Heroic Ego

The heroic ego names the mythologized figure of the ego as it appears in Neumann’s developmental account and as it is then criticized by Hillman. For Neumann, the ego’s emergence from the uroboric round repeats mythologically the “divine birth of the hero and his filiation to ‘heaven’” (Neumann 1954). The hero’s journey — slaying the dragon, winning the treasure, returning — is the inner story of ego-formation writ as myth, and the “father-son likeness between self and ego” is manifest both in the hero’s martial exploits and in consciousness’s synthetic power to build culture in the likeness of the divine.

Hillman takes this inheritance as the very problem archetypal psychology was convened to address. Psychology that centers the heroic ego as its protagonist inherits the hero’s violence — its will to conquest, its intolerance of ambiguity, its need to slay what it cannot assimilate. “Consciousness itself becomes ego-consciousness” when the ego is made the measure (Giegerich). Hillman’s polytheistic alternative refuses the ego’s sovereignty and restores a plurality of perspectives — each god a style of consciousness, no god the king.

The disagreement is real. Neumann reads the heroic ego as developmental necessity; Hillman reads it as psychology’s captivity to a single archetypal perspective. The ego-Self axis, Edinger’s figure, holds the middle — the ego is necessary, and the ego is not sovereign.

Relationships

• ego
• hero-myth
• centroversion
• soul-making
• polytheistic-psychology
• individuation

Primary sources

• neumann-origins-history-consciousness (Neumann 1954)
• hillman-revisioning-psychology (Hillman)
• giegerich-souls-logical-life (Giegerich)