Surrender / Ego-Death

Surrender and ego-death are the twinned terms the recovery literature and the depth-psychological tradition use for the psychic movement by which the ego’s claim to self-sufficient control is given up, so that a larger pattern — what Jung calls the Self, what the recovery tradition calls the Higher Power, what the alchemical tradition enacts as mortificatio — can become operative.

The First Step of Alcoholics Anonymous — the admission of powerlessness — is the canonical modern formulation of the condition: surrender is the precondition of recovery because the will that created the problem cannot solve it. Kurtz‘s [[kurtz-not-god|Not-God]] treats the thesis historically; the Grofs’ The Thirst for Wholeness treats it in the register of transpersonal crisis; the Jungian tradition reads it as the canonical moment of individuation at which the ego relinquishes its pretension to be the center and recognizes the Self. The alchemical figure is the blackening of the nigredo, the death of the old king, from which alone the filius can arise. See addiction-as-distorted-religion and mortificatio.

Relationships

• mortificatio
• kurtz-not-god
• addiction-as-distorted-religion