Encounter With The Self: A Jungian Commentary On William Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job

From the Author’s Preface:

“There is in the unconscious a transpersonal centre of latent consciousness.  The discovery of this centre, which Jung called the Self (and which empirically cannot be distinguished from the God-image), is like the discovery of extra-terrestrial intelligence.  Man is no longer alone in the psyche and in the cosmos.  The vicissitudes of life take on new and enlarged meaning. . . .”

“At first, the encounter with the Self is indeed a defeat for the ego; but with perseverance, light is born from the darkness.  One meets the “Immortal One” who wounds and heals, who casts down and raises up, who makes small and makes large – in a word, the One who makes one, whole.”

The Biblical Book of Job is seen here as a paradigm for a certain experience of God; in psychological terms, the Job story is an archetypal image which pictures a typical encounter between the ego and the Self.

William Blake’s series of 22 illustrations, first Published in 1825, vividly portrays the effect of a typical encounter between the ego of a modern man and the Self.  The book features full-page reproductions of Blake’s original engravings.