God-Image

The god-image (Gottesbild) is Jung’s technical term for the psychological correlate of the metaphysical God — the way God appears to and within the psyche, as distinct from whatever God may be in himself apart from the psychic image. The distinction is Kantian in structure and Jungian in development: the psychologist can speak empirically of the god-image without adjudicating the metaphysical question, because the god-image is itself an observable psychic fact.

Jung’s mature thesis — stated most sharply in Answer to Job — is that the god-image is not static. It develops across history; it is in some sense co-created by the conscious engagement of the human soul with it. The [[edinger-transformation-god-image|Transformation of the God-Image]] that Edinger traces through Jung’s reading of Job is the biblical-psychological record of that development. The god-image is structurally equivalent to the archetype of the Self, which in Jung is why the integration of the Self and the psychological work on the god-image are the same process under different descriptions. See self-as-god-image and continuing-incarnation.

God-Image

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