Ego-Self Axis

The ego-Self axis names the vital connecting link between the conscious center of the personality and the total personality (the Self). Edinger inherits the term from Erich Neumann and formalizes its clinical use in Ego and Archetype: “The line connecting ego-center with Self-center represents the ego-Self axis — the vital connecting link between ego and Self that ensures the integrity of the ego” (Edinger 1972).

The axis is grounded in a formulation from Jung that Edinger cites as the structural claim: “The ego stands to the Self as the moved to the mover … The Self … is an a priori existent out of which the ego evolves. It is, so to speak, an unconscious prefiguration of the ego” (Jung, cited in Edinger 1972).

Development proceeds as a spiral of progressive ego-Self separation: an original identity gives way to differentiation, which permits conscious relationship. Damage to the axis produces alienation; identification along it produces inflation. The analytic encounter is, in this reading, the site where the axis is repaired: “These phenomena indicate that a repair of the ego-Self axis is occurring” (Edinger 1972). The projection of the Self onto the therapist, the emergence of a center of meaning where there had been chaos, the gradual internalization of acceptance — these are phases of the axis’s restoration.

The axis is the structural precondition of the religious function of the psyche: without it there is no ego capable of standing in relation to its own transpersonal ground.

Relationships

• self
• individuation
• religious-function-of-the-psyche
• inflation
• alienation-as-inflations-complement

Primary sources

• edinger-ego-and-archetype (Edinger 1972)
• jung-mysterium-coniunctionis (Jung 1955)