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Ego-consciousness

Ego-consciousness

Ego-consciousness names consciousness as it is centered on and directed by the ego, distinguished from consciousness in its broader sense as the field within which the ego sits. Neumann makes the centering its developmental story: “Whereas in its later developments centroversion promotes the formation of ego consciousness as its specific organ, in the uroboric phase, when ego consciousness has not yet been differentiated into a separate system, centroversion is still identified with the functioning of the body as a whole” (Neumann 1954). Ego-consciousness is the outcome of a differentiation the psyche performs upon itself.

Giegerich names the contemporary hazard: in the absence of symbolic and ritual containment, “consciousness itself becomes ego-consciousness” — the psyche collapses into its own center and loses the dimension that would redeem the center’s finitude. “The search for the Self is the opposite of itself” (Giegerich) because the more the modern person seeks the Self through archetypal material, the more the ego consolidates its hold on the search itself. The logical form of consciousness — not its contents — becomes the problem psychology must address.

Ego-consciousness is therefore not an achievement once-and-for-all but a continuous relation maintained against its own tendency to absolutize.

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