God-image
1. Etymology
God-image (German Gottesbild; Latin imago Dei in theological adjacency) names a psychic image of the divine—not a claim about God “in himself.” Jung separates God (metaphysical object) from God-image (psychological fact / imago). Related: imago; numinous symbol of totality; relation to the self.
2. Plain summary
A God-image is the psyche’s picture of what is highest, most compelling, and most whole—an image that gathers scattered parts of a life and can feel sacred. It is not the same as proving God exists. Psychology can work with the image; it cannot settle what God is beyond the image.
The God-image often rhymes with the self: highest value, supreme dominant, image of totality. Because totality includes shadow, the God-image has two sides—light and dark. When the ego merges with it, inflation follows; when it is only projected outward, inner authority stays empty.
Examples (exhaustive house list for this Index lemma — common God-image-related figures and motifs named across Jung’s essays and standard Jungian lexica; not a claim that Jung’s CW contains only these):
unifying / transcendent symbol; drawing together psychic fragments; uniting polarized opposites; psychic product distinct from the object it points to; numinous attractor of attention and energy; cross-cultural / age-recurrent idea-form; image of totality; identity or immediate relation to the Self; two sides (good / evil); contamination of object and imago; distinction God vs God-image; refusal of psychological hypostatization; complex of psychological facts operable in analysis; “church within” / psychic container / value system / moral arbiter; highest value claimed as God (conscious or unconscious); recurring religious motifs in dogma and myth; Christ / Buddha / mandala / stone as possible carriers (images, not identity claims); projection onto leaders, doctrines, partners; inflation when ego = God-image; relation to archetype and collective unconscious; psychoid unknowability of archetype-as-such behind the image.
3. Academic elucidation
4. Lexicon
Samuels, Shorter & Plaut (1986)
God-image … a unifying and transcendent symbol capable of drawing together heterogeneous psychic fragments or uniting polarised opposites. … The God-image points to a reality that transcends consciousness, is extraordinarily numinous … As such, it is an image of totality and ‘as the highest value and supreme dominant in the psychic hierarchy, the God-image is immediately related to, or identical with, the Self’ … Being an image of totality, however, the God-image has two sides; one good, the other evil. … It is the fault of the everlasting contamination of object and imago that people can make no conceptual distinction between ‘God’ and ‘God-image’…
5. CW concordance — sample, not exhaustive
Unity and totality stand at the highest point on the scale of objective values because their symbols can no longer be distinguished from the imago Dei. Hence all statements about the God-image apply also to the empirical symbols of totality.
As the highest value and supreme dominant in the psychic hierarchy, the God-image is immediately related to, or identical with, the self…
(Jung, 1951/1959, CW 9ii, p. 109, ¶170)
The God-image is not something invented, it is an experience that comes upon man spontaneously… The unconscious God-image can therefore alter the state of consciousness, just as the latter can modify the God-image once it has become conscious.
(Jung, 1951/1959, CW 9ii, p. 194, ¶303)
… I make use of a God-concept or an equally metaphysical concept of energy … because they are images which have been found in the human psyche from the beginning. … neither the moral order, nor the idea of God, nor any religion has dropped into man’s lap from outside … he contains all this in nuce within himself…
(Jung, 1916/1969, CW 8, p. 360, ¶528)
See also: self; inflation; ego; archetype; collective unconscious; psychoid; projection; individuation; shadow; anima; animus; complex. synchronicity. transcendent function. imago. (Queued — not yet linked: numinosum.)
References
Jung, C. G. (1959). Aion: Researches into the phenomenology of the self. In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.) (Vol. 9ii, pp. 31–32, 109, 194, ¶¶60, 170, 303). Pantheon / Bollingen. (Original work published 1951)
Jung, C. G. (1969). General aspects of dream psychology. In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.) (2nd ed., Vol. 8, p. 360, ¶528). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1916)
Samuels, A., Shorter, B., & Plaut, F. (1986). A critical dictionary of Jungian analysis. Routledge.
Sharp, D. (1991). Jung lexicon: A primer of terms & concepts. Inner City Books. (No God-image headword; adjacent heads only.)