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Ego

Ego

In the Jungian sense — and the sense this vault intends wherever the word appears — the ego is the center of the field of consciousness, not the whole of the psyche. It is “a focal point within consciousness, its most central and perhaps most permanent feature” (Stein 1998, p. 18), against which William James’s stream of consciousness is the larger field it navigates. Stein’s figure, following Jung: “The ego is a point or a dot that dips into the stream and can separate itself from the stream of consciousness and become aware of it as something other than itself” (Stein 1998, p. 28).

The ego is innate, not acquired. “Fundamentally, the ego is a virtual center of awareness that exists at least from birth, the eye that sees and has always seen the world from this vantage point, from this body, from this individual point of view” (Stein 1998, p. 19). What develops through life is its range and strength, won through Jung’s collisions — conflict, frustration, and suffering by which the ego is forced into articulation against reality.

The ego is morally neutral. Popular usage treats it pejoratively; Jungian usage treats it structurally. The ego is “the locus of decisionmaking and free will” and “the individualizing agent in human consciousness” (Stein 1998, p. 19). Without an ego, consciousness itself becomes questionable. With only an ego, the psyche has been mistaken for its own smallest part.

The ego is one complex among complexes — a feeling-toned complex organized around the axis of I-ness. It stands in identified relation to the persona (its outward-facing mask) and in oppositional relation to the shadow (its unconscious backside). It is subordinate to the Self and related to it through the ego-Self axis, whose integrity is the work of individuation.

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