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Edinger as Systematizer of Jung's Religious Psychology

Edinger as Systematizer of Jung’s Religious Psychology

Jung’s psychology of religion is distributed across a shelf of writings that do not resolve into a single argument: Psychology and Religion: West and East (CW 11), Answer to Job (1952), Aion (CW 9ii), Mysterium Coniunctionis (CW 14), the late letters. What Edinger does across his corpus — and inaugurates in Ego and Archetype — is to gather the scattered material into a teachable clinical anthropology.

  • Ego and Archetype (1972): the developmental arc (inflation → alienation → encounter → individuation) as a psychology of religion in clinical form.
  • The Creation of Consciousness (1984): Jung’s Answer to Job read as a myth for modern consciousness; the human ego as the site at which the God-image becomes self-aware. “The hallmark of individuation is the differentiation of the individual psyche from its containment in the collective psyche. This process is accompanied by a progressive awareness of the transpersonal psyche and the task of mediating and humanizing its energies” (Edinger 1984).
  • The Christian Archetype (1987): fourteen images from the life of Christ as stations of the individuating ego.
  • Transformation of the God-Image (1992): a paragraph-by-paragraph elucidation of Answer to Job, making explicit what Jung had left compressed.
  • The New God-Image (1996): Jung’s late letters as the continuation of the argument past the close of the Collected Works.

The thread is not mere exegesis. Edinger’s systematization performs a distinct move: he renders Jung’s religious psychology into a form that a clinician, a pastor, or a serious reader can use, without loss of the speculative depth. The cost is a certain flattening of Jung’s ambiguities; the benefit is a body of work that has carried Jung’s most difficult thought — the thought of the continuing incarnation — into the second half of the American twentieth century and beyond.

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