Alter Ego

the Alter Ego asks his human self to recount his itinerarium spirituale. For this Quest could lead the human self to a goal that had been known since pre-eternity to his divine Alter Ego, who in answer makes this known to the human self through the story of his pre-eternal enthronement.

Corbin presents the alter ego as the divine, angelic counterpart to the human self in Ibn Arabi’s mysticism, a pre-eternal twin whose knowledge of the soul’s destiny is disclosed through initiatory dialogue.

Corbin, Henry, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis

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among them each earthly being has his Twin of light. This mundus imaginalis also has its guardian spirit (its dmutha), its king of light, Shishlam Rba

Corbin establishes the Mandean and Iranian Sufi doctrine of the luminous Twin as the cosmic alter ego inhabiting the mundus imaginalis, the celestial double that corresponds to each earthly being.

Corbin, Henry, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971supporting

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intentionalities that are directed to the other as foreign, that is, as other than me, go beyond the sphere of ownness in which they are nevertheless rooted. Husserl gave the name ‘appresentation’ to this givenness

Ricoeur, drawing on Husserl, articulates the intersubjective constitution of the alter ego through analogical transfer from one’s own flesh to the other’s body, grounding otherness in the paradox of appresentation.

Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting

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The perception of other people and the intersubjective world are problematical only for adults. The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him.

Merleau-Ponty traces the developmental emergence of the alter ego as a problem, noting that the child inhabits a pre-reflective interworld before the self-other distinction solidifies into adult consciousness.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting

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The story of Jekyll and Hyde represents an extreme form of this. Another novel with the same theme is The Picture of Dorian Gray, where the main character keeps a picture of himself in the attic.

Stein uses the Jekyll-and-Hyde and Dorian Gray figures as literary emblems of the alter ego dynamic, wherein the shadow-self accumulates what the persona disavows, representing an extreme splitting of the unified personality.

Stein, Murray, Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction, 1998supporting

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Stories such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde describe a complete split between persona and shadow. In these stories there is no integration, only fluctuation back and forth between the opposites.

Stein argues that the alter ego, in its pathological form as persona-shadow split, forecloses the transcendent function and produces an oscillation between opposites rather than their integration.

Stein, Murray, Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction, 1998supporting

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Ego-consciousness seems to need this ‘other’, this archetypal thou. We can see this even more clearly in Zinkin’s work

Samuels identifies the structural necessity of an archetypal ‘other’ — an inner alter ego — for the very constitution of ego-consciousness, linking this to Lambert’s adversarial principle and its developmental function.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting

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there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself. When I return to myself from an excursion into the realm of dogmatic common sense or of science, I find, not a source of intrinsic truth, but a subject destined to be in the world.

Merleau-Ponty’s rejection of the ‘inner man’ establishes the phenomenological horizon within which the alter ego cannot be a purely internal figure but must be constituted through worldly, embodied encounter.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962aside

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In the dream, he is struggling to tear off a mask, which he cannot detach, and he ends up pulling his face off along with the mask. The bishop’s ego is utterl

Stein’s illustration of the bishop’s dream — the ego fused with its mask — figures the collapse of distance between self and persona-alter that underlies pathological identification.

Stein, Murray, Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction, 1998aside

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