Self as God-image

Jung’s most contested claim about the Self is that its psychological phenomenology is indistinguishable from the phenomenology of the God-image: “the self is a God-image, or at least cannot be distinguished from one” (Aion, 1951). The claim is carefully bounded — “the parallel I have drawn here between Christ and the self is not to be taken as anything more than a psychological one… There is no question of any intrusion into the sphere of metaphysics, i. e., of faith” (Jung 1951). The Self is named as God-image not because Jung is making a metaphysical assertion about God but because the images by which the psyche represents its totality are, empirically, the same images by which the tradition represents God: Christ, Anthropos, lapis, quaternity, mandala.

Edinger pushes the consequence: “God and man, or rather, the human ego and the Self, have something common in their natures (therefore, in Catholic dogma, homousie necessarily gained victory over the homoiusie of the son, that is, the Self)” (Jung, Dream Interpretation 1936–1941, 2014). The Nicene victory of homoousia over homoiousia is read as the dogmatic registration of an empirical psychological fact: the Self shares substance with the ego, not merely likeness. Edinger’s Ego and Archetype names the structural corollary — “The ego stands to the Self as the moved to the mover… The Self… is an a priori existent out of which the ego evolves” (Edinger 1972, quoting Jung).

The ego-Self relation is therefore not merely developmental; it carries the theological weight the tradition has always accorded the image of God in the human person. When Clement of Alexandria writes that “he who knows himself knows God,” Jung reads this as a pre-modern registration of the same empirical finding (Aion 1951).

Relationships

• self
• imago-dei
• continuing-incarnation
• ego-self-axis
• anthropos

Primary sources

• jung-aion (Jung 1951)
• edinger-ego-and-archetype (Edinger 1972)