ABSTRACT
The author discusses that the self is more than conscious identity (i.e., the ego) because it includes and expresses the full range of the psyche. Beyond this, the self-concept links analytical psychology and religious doctrines of transcendence. This chapter explores the complex relation of the self to the transcendent (Divinity), as Jung understood these terms and employed them, focusing especially on a critical passage from his last major work, Mysterium Coniunctionis. The notion of self as Imago Dei grasps the paradoxical nature of the self, a coincidentia oppositorum that is at once personal and impersonal. Jung posits, moreover, a dynamic interactive relation between the self and the transcendence it mirrors. Altogether, this combination of features regarding the self sets Jung’s psychology apart from humanistic and personalistic psychologies and secular depth psychologies, on the one hand, and from pre-Enlightenment dogmatic psychologies such as those of religious fundamentalisms on the other. This chapter argues that Jung’s depth psychology represents a post-Enlightenment, post-secular, post-humanistic vision of the human being, whose psyche links earth and heaven, the here and the beyond, and the finite and the infinite. It is a radical attempt to break out of modernity without regressing to medievalism.
