For this reason, Jung saw Friedrich Nietzsche's declaration that God is dead (for him) as problematic. As a matter of fact, Jung sees Nietzsche's declaration as the root cause of his psychological problems.
See Jung's 1,600-page commentary Nietzsche's Zarathustra : Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939 by C. G. Jung, 2 vols., edited by James L. Jarrett (Princeton University Press, 1988).
Jung sees Nietzsche's fictional character named Zarathustra as manifesting the Wise Old Man archetype in Nietzsche's psyche.
In theory, all men and all women have the Wise Old Man archetype in their psyches.
Now, people in the monotheistic religious traditions, including Nietzsche and Jung, tend to see God (i.e., the deity) as embodying the Wise Old Man archetype in their psyches.
Of course you could argue that God is nothing but an imaginary conceptual construct. Basically, this is the argument of the Soviet communists and the secular humanists.
But Jung's counter-argument is that we humans need to have a conceptual construct in which we can express the Wise Old Man archetype in the human psyche.
When we do not have such a conceptual construct, we may find the Wise Old Man archetype in our psyches problematic.
In theory, I would operationally define the optimal form of the Wise Old Man archetype as the constellation of the four optimal forms of the four masculine archetypes in our psyches that the Jungian theorist Robert L. Moore of the Chicago Theological Seminary discusses at length in the series of five books that he co-authored with Douglas Gillette.
See, for example, the revised and expanded edition of Moore and Gillette's book The King Within: Accessing the King [Archetype] in the Male Psyche (Exploration Press, 2007; 1st ed., 1992).
All men and all women have all four of the masculine archetypes of maturity in their psyches, and they also have all four of the feminine archetypes of maturity in their psyches.
In theory, I would operationally define the optimal form of the Anima archetype as the constellation of the four optimal forms of the four feminine archetypes of maturity.
In theory, I would operationally define the optimal androgynous person as having both the optimal form of the Anima archetype and the optimal form of the Wise Old Man archetype in his or her psyche.
See my essay "Understanding Jung's Thought" at the digital commons of the University of Minnesota Duluth's library: https://d-commons.d.umn.edu:8443/hanlde/10792/2576.
With these operational definitions in mind, I now return to Friedman's discussion.
As people journey toward the optimal forms of the Wise Old Man archetype and the Anima archetype, they may experience understandable difficulties along the way, which may prompt them to seek help from a spiritual director and/or a psychotherapist -- or perhaps from self-help books.
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