---
slug: edinger-the-self-e7e421ad
title: "Edinger on The Self"
author: "Edward F. Edinger"
work: "Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche"
section: ""
year: "1972"
tradition: jungian-core
themes:
  - the-self
fragment: |
  The Self is the ordering and unifying center of the total psyche (conscious and unconscious) just as the ego is the center of the conscious personality. Or, put in other words, the ego is the seat of subjective identity while the Self is the seat of objective identity. The Self is thus the supreme psychic authority and subordinates the ego to it. The Self is most simply described as the inner empiri-cal deity and is identical with the imago Dei.
lead_in: ""
reflection: |
  Edinger is precise here in a way that can slip past quickly: he does not say the Self is God, but that it is the *imago Dei* — the inner empirical image of divinity, what the psyche actually registers when it encounters what it calls the divine. The distinction matters more than it first appears. An image is not the thing it images. It is the form in which the psyche can receive a content that otherwise floods or annihilates. Calling the Self the "supreme psychic authority" locates sovereignty inside the soul's own structure rather than outside it — which is a genuinely post-Reformation move, and a costly one: it removes the old alibi that the divine is someone else's business.
  
  What is harder to hold is the relationship between ego and Self once that hierarchy is named. The ego subordinated to the Self is not dissolved — Edinger is careful about this — but it can easily become a religious move of a familiar kind: the smaller self surrendered to the higher Self, which is still surrender, still the logic of ascent. The question the passage quietly raises but does not answer is whether "objective identity" frees the ego or simply installs a new authority above it. That tension is where individuation actually lives.
reflection_v0_3: |
  What resists easy absorption is the word "objective" — objective identity sounds almost like a contradiction, since identity is the most personal thing we have. But Edinger means something precise: the ego knows itself by contrast with others, while the Self is what you are before and beneath that contrast, the pattern that was never only yours. The phrase "inner empirical deity" is where readers tend either to lean in or pull back. Edinger is careful to say empirical — encountered, not merely posited — which puts him in the company of those, Jung chief among them, who insist the divine is a datum of experience before it is a metaphysical claim. The imago Dei is not a flattery; it is a description of where the images of wholeness seem to originate. What changes, if you take this seriously, is the direction of authority — not the ego managing the spiritual life, but something deeper that the ego is asked, slowly, to serve.
parent_id: Edinger_1972_Ego_and_Archetype_Individuation_and__par0002
source: oracle-v3-retrieve
generated: 2026-04-16
regenerated: 2026-04-18
prompt_version: v2.7
status: draft
---

Edinger writes:

> The Self is the ordering and unifying center of the total psyche (conscious and unconscious) just as the ego is the center of the conscious personality. Or, put in other words, the ego is the seat of subjective identity while the Self is the seat of objective identity. The Self is thus the supreme psychic authority and subordinates the ego to it. The Self is most simply described as the inner empiri-cal deity and is identical with the imago Dei.

— Edward F. Edinger

Edinger is precise here in a way that can slip past quickly: he does not say the Self is God, but that it is the *imago Dei* — the inner empirical image of divinity, what the psyche actually registers when it encounters what it calls the divine. The distinction matters more than it first appears. An image is not the thing it images. It is the form in which the psyche can receive a content that otherwise floods or annihilates. Calling the Self the "supreme psychic authority" locates sovereignty inside the soul's own structure rather than outside it — which is a genuinely post-Reformation move, and a costly one: it removes the old alibi that the divine is someone else's business.

What is harder to hold is the relationship between ego and Self once that hierarchy is named. The ego subordinated to the Self is not dissolved — Edinger is careful about this — but it can easily become a religious move of a familiar kind: the smaller self surrendered to the higher Self, which is still surrender, still the logic of ascent. The question the passage quietly raises but does not answer is whether "objective identity" frees the ego or simply installs a new authority above it. That tension is where individuation actually lives.

---

Edward F. Edinger · *Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche* · 1972