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This book was transcribed from the audio-tapes of a series of lectures given by Dr Edinger to the Analysts' Training Program of the C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles in 1991. The book is the latest in a series of works in which Edinger both articulates his understanding of Jung's religious writing, and expresses the idea that a new religious dispensation is upon us. For these purposes, Edinger uses Jung's letters, because he believes that they reveal Jung's religious thought more clearly than does his formal writing.
The letters selected by Edinger (which are reproduced in an appendix) contain some of Jung's most controversial ideas, such as those of the unconsciousness of God, the continuing incarnation, and the suggestion that the God-image contains within it opposites such as dark and light. Edinger stresses Jung's ideas that a God-image is not necessarily synonymous with ‘God’ in the theological sense of the word, and that the God-image is a collective or transpersonal Self, not simply an individual Self. He also notes Jung's emphasis on the psychological importance of religious experience irrespective of its absolute truth or its exact ontological status. Edinger uses the letters to illustrate Jung's discovery that the Western God-image has evolved throughout history, and suggests that the latest transformation is found in Jung's belief that God-images are modes of expression of the autonomous psyche.
Edinger stresses Jung's epistemological stance in relation to religious matters, which is important in view of the traditional criticisms of Jung (for example, by Buber and Fromm) that he is reductionistic, because he replaces God with the psyche and reduces religious phenomena to mere subjectivity. Edinger makes the point that the concept of the reality of the psyche is crucial to understanding Jung's method, which Edinger believes to be based on Kant's thought. For Jung and Edinger, Kant is the ‘turning point’ for modern psychology, since Kant's work makes it cl