The New God Image

The New God Image is a work by Edward F. Edinger (1996).

Core claims

• Edinger demonstrates that Jung’s late letters constitute not a personal correspondence but a systematic epistemological treatise—a Kantian revolution applied to theology, where the God-image shifts from metaphysical object to psychic phenomenon without losing its ontological weight.
• The book’s tripartite structure (epistemological premises → paradoxical God → continuing incarnation) mirrors the individuation process itself: one must first perceive the psyche’s reality, then endure the tension of opposites within the God-image, and finally participate consciously in the incarnation that the archetype demands.
• Edinger’s reading of the God-image as the “collective Self” undergoing biological evolution—not merely cultural change—places Jung’s theology closer to Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere than to any confessional tradition, making depth psychology the heir to both natural science and prophetic religion.

Related questions

• How does Edinger’s six-stage evolutionary schema of the God-image in The New God-Image compare with Erich Neumann’s mythological stages of consciousness in The Origins and History of Consciousness, and where do the two frameworks diverge?
• Edinger presents Jung’s quarrel with Father Victor White as a paradigmatic failure to integrate the shadow of the God-image. How does this compare with James Hillman’s critique in Re-Visioning Psychology that monotheistic thinking itself is inherently pathological for the soul?
• Edinger argues that the continuing incarnation requires individual humans to carry the divine projection consciously. How does this formulation relate to Jung’s concept of the coniunctio as developed in Edinger’s own The Mystery of the Coniunctio and in Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis?

See also

• Library page: /library/the-psyche/edinger-new-god-image/

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