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Ego and Archetype
Ego and Archetype
Edinger’s 1972 Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche is the most lucid post-Jungian elaboration of Jung’s psychology of religion. The subtitle is the thesis: individuation and the religious function of the psyche are the same process under two descriptions. The book’s clinical anchor is the ego-self-axis — the living relation between the conscious ego and the autonomous Self — and its diagnostic frame is alienation, the breakdown of that relation.
Edinger reads modern existential meaninglessness — Tolstoy’s Confession, Eliot’s Waste Land, the heap of broken images — as a religious symptom: “the traditional religious symbols which for many people have lost their meaning … we live in a desert and cannot find the source of life-giving water” (Edinger 1972). The cure is not the recovery of the old creed but the establishment of a living relation to the Self. “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). Religious institutions, properly understood, are technologies for maintaining the ego-Self axis in a community where the individual encounter would be too dangerous or too rare to sustain.
The book’s enduring importance is its translation of Jung’s psychology of religion into a clinical anthropology a non-Jungian reader can use. Ego and Archetype makes the religious function not a doctrinal commitment but the load-bearing structure of psychic health, in continuity with the depth tradition from Plotinus through the alchemists through Jung.