The Weapon and The Wound: The archetypal and personal dimensions in ‘Answer to Job’

Jung wrote ‘Answer to Job’ when he was 75 years old after a lifetime's struggle with traditional protestant and religious beliefs, a wide-ranging study of religious symbolism and dialogues with theologians, particularly on the nature of good and evil. He therefore covers many issues, in terms of both metapsychology and theology. Not only that; this is a passionate book written from different angles and from very different places in Jung, and here I am thinking of the clash between his objective understanding response and his highly charged emotional responses. In the ‘Lectori benevolo’ introduction, Jung sets out his position in these two dimensions. First, the theoretical point of view: he makes a clear distinction between God, an unknowable essence, and man's God-images. Man's God-images are symbolic - they can only point the way to an ‘unknowable essence’. ‘These images derive from archetypal dynamics which filter through to consciousness and the visible forms which they take are, in their turn, subject to our human imagination and its temporal and local conditions’ (Jung 1952, para. 555). So here Jung states that the evolving images are the outcome of an unconscious/conscious dialectic.

I will paraphrase Jung's continuation of this theme. As I understand it, he is saying that archetypal motifs in the collective unconscious have affective roots and their own dynamic autonomy. In so far as they are not subject to our will, we may experience them as subjects. Alternatively, man's consciousness develops through inner and outer factors, and with the growth of conscious understanding man can function as subject in relation to unconscious processes.

In the introduction to the book, he goes on to explain why he needs to give free rein to his emotional responses to some of the events in the Bible. While he has made it clear that God-images are related to the culture of the time in which they occur, he says that he