Ego-development through collision

Jung’s account of how the ego grows is not developmental-maturational but frictional. The ego is given as a virtual center from birth, but it is earned as an effective center through what Jung calls collisions: “Although its bases are themselves relatively unknown and unconscious, both psychic and somatic, the ego is a conscious factor par excellence. It is even acquired, empirically speaking, during the individual’s lifetime. It seems to arise in the first place from the collision between the somatic factor and the environment, and, once established as a subject, it goes on developing from further collisions with the outer world and the inner” (Jung, as quoted in Stein 1998, p. 28).

Stein glosses: “conflict, trouble, anguish, sorrow, suffering. These are what lead the ego to develop” (Stein 1998, p. 29). A moderate friction between the psycho-physical body and an environment demanding response is the optimal condition for ego growth. Too little collision leaves the ego unformed; catastrophic collision — trauma, abuse — injures it into fragility.

The collision theory carries a cost the tradition has sometimes been reluctant to name: there is no painless route to an effective ego. The shadow is acquired in the same collisions, as the ego comes to reject what the environment will not tolerate. Suffering is not an accident of psychic life. It is the medium in which the center of consciousness is tempered.

Relationships

• ego
• individuation
• complex
• shadow
• midlife-transformation

Primary sources

• jungs-map-of-the-soul (Stein 1998, quoting Jung CW 9ii)