Dourley, John P.

Dr. John Dourley is Professor Emeritus, Department of Religion, at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. He graduated as a Jungian analyst from the Zurich/Kusnacht Institute and has published widely on Jung and religion.

Goddess, Mother of the Trinity a Jungian Implication

1990 0-88946-244-5
Systematically covers Jung's criticism of biblical imagination, the Goddess as Mother of the Trinity, and Jung's appropriation of Eckhart to make the above points. The three sections of this work are entitled "Jung's Critique of Biblical Imagination: An Appreciative Undermining," "The Goddess as Mother of the Trinity," and "Jung and Meister Eckhart: Breakthrough to the Goddess."

Intellectual Autobiography of a Jungian Theologian

2006 0-7734-5975-8
This book describes the development of the author’s thinking on religion. It begins with his theological initiation into the supernatural and Aristotelian dualism of Aquinas in the seminary of the late 1950s and early 1960s. It continues through his turn to the immanental theology of Paul Tillich and, through Tillich, to the even deeper interiority of Carl Jung’s psychology and to his decision to train as a Jungian analyst. Jung’s thought led him to an appreciation of the apophatic mystical tradition and its moment of the immersion of the individual in that nothingness beyond the distinction between the divine and the human. The volume also contains an early work in which the author attempts to bridge the gap between the worlds of theology and psychology by relating Tillich’s immanentalism to Jung’s understanding of the “religious function” of the psyche and its role in generating humanity's sense of God. The last work in the volume is a series of essays dealing with the interface of psychology and theology containing essays on Jung’s appreciation of mysticism and a critical analysis of the difficulty in bringing fully together Tillich’s Christian theology and Jung's psychology.

Jung and the Religious Alternative the Rerooting

1995 0-7734-9048-5
The work presents all pertinent material on Jung's dialogues with Victor White and Martin Buber. It argues that both these dialogues failed for the same reason. Buber and White held to a conception of divine transcendence and otherness incompatible with the more intimate divine-human relation foundational to Jung's understanding of the psyche. A transitional chapter presents the thought of Paul Tillich and Teilhard de Chardin as concerned with establishing similar synthetic views of the divine-human relation as exists in Jung's understanding of the psyche. The work contends that neither of these major correlations of the divine and human is as thorough as Jung's. The work then goes on to show the philosophical and theological implications of Jung's appreciation of mystical experience as the primordial form of religious experience, an experience he functionally equates with the further reaches of human maturity. Thus the work explains the paradox of Jung's inability to agree with major representatives of religious orthodoxies and his high appreciation of that immediate religious experience termed mystical.