Ego Not Master in Its Own House

The claim that the ego is not master in its own house names the decisive turn of depth psychology. Jung makes the claim operational in the association experiment. “If we submit such a case to an association experiment, we soon discover that he is not master in his own house. His reactions will be delayed, altered, suppressed, or replaced by autonomous intruders” (Jung 1958, Psychology and Religion: West and East). The decentring of the ego is not a metaphor borrowed from philosophy; it is an observation of reaction times.

In Jung’s earliest work the finding is put sharply: “consciousness plays only a minor role in the process of association. All our thinking and acting, the vast bulk of which appears to us to be conscious, actually consist of all those little bits that are finely determined by innumerable” — and here Jung means complex-constellations (Jung 1904, Experimental Researches). The ego does not author the person’s speech; the person’s speech is co-authored by complexes of which the ego is largely unaware.

The claim is continuous with the classical tradition it inherits. The Homeric hero’s thumos rouses him without his bidding; the Platonic tripartite soul contains elements that must be reined in by reason. The homeric-plural-self already knew what the association experiment measured. What Jung contributed was the laboratory demonstration — the milliseconds — that removed the claim from philosophy and placed it in empirical psychology.

The therapeutic consequence is the discipline of the autonomous-psychic-complex: one studies the intruders, learns to recognize them, and cultivates a standpoint from which the intrusion can be named. Individuation begins when the ego ceases to claim dominion it does not have.

Relationships

• autonomous-psychic-complex
• word-association-experiments
• homeric-plural-self
• collective-unconscious

Primary sources

• jung-experimental-researches (Jung 1904)
• jung-structure-dynamics-psyche (Jung 1960)