Carl Jung's Self Archetype: The God Image Within

Jung does not make a big deal out of our everyday use of the word self. When you refer to yourself, you're referring to what we all know you're referring to. In Jungian technical terms, you're referring to the ego. Jung writes, By ego, I understand a complex of ideas which constitutes the center of my field of consciousness and appears to possess a high degree of continuity and identity. The word ego has gotten a lot of bad rep lately, but here it has no negative connotations. Ego is not the enemy. It is simply the bundle of psychic content that makes up what we call I. Thoughts, emotions, sensations, memories and other experiences tend to knot together. That psychic knot is the ego. The ego is flexible enough to allow for continuity through time. This is why your childhood pictures still feel like pictures of you. The ego cares little that there's not a single cell in common between your body and the body of the kid in the picture. So the ego's flexibility is coupled with enough rigidity to maintain identity. The ego acts as border police between I and everything that's not I. In disproportionate amounts, this rigidity turns into egocentrism or selfishness. But mostly, it is a healthy adaptation. You wouldn't survive long if you couldn't tell yourself apart from your neighbor or from the tree in your backyard. Such boundary dissolution occurs in mental illness and psychedelic intoxication. Also, it appears in mystical experience and deep meditation. Something to think about. We've lingered on the ego just so I can show you this is what most of us mean when we say self. In Jung's work, however, the self is a technical term that means something different. The self relates to the ego like how the ocean relates to a wave. Remember, Jung defines the ego as a complex of ideas which constitutes the center of my field of consciousness. Complex is another technical term. In fact, Jung was so fascinated by complexes, he initially called his work complex psychology. By a complex, he means an unconscious focal point of psychic processes. Let me give you an example. Imagine a kid whose dad keeps walking out on him and his mom during arguments. What does the kid feel in these cases? He feels abandoned, unimportant, and unloved. What does he think? He thinks, I'm not wanted. I'm not good enough. With time, these thoughts and emotions clump together in the kid's mind. They form a complex. When he grows up, the boy develops what we call abandonment issues. Even among friends, he suffers from anxiety attacks and feelings of inferiority and possessiveness. Oftentimes, he feels left behind and misunderstood. The odd one out. The boy has no clue, of course, of any connection between his anxiety and his childhood experiences. He would much rather blame himself or those around him for his condition. Those immersed in trauma are usually the last to know it. So, this is how a complex develops under the radar of consciousness. A complex is like a reflex in the psyche. As such, it has certain autonomy. It can act without the ego's knowledge and against the ego's interests. This is why Jung calls complexes split-off components of the psyche. The goal of Jungian therapy is to make the person whole again. A big part of this is bringing complexes out of the unconscious and into consciousness. This way, we return their energy back into its source. The self. Yes, the self. We've arrived. We can understand easily how having abandonment issues is a complex. But Jung calls the ego itself a complex. We've seen that the ego is what we mean when we say I. This leads to the bizarre conclusion that you yourself are a complex. A reflex in the psyche. Jung writes, The ego is only the center of my field of consciousness. It is not identical with the totality of my psyche, but merely one complex among other complexes. I therefore distinguish between the ego and the self, since the ego is only the subject of my consciousness, while the self is the subject of my total psyche, which also includes the unconscious. Okay, let's take this slow. It took me five years to only begin to understand it. Think again about the boy from our example. His abandonment complex forms from the emotions, thoughts, memories, and sensations of his childhood. He grows up feeling I am the odd one out. I'm not good enough. Compare this to what you feel you are, your ego. A lifetime of emotions, thoughts, memories, and sensations clump together. As they accumulate, they create the image of an entity called I. An entity separate from your neighbor and the tree in your backyard. This insight is profound, but remember, Jung dropped the name complex psychology. I think that's because he discovered something deeper. You were not conscious of that something, but it is conscious of you. You do not know what it is, and Jung too, ultimately, did not know what it is. But to work with it, he gave it a name. He called it the self. We read, Jung qualifies the self as an empirical concept. Like the Buddha, he avoids metaphysical claims. He insists on sticking with what we experience psychologically. And what do we experience? Well, in our dreams, our fits of anger and bursts of inspiration, our intuitions, our intrusive thoughts and fantasies, our irrational urges, our Freudian slips. Through these, we experience hidden forces at work within us. Forces we can neither control nor understand. This is the unconscious, but there's more. If we investigate seriously these forces, we find that, while irrational, they're not random. They suggest a hidden mental life, which responds to and influences our conscious life. They reveal something unknown within and around us that acts with a purpose. The most meaningful way of describing this something is to call it a greater personality. Why? Because that's how it presents itself. An immeasurably large self, of which our ego is but an imperfect miniature. Jung writes, Though one should, of course, keep oneself conscious all the time of the anthropomorphism of such a conception. For close on two thousand years, history has been familiar with the figure of the cosmic man, the Anthropos, whose image has merged with that of Yahweh, and also of Christ. Here you might think, this big self sounds suspiciously similar to the Abrahamic god. Is Jung simply smuggling religion into science? Well, it's complicated. Jung sees many central figures of religion, myth and art as symbols of the self. In fact, he singles out Christ and the Buddha as the two most perfect images of psychic wholeness. He says, and a god image. The two ideas, however much we try to differentiate them, always appear blended together. For example, the Atman appears as the individualized self, and at the same time, as the animating principle of the cosmos. And Tao, as a condition of mind, and at the same time, as the correct behavior of cosmic events. Psychologically speaking, the domain of gods begins where consciousness leaves off. For at that point, man is already at the mercy of the natural order, whether he thrive or perish. To the symbols of wholeness that come to him from there, he attaches names which vary according to time and place. But Jung avoids overstepping the boundaries of psychology. He never claims the self is god. He says it would be unscientific to jump to that conclusion. So, if we shouldn't equate the self with deity, what should we define it as? Remember, the ego is a complex, a bundle of psychic energy in our unconscious. The self, however, cannot be a complex. It cannot be located within our unconscious, as it contains our unconscious as well as our consciousness. Moreover, when I say I, and you say I, we mean different things. We each have our own personal ego complexes. But when we say god, or buddha, or Tao, we mean a single thing which transcends us. This is how Jung characterizes the self. As such, the self is not a complex in our personal unconscious. It is an archetype in our collective unconscious, a basic universal pattern of experience. If your ego is a leaf, in your personal unconscious is the branch on which that leaf grows. The self is the tree, out of which all branches grow. The structure of the leaf is a miniature of the structure of the tree. So too, the ego is a miniature of the self. Let me make a crucial point here. Some atheists claim god is simply a projection of human personality onto the cosmos. This quasi-psychological argument is, however, unconvincing. The ego, with all its personal flaws and insecurities, would never result in wholeness, no matter how much we blow it up. This would be like increasing the size of an 8-bit image, expecting it to become 4K. The original lack of detail will only become more obvious. We can do the reverse, however, by starting with a 4K image and downsizing it to 8-bit. You see, the self is not the ego projected big. It is rather the ego that is an imperfect image of the self. Much can be said about the metaphysical implications of this. Psychologically speaking, we can only say it is a fact. I hope all this gives you some idea of the archetype of the self. If it all seems vague to you, that's partly my fault. But not only my fault. Jung himself says it is impossible to give a cut-and-dry definition of the self. He writes, it transcends our powers of imagination to form a clear picture of what we are as a self. For in this operation, the part would have to comprehend the whole. The self will always remain a superordinate quantity. Thank you for watching. To learn more, check out the full-length video here. 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