Narcissism, God, and the Shadow: Carl Jung’s Answer to Job Lecture 5: the 3 God-images in Jungian Psychology
Hi, I am Harry Venice, an Attachment, Trauma, and Jungian Therapist who is also certified to score the Adult Attachment Interview for Reflective Function.
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Lecture 5: the 3 God-images in Jungian Psychology
Today I will cover three things in my lecture on Carl Jung’s ‘Answer to Job’ as explained in Season 2, Episode 5 of the Harry Venice Psychology Podcast. For my newsletter followers, I condense my lecture below into a blog post for your convenience.
Photo: Artwork from Carl Jung’s ‘Red Book’
In today’s lecture I will cover three God-images in Jungian Psychology relevant for Carl Jung’s ‘Answer to Job’.
When Jung refers to God-image there are three:
1. The Old Testament God-Image (“Yahweh”).
This is Yahweh, who is not conscious of the opposites within him until he has his encounter with Job.
2. The New Testament God (“The Christian God-image)
This is a one-side, loving God image in the form of God’s son Christ. But God has two sons. He also has the Anti-Christ in Satan. A shadow side. Sp the opposites of good and evil come into play here.
3. The God-image experienced psychologically by Modern Man (“God as experienced psychologially”)
Understanding these three God-images is important, otherwise you won’t understand the context of what Jung is talking about in ‘Answer to Job’.
1. The First God image: Yahweh, the God-image Job experiences.
This god-image contains the opposites but they are not in conflict because he hasn’t met someone with the consciousness of Job, to bring that conflict to consciousness.
Job presents an encounter to the Old Testament God, Yahweh, that he has not had yet. The opposites in Yahweh which come into conflict are characteristics including: good versus evil, justice versus injustice (e.g. just vs unjust), wrath versus kindness, etc.
2. The Second God image: the New Testament God (“The Christian God-image” which is pictured in Christian theology.
The God-image of the New Testament has undergone a transformation and an incarnation. This means that the God-Image of Yahweh (e.g. the Old Testament God that faced Job) has in the New Testament, undergone a transformation by the incarnation (e.g. by the incarnation of Christ, the loving son of God in human form).
Edward Edinger emphasises that this is never said outright in the bible because it would be scandalous to do so from a concrete religious perspective.
Edinger notes that Yahweh was “tamed in the lap of the virgin” (e.g. Virgin Mary and the Unicorn).
Edward Edinger does not expand upon this remark but I have looked into it further. When he says this, Edinger is referring to the symbolism of Mary and the unicorn. Mary was often portrayed in an enclosed garden. From a mythological perspective, only a pure virgin could capture a unicorn. From a symbolic perspective, the enclosed garden symbolized Mary’s virginal womb (as a symbolic image, this has its origins in the Song of Songs which is also called the ‘Song of Solomon’ and is a poem about love between a man and a woman).
The unicorn itself symbolized the uniting of two opposites: firstly, it was seen as a mightily good, but on the other hand, it was seen as a fierce and wild animal which could not be killed by hunters unless it came across a pure virgin. When it did, the wild and fierce animal, would lay its head in her lap and fall asleep. Once the unicorn was in this tranquil state, the hunters could kill it.
In the context of Christianity this motif meant that the fierce, male God could only be bound in this world, tamed, and made docile by the exceedingly pure and docile Virgin Mary. Once he entered her womb and became Jesus Christ (e.g. he incarnated into Christ), he could be sacrificed as the Lamb of God for the good of humanity.
But the unicorn also embodied a broader symbolism. It represented on the one hand, wild, ferocious manhood that could only be tamed by pure womanhood and would gladly allow itself to be trapped into holy matrimony and made docile. It is in this context that the Virgin Mary is a symbol of virtuous womanhood taming wild manhood and channeling erotic passion into the 'sacrament marriage' (note: ‘sacrament’ is a specific, visible ritual or ceremony). This imagery of the ritual or ceremony of a ‘sacred marriage’ is also relevant for alchemy: the alchemical wedding, the divine marriage and union of the masculine and feminine, the hieros gamos.
What Edinger was referring to, is that the Virgin Mary, a symbol of virtuous womanhood taming wild manhood, tamed Yahweh (the ego bound, unconscious, wild, masculine) in her lap. If we amplify this, it also links with Sophia, wisdom and the feminine being needed for Yahweh to become whole and transform his consciousness (which occurs via his encounter with Job). There is a repeating theme, of the masculine being stuck in Ego space and time, and needing the feminine, Sophia for wholeness and completeness. Rather than seeking ‘perfection’ (masculine trait), to have the wisdom to seek ‘completeness’ or wholeness (the wisdom of the feminine). Carl Jung makes this point of masculine ‘perfection’ versus feminine ‘completeness' in Answer to Job.
Symbols of Transformation (Collected Work 5 - the Hero’s Journey, infantile relation to parents and separating from parents.
The idea is that Yahweh underwent a “transformation”.
This gets me thinking of Carl Jung’s book “Symbols of Transformation” (Collected Work 5), which is about the Hero’s Journey, the start of individuation. It links to today’s theme because:
Christ is a symbol, and the God image is a symbol of the Self (Edinger in fact said that this is a ‘psychic fact’, a fact of the psyche).
Virgin Mary and even unicorns are literally both symbols and representative of transformation (with a distinction that Virgin Mary is also a God image, which Jung explains in Answer to Job).
In this way, the hero’s journey and transformation has links to the God image. I will not add more to this now, but I want you to see how Jung’s works, although they may seem completely separate and abstract… when you understand it more deeply, or amplify it, you see links. For example, I never would have thought that there were such links between the hero’s journey (collected work 5) and God, religion, virgin mary, unicorns, and Answer to Job for example.
Back to the second god image: In the second God image, the Christian God image, the Yahweh God image is born as a man and in the process of that incarnation he takes on a one sided goodness.
This is represneted by the figure of Christ, the son of God. But as Jung emphasised, Christ is only one of two sons. In the background, is the other son, Satan, the Anti-Christ (if you recall, this links back to Aion as discussed in lecture 2). Once again, we have the opposites: Christ and Anti-Christ.
That summarises the God image in Christian theology, which is also referred to as the Christian God image, especially by Edward Edinger.
3. The God-image experienced psychologically by Modern Man (“God as experienced psychologically”)
This takes us to the present day. If you recall in lecture 2, I mentioned that the ‘Answer to Job’ is part of a trilogy by Carl Jung. And each trilogy deals with “aeons” or large periods of time in history, specifically the psychological history and development of the human psyche. I’ll repeat the trilogy here again for your convenience:
The 1st part of the trilogy is Aion (Collected Work 9, ii): Jung traces the human psyche from the Birth of Christ to modern day time, (e.g. 0 -2000).
The 2nd part of the trilogy is Answer to Job: we can say, according to Aion, this addresses the Christian religious ‘Aion’ (0-2000), but it has increasing important in more recent times where the Christian Aeon declined and as Nietzsche announced: “God is dead” (e.g. 1500-2000 aeon). It is important for us moderns to remember, that just because “God is dead” (or traditional religion is ‘dead’) today, for centuries it was not, and the metaphysical God image ruled the collective psyche on a daily basis. More recently with monotheism (single god religions), but before that (e.g. before the birth of Christ), we had polytheism in the form of the Greek Gods for example.
The 3rd part of the trilogy is ‘The Undiscovered Self’ (Jung’s real title was “Present and Future”: this title published in 1957 a few years before Jung’s death and he addressed modern man’s psyche: the present and the future.
The third God image
With this time sequence in mind, it is this third god image and modern man’s experience of it, which is what we need to bring to our study of ‘Answer to Job’ to make it relatable and relevant to our modern psyche.
I will explain this third god image by exploring three key passages where Jung discusses God and the God image.
Passage 1 - God is a most shocking problem
It is at this point, that it is important to go directly to what Jung said about modern man’s experience of the god image psychologically:
“For the collective unconscious we could use the word ‘God’ …
You all know what the unconscious is. You have certain dreams that carry the hallmark of the collective unconscious. Instead of dreaming of ‘aunt this or that’ or ‘uncle this or that’, you dream of a lion.
Then the analyst will tell you, that is a mythological motif. Then you will understand that is the collective unconscious.
So you get the collective unconscious right there.
This God, is no longer miles of abstract space away from you in an extra mundane sphere. This divinity is not a concept in theological textbooks or in the bible. It is an immediate thing. It happens in your dreams at night. It causes you to have pains in your stomach. Diarreah. Constipation. A whole host of neurosis.
If you try to formulate it. Think what the collective unconscius is, after all. You wind up by concluding that it is what the prophets were concerned with. It sounds exactly like some things in the Old testament. Where God sends plagues on people, he burns their bones in the night, he injures their kidneys, he causes all sorts of trouble.
Then you come naturally to the dilemma, is that really God? Is God a neurosis?
Now that is a shocling dilemma I admit. But when you think consistently and logically, you come to the conclusion that God is a most shocking problem. And that is the truth. God has shocked people out of their wits.
Think of what he did to poor old Hosea. He was a respectable man and he had to marry a prostitute. Probably he suffered from a strange kind of mother complex.”
- Carl Jung (“Visions Seminar”, Vol 2, Springer Edition, page 391)
This passage is self explanatory. I only emphasise one thing, whe Jung says “It sounds exactly like some things in the Old testament.” You should note that the Book of Job is from the Old Testament.
Passage 2 - The patient who is convinced he has cancer
The second passage comes from Jung discussing a patient of his who was convinced he has cancer despite all evidence against it.
Jung said:
“He needs aslittle as a neurosis to conjure up a force that cannot be dealt with by reasonable means. Our cancer case shows how impotant human reason and intellect are against the most powerful nonsense. I always advise my patients to take such obvious but invisble nonsense as the manifestation of a power and a meaning not yet understood. Our case is confronted with a will power and a suggestion more than anything his conscious can put against it.
In this precarious situation, the best strategy is to convinve the patient that he is somehow, though in a highly incomprehensible way at back of his own symptom. Secretly inventing it and reporting it. Such a suggestion would instantly paralyse … and demoralise him [Harry’s clinical note: ie. telling him the objective truth would destroy him].
It is much better if he understands his complex is an autonomous power [Edinger adds: “ie. God”; Harry adds: “archetypes are also autonomous, Jung describes them as such often”)
Photo: Jungian Analyst Edward Edinger (who wrote extensively on Jungian Analysis)
Edinger also adds about this cancer case:
“This case who was caught by his cancer phobia, thats how the God image manifested in him.”
Passage 3 - What is God?
Right before his death, Carl Jung said the following:
“To this day, “God” is the name by which I designate all things which cross my wilful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions, and change the course of my life for better or worse.”
Importantly, he didnt say it is only what changes his life for the better. It also crosses his path “violently and recklessly” and even “upsets” his “subjective views”. It is a powerful force and these descriptions, all which embody a lack of control and planning, also align with synchronicity.
They also align with deep trauma and the experience of abuse (e.g. Book of Job experiences).
The experiences are archetypal, powerful, synchronistic, deep, for better or for worse… they are God.
I leave you with this final quote today. On Carl Jung’s tombstone was inscribed:
“Called or not called, the gods will be present.”
Amen.
If you want to explore individuation, Jungian Analysis, Shadow Work, trauma healing or to repair insecure attachment, book a Free 1:1 Discovery Call with me today: https://calendly.com/harryvenicepsychology/30min
Always Believe. Stay Brave. Never Give Up.
Harry Venice
Attachment, Trauma, and Jungian Therapist
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