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Inflation

Inflation

In analytical psychology, inflation names the ego’s identification with an archetypal content it does not possess but is possessed by. The ego, animated by a power that belongs to the Self or to one of the dominants of the collective-unconscious, mistakes the radiance for its own light and behaves as the totality.

Jung defines the structure with precision: “The characteristic feature of a pathological reaction is, above all, identification with the archetype. This produces a sort of inflation and possession by the emergent contents, so that they pour out in a torrent which no therapy can stop. Identification can, in favourable cases, sometimes pass off as a more or less harmless inflation. But in all cases identification with the unconscious brings a weakening of consciousness” (Jung 1959, par. 621). The same description in Two Essays gives the canonical figure: when the ego draws to itself the mana released by the depotentiation of the anima, it becomes a mana-personality — a temporary godlikeness that is “an almost regular phenomenon” of the analytic process (Jung 1953, par. 389).

The term does not carry its Freudian-economic or its monetary register. It is a structural diagnosis: the ego is not the dominant; when it acts as if it were, it swells; the swelling is followed, of necessity, by a collision with reality and a corresponding contraction. Edinger gives the contraction its name — alienation — and draws the oscillation as the basic developmental cycle. Inflation does not come without its complement; the two define each other.

The classical tradition prefigures the diagnosis. hubris names the act of mortal overreach; ate names the divinely sent blindness in which the inflated agent cannot see the thing destroying him. The depth tradition inherits both as twin precursors to its own term.

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