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.