Religious Function of the Psyche

The religious function is the psyche’s native vocation to relate consciously to its own transpersonal ground. Edinger takes the phrase from Jung and makes it the subtitle of his foundational book — Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche — on the premise that individuation is not a secular process of self-actualization but the psychological form of the religious life.

The argument is phenomenological. The two catastrophic fates of the unrelated ego-Self axis — inflation and alienation-as-inflations-complement — are what religious traditions have named in their own vocabulary. Edinger reads the Seven Deadly Sins as a catalogue of inflation: “Pride, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, avarice, and sloth, are all symptoms of inflation. By being labelled sins, which require confession and penance, the individual is protected against them” (Edinger 1972).

The function is therefore not derivative of a particular creed. Every religious practice, in its structural aim, serves the same psychological end: “The central aim of all religious practices is to keep the individual (ego) related to the deity (Self). All religions are repositories of transpersonal experience and archetypal images” (Edinger 1972). The Christian beatitudes, the Buddhist koan, the Jewish confession — each is an ego-technique for the maintenance of the axis.

When institutional religion weakens, the religious function does not disappear; it returns to the psyche as its own demand. This is the ground of Edinger’s thesis of the continuing incarnation.

Relationships

• ego-self-axis
• individuation
• continuing-incarnation
• inflation
• alienation-as-inflations-complement

Primary sources

• edinger-ego-and-archetype (Edinger 1972)