Ego-Self identity and separation

Edinger’s developmental formalization of the ego-Self relation posits an “original state of affairs — experiencing oneself as the center of the universe” — in which ego and Self are not yet distinguished. The infant and the young child live in residual ego-Self identity: “a young man who thought quite naively: ‘The world is my picturebook.’ All the things he encountered he thought were put there for his purposes” (Edinger 1972). Reality-encounter progressively breaks the identity: “he is exiled from paradise, and permanent wound­ing and separation occur. Repeated experiences of alienation continue progressively right into adult life.”

The diagrams in Ego and Archetype render the sequence: shaded regions of residual identity shrinking as the ego differentiates from the Self across four stages. The ego-self-axis is what remains — the “vital connecting link” that holds the separated ego to the totality it emerged from. When the axis is damaged, “a kind of unhealing psychic wound is created… we are alienated from the depths of ourselves and the ground is prepared for psychological illness” (Edinger 1972).

Neumann names the same dynamic in the terms of his developmental mythology: the uroboric origin is the state of ego-Self identity; the emergence of the ego is the hero’s differentiation from this totality; centroversion is the unitive function that first builds the ego and later, in the second half of life, turns back to rebuild the Self on conscious terms. “The unconscious activity of the self dominates the whole of life, but it is only in the second half that this activity becomes conscious” (Neumann 1954/2019).

Relationships

• self
• ego-self-axis
• inflation
• alienation-as-inflations-complement
• centroversion
• uroboros

Primary sources

• edinger-ego-and-archetype (Edinger 1972)
• neumann-origins-history-consciousness (Neumann 1954)