or not
there is life after death, he also evoked what he called “mythic man”
as “going beyond” what science says about life after death:
We cannot visualize another world ruled by quite other laws, the
reason being that we live in a specific world which has helped to
shape our minds and establish our basic psychic conditions. We are
strictly limited by our innate structure and therefore bound by our
whole being and thinking to this world of ours. Mythic man, to be
sure, demands a ‘going beyond all that,’ but scientific man cannot
permit this. To the intellect, all my mythologizing is futile
speculation. To the emotions, however, it is a healing and valid
activity; it gives existence a glamour which we would not like to do
without. Nor is there any good reason why we should. [ix]
On James Hillman
James Hillman had an unbelievable intellect. He was an
extraordinarily complex man with multiple-meaning, difficult-to-fully-
comprehend, extraordinarily dense views concerning archetypal
psychology; the psyche; ancient history, philosophy, and religion;
modern psychotherapy; and much more. In his Pulitzer Prize-
nominated book, “Re-visioning Psychology” (first published in 1976),
he presented wide-ranging thoughts about what became the
dominant theme of his career: soul-making. Although soul was
“intangible and indefinable,” he wrote that it also carried the “highest
importance in hierarchies of human values, frequently being
identified with the principle of life and even of divinity.” [x]
He defined Depth Psychology as having roots tied to the pre-Socratic
Greek Philosopher Heraclitus, quoting him as saying “You could not
discover the limit of the soul (psyche) even if you traveled every road
to do so; such is the depth (bathum) of its meaning (logos).” [xi]
This depth was further brought out in the last chapter of “Re-
visioning Psychology,” where Hillman wrote about soulfulness,
humanness, and individuality:
If we conceive each human being to be defined individually and
differently by the soul, and we admit that the soul exists
independently of human beings, then our essentially differing
human individuality is really not human at all, but more the gift of
an inhuman daimon who demands human service. It is not my
individuation, but the daimon’s; not my fate that matters to the
Gods, but how I care for the psychic persons entrusted to my
stewardship during my life. It is not my life that matters, but soul
and how life is used to care for the soul. [xii]
Despite the soulfulness that so eloquently reverberated throughout
Hillman’s writing, he was not a fan of the idea of hope, at least as it
applied to psychotherapy. Tayria Ward, Depth Psychology PhD,
summed up Hillman’s opinion about hope, in a blog post, from when
she attended one of his lectures:
I remember a classroom lecture during my doctoral studies at
Pacifica Graduate Institute when archetypal psychologist James
Hillman spoke of what he called the naivete of hope. Hope was, after
all, he said, the one evil left in Pandora’s box when she snapped the
lid back shut. His point as I understood it, was that hope is a
reliance upon an unknown future that distracts us from the present,
from dealing with what is here, right now. [xiii]
There was, however, a softer, not so anti-hope side of Hillman, as
evidenced in a 1993 book he co-authored with journalist Michael
Ventura, titled “We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy–and
the World’s Getting Worse.”:
We do not die alone. We join ancestors and all the little people, the
multiple souls who inhabit our night world of dreams, the complexes
we speak with, the invisible guests who pass through our lives,
bringing us gifts of urges and terrors, tender sighs, sudden ideas.
They are with us all along, those angels, those demons. [xiv]
Thomas Moore on Hope & the Afterlife
Modern-day Depth Psychologist Moore, who was a close friend and
apprentice of Hillman’s, addressed hope and the afterlife in a chapter
of his book “Ageless Soul,” titled “Living with Dying.” He called death a
“transition,” but he did not imply that life after death is an absolute.
Instead, he said: “I don’t know if there is anything there, but I do
know that I can live in hope of eternal life. Hope is an odd thing.” [xv]
Moore also wrote, in “Ageless Soul,” about Hillman’s views on death
and the afterlife, explaining how he had visited with him shortly
before he died “lying in a hospital bed in the living room of his
country house, a morphine drip draped over him, and yet he was
working on a project right up to the end.” Moore noted that
previously, during what he called a “tender moment,” Hillman had
“pronounced” that he was a “materialist,” who said “there is nothing”
after death.
I was surprised that this intelligent man who had written so much
about eternal things— soul, spirit, religion— with a strong
suggestion that we should always penetrate beyond the literal,
would suddenly become a materialist, which is a kind of literalist. . .
This is one of the few areas where I disagree with him. [xvi]
Moore then further presented his personal assessment regarding life
after death:
I’m not a naive believer— I don’t want to be in the camp that has too
much hope or creates illusions, so we don’t have to face the reality
of what it means to be a human being. . . We can acknowledge our
ignorance about death and afterlife, keeping an absolutely open
mind, and at the same time find comfort and guidance in traditional
teachings like reincarnation and heaven. [xvii]
In conclusion, Depth Psychology illustrates a unique intellectual
point of view that strongly suggests there exists an exceptional soul
within every human being that transcends conscious thinking and
dwells in the archetypal realms of the unconscious, displayed to us
through dreams. It offers this “odd thing” we call hope that cannot be
discounted.
End Notes:
[i] J. Hampton Keathly III. “Hope.” Bible.org. April 22, 2005.
https://bible.org/article/hope.
[ii] Market Research. “Ispos@advisory: Supreme Being(s), the
Afterlife, and Evolution.” Ispos. April 24, 2011.
https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/ipsos-global-dvisory-
supreme-beings-afterlife-and-evolution.
[iii] Bonnie Bright. “On Depth Psychology: It’s Meaning and Magic.”
Depth Psychology List. 2010.
https://www.depthpsychologylist.com/Depth-Psychology-Its-
Meaning-and-Magic .
[iv] Ibid.
[v] The C.G. Jung Center. “What is Depth Psychology?”
http://www.cgjungcenter.org/clinical-services/what-is-depth-
psychology/
[vi] C.G. Jung. “Memories, Dreams, Reflections.” Knopf Doubleday
Publishing Group. 1961.
[vii] Ibid.
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] Ibid.
[x] James Hillman. “Re-visioning Psychology.” Harper Perennial. 1976.
[xi] Ibid.
[xii] Ibid.
[xiii] Tayria Ward. “Hope: The last evil?” Doctortayria’s blog. April 6,
2011. https://doctortayria.com/2011/04/06/hope-the-last-evil/
[xiv] James Hillman and Michael Ventura. “We’ve Had a Hundred
Years of Psychotherapy–and the World’s Getting Worse.” Harper One.
1993.
[xv] Thomas Moore. “Ageless Soul: The Lifelong Journey Toward
Meaning and Joy.” St. Martin’s Press. 2017.
[xvi] Ibid.
[xvii] Ibid.
“I don’t know if
there is anything
there, but I do
know that I can live
in hope of eternal
life. Hope is an odd
thing.”
- Thomas Moore