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Jung used the word self in a way which was different from the everyday meaning of the word. To refer to the image of God as a symbol of the self seems at first sight to beg a whole series of philosophical questions. To learn how Jung used the word, and then gradually use it more and more as he did, is already halfway to becoming a Jungian. I have no wish to indoctrinate you in this way, and I shall retain my own critical attitude throughout this paper. I have decided to devote most of it to an evaluative description of the development of Jung's concept of the self, and to try to relate this to Jung's own personal development.
In his autobiography Jung devotes relatively little space to himself in the ordinary sense of the word, and much to the development of his particular unified vision of psychic reality. He describes how his inner vision finally united with his choice of career and his respect for facts and for his clinical observations, in a stream which he calls the psychological attitude. It was his own synthesis, evolved through agonising personal struggle.
From an early age Jung was unusually open to himself, unusually able to find meaning and value from his inner life, his dreams, visions and revelations. He seems also to have been unusually courageous in all this.
To him, as a child, God always had a curious ambiguity. Owing to his father's profession as minister, Jung saw many burials. Certain people were no longer around; he was told the Lord Jesus had taken them and he knew they had been committed to a hole in the ground. Lord Jesus evidently swallowed people up and furthermore seemed to be associated in his mind with gloomy men in black coats called Jesuits, whom his father seemed to fear. At this time, after a particularly frightening encounter with a ‘Jesuit’ which ended in his hiding in the attic, he had his first dream of the numinous