Christian Psychology
71
Mother Teresa and Carl Jung: Reflections on the
Experience of God
Greg Mahr
Wayne State University School of Medicine
The religious experiences of Mother Teresa as described in her posthumous spiritual autobiography are examined from
a Jungian perspective. Her religious experiences are compared and contrasted with those of Jung, especially as related
to the experience of the internality or externality of God. Mother Teresa experienced God as an external presence that
spoke to her, Jung saw God as an internally located “psychic reality.”
Keywords: spirituality, Mother Teresa, Jung, religion, visionary experiences
Christian Psychology: Articles
Mother Teresa, perhaps with John Paul II and the Dalai
Lama, is one of the central religious figures of our time.
Deeply spiritual and unquestionably and devoutly
Catholic, Mother Teresa transcended religious and
cultural barriers; her dignity and holiness are recognized
throughout the world.
We have a unique window into the inner religious
life of Mother Teresa through the private letters that
she wrote to her confessors. They describe a woman of
profound faith who spent much of her life in deep sad-
ness, feeling separated from the God she so profoundly
loved. She attempted to destroy these letters, demanded
that her confessors return them to her. In their wisdom,
her confessors recognized that her letters belonged not
to her but to all of mankind. They leave a trail of faith
and torment, a unique window into the inner life of a
woman of profound faith (Mother Teresa, 2007).
Can Jungian theory help us understand the reli-
gious experiences of Mother Teresa? Jung described that
he rarely dealt with individuals who were truly religious,
and particularly with very few Catholics (Jung, 1967d,
p. 334). Most of his patients were searchers, trying to
find a path back to meaning and faith that had been lost
to them. They were mostly individuals who no longer
had faith; only a small minority was Catholic. Can
Jung’s profound insights shed light on the experiences
of someone truly faithful?
To understand the religious experiences of Mother
Teresa, we must begin before the beginning with the
New Testament story from John’s Gospel about the
“woman at the well.” Jesus was passing through a region
near Galilee in Samaria. There he stopped at the sacred
mountain site of Jacob’s well. A Samaritan woman
was drawing water and he asked her for a drink. She
reminded him that as Jew he should not be asking a
Samaritan woman, considered ritually impure by the
Jews, for a drink. He answers, “If only you recognized
God’s gift and who it is that is asking you for a drink,
you would have asked him instead and he would have
given you living water” (John 4:10 New American
Bible: St. Joseph Edition). The two banter about flow-
ing and living water and Jesus insists that “whoever
drinks the water I give him will never be thirsty; no, the
water I give shall become a fountain within him” (John
4:14). Without chastising her, Jesus speaks to her about
her adultery. She is stunned and says, “Sir, I can see you
are a prophet” (John 4:28). She leaves her water jar a
changed woman, telling the people in her town, “Come
and see someone who told me everything I ever did!”
(Mother Teresa, 2007, p.15).
A sacred mountain, thirst, living water that
quenches thirst eternally, a fountain within, secret sin
and the perspicacity that sees hidden sin, confronts
and accepts it. Those are the key elements of the story.
The only other time in the Bible Christ was thirsty was
when he was dying on the Cross and soldiers gave him
vinegar to drink. This story was sacred to Therese of
Lisieux, who kept it at her bedside. Because of the in-
fluence she felt from Therese of Lisieux, Agnes Gonxha
Bojaxhiu chose the name Teresa when she became a
nun.
Agnes, now named Teresa, received several spiritual
calls. The first call was to dedicate her life fully to Jesus,
to “drink the chalice to the last drop” (Mother Teresa,
2007, p. 29). Then she was called to serve the poorest
of the poor. “It was on this day on the train to Darjeeel-
ing that I received the ‘call within a call’ to satiate the
thirst of Jesus by serving him in the poorest of the poor”
(Mother Teresa, 2007, p. 40). The mission of the Sisters
of Charity to this day is “to satiate the thirst of Jesus
Christ on the Cross for Love and Souls.” She wrote,
“Jesus is God, His Love, His thirst is infinite. Our aim
is to quench this infinite thirst…” (Mother Teresa,
2007, p. 41).
