Alienation as Inflation’s Complement

In Edinger’s systematization of Jung, inflation never appears alone. It moves in cycle with its complement: alienation, the felt severance of the ego from the Self, the wound left when an inflated ego collides with reality and is rejected. “A kind of unhealing psychic wound is created in the process of learning he is not the deity he thought he was. He is exiled from paradise, and permanent wounding and separation occur” (Edinger 1972, p. 13). Alienation is what damaged inflation feels like from the inside.

Edinger draws the cycle: original wholeness → inflated act → rejection → alienation from Self → humility, repentance, metanoia → partial restoration of the ego-self-axis → renewed inflation. “Psychic growth involves a series of inflated or heroic acts. These provoke rejection and are followed by alienation, repentance, restitution and renewed inflation” (Edinger 1972, p. 41). The pendulum is not a pathology but the basic developmental rhythm; what is pathological is when alienation deepens past restitution into permanent severance, “the ground prepared for psychological illness” (Edinger 1972, p. 13).

The clinical relevance is that the two poles produce identical-looking material at opposite charges. The patient who feels worthless, abandoned by life, severed from any source of meaning, is not in a different condition from the patient who feels chosen, exalted, possessed of secret knowledge — they are two phases of the same broken axis. Therapy aims neither at the suppression of inflation nor at the rescue from alienation but at the conscious realization of the ego-self-axis itself, at which point “a dialectic process between ego and Self can, to some extent, replace the previous pendulum swing between inflation and alienation” (Edinger 1972, p. 103). Conscious dialogue supersedes the unconscious oscillation. This is what Edinger calls individuation.

Relationships

Primary sources

edinger-ego-and-archetype (Edinger 1972, pp. 13, 40–42, 55, 103)