Modern culture likes to imagine that politics is rational, secular, and policy-driven. Yet again and again, political life becomes devotional, moralistic, and absolute. When that happens, we are no longer arguing about ideas. We are negotiating with the sacred.

Jung’s language for this is the God-archetype, or the God-image: an inner psychic pattern that organises meaning, hierarchy, and belonging. It is not “belief” in the everyday sense. It is the deep human impulse to locate an ultimate authority, and to live in its orbit.

The God-archetype in a secular age

Jung describes the Self as the organising centre of the psyche, larger than the ego, and experienced by many as numinous. When life feels coherent, the God-image tends to remain inward, shaping conscience, purpose, and direction. When life fragments, the psyche looks for an external carrier.

This is where public figures enter. A leader can become a vessel for collective longings: certainty, protection, revenge, purity, redemption, and the promise that someone, somewhere, is in control.

Trump as a case study in projection

In the United States, Donald Trump has become more than a politician for many of his supporters. He is often treated as a symbol of absolute legitimacy, beyond contradiction, beyond failure, beyond ordinary accountability. In Jungian terms, this is the psychology of projection: the God-image fuses with the political image.

To say this is not to diagnose Trump, nor to explain away anyone’s political preferences. It is to notice an archetypal process: when the God-image is projected outward, politics becomes a theatre of salvation and damnation. Opponents become enemies of the good. Loyalty becomes devotion. Doubt becomes betrayal.

Why this matters to people who “have everything”

If you are successful, resourced, and outwardly stable, it can be tempting to watch these dynamics from a distance, as if they belong to “other people.” Yet archetypal processes do not discriminate by education or income. They simply find more refined disguises.

For many high-achieving people, the God-image relocates into different temples: status, productivity, control, reputation, exceptionalism, or the fantasy of being self-sufficient. The same psychic hunger can live beneath a polished life: the need for certainty, the intolerance of vulnerability, and the fear of inner disorder.

In other words, the question is not only, “Why do they worship him?” It is also, “Where do I look for salvation, and what part of myself have I exiled in the process?”

The real work is inward

Archetypal politics becomes less gripping when the psyche develops inner authority: the capacity to hold tension without collapsing into certainty, to tolerate ambiguity without fleeing into ideology, and to bear fear without outsourcing it to a saviour or an enemy.

This is one of the quiet aims of depth psychotherapy: not to make you “nice,” compliant, or endlessly adjusted, but to make you more real. More able to carry the complexity of your own life without needing the world to simplify itself on your behalf.

When the God-image is reclaimed inwardly, something changes. You may still care about politics, perhaps even more so, but you are less likely to be possessed by it. The aim is not neutrality. It is freedom.

If you’d like the longer version of this essay, with more clinical and archetypal detail, you can read it on my Substack