Dingir.cz | Review of Dark Religion: Fundamentalism from The Perspective of Jungian Psychology

This review originally appeared in Czech at dingir.cz.

Vladislav Šolc, George J. Didier, Dark Religion: The Psychology of Denying and Discovering Reality, Prague: Malvern, 2025, 398 pages.

I opened Vladislav Šolc and George Didier’s Dark Religion expecting a scholarly Jungian study of fundamentalism and was pleasantly surprised by how much space it gives to many of the questions I ask myself at my own therapeutic desk—for example, where does healthy faith end and possession by one’s own image of God begin, and where do the concepts of psychotherapeutic work end and a genuine spiritual crisis begin?

Central Concepts: Theocalypsis and Theonemesis

The authors, both Jungian analysts, distinguish between religion, understood as a living relationship to the numinous that can never be fully grasped, and creed, a confession of faith that can so easily preserve this relationship in the form of dogmas, rituals, and institutions. According to the authors, religion becomes “dark” when creed becomes severed from its living source in the unconscious and begins to serve a defensive purpose—concealing what a person does not wish to see about themselves and about reality.