| Summary: | Certain aspects of Jung’s analytical psychology are treated in the first section of the article. After this, the relevance of his theories in relation to research within the history of religions is critically assessed. The aim is to establish that a deeper understanding of religious symbols can be reached on the basis of Jung’s model of the unconscious. The concepts of the archetypes and the collective unconscious have no a priori content of their own. Being categories of experience, they constitute structural properties of the psyche. Thus, Jung does not postulate the existence of universal symbols. He shows that the unconscious is a determining factor in religious matters, and he points to a psychic principle which the historian of religion must either take into account or choose to ignore artificially.
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