The term ‘ego position’ traverses the depth-psychology corpus along several distinct axes, none reducible to the others. In Jungian and post-Jungian writing, the phrase most often designates the structural stance the ego adopts relative to the unconscious and to the Self: whether it holds itself as absolute center, submits to relativization, or negotiates a mediatory ‘third position’ through the transcendent function. Jung himself insisted that the ego’s formerly absolute position had been decisively relativized by the empirical discovery of a psyche outside consciousness, making the question of where the ego stands — and how firmly it stands there — a clinical and metaphysical matter of the first order. Neumann traces the ego’s positional history developmentally, linking its central position in the first half of life to centroversion and its surrender in the second half to individuation. Edinger maps the same terrain through the ego-Self axis, distinguishing credo containment, secular inflation, and genuine ego-Self dialogue as three fundamental religious-psychological positions. The Kleinian current introduces a parallel but distinct vocabulary: paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions are not ego postures toward the Self but structural organizations of early object relations and anxiety, establishing a competitive nomenclature that post-Jungians such as Samuels have worked to integrate. Giegerich, from a logical-life perspective, critiques imaginal psychology for retaining an ‘unshaken position of the ego’ that he regards as an anthropological fallacy. Across this literature the stakes are constant: how the ego positions itself determines the possibility of individuation, the quality of consciousness, and the depth of psychological transformation.
With this discovery the position of the ego, till then absolute, became relativized…. It is part of the personality but not the whole of it.
This passage, citing Jung directly, identifies the relativization of the ego’s formerly absolute position as the foundational epistemological event of modern depth psychology.
, Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion, 1985thesis
the tension necessary (between opposing forces of the ego and unconscious) to create a third position in the ego, developing the personality further towards wholeness
This passage articulates the ego position as dynamically generative: by holding the tension between itself and the unconscious counter-position, the ego produces a third, transcendent position that advances individuation.
, Individuation in Addiction Recovery: An Archetypal Astrological Perspective, 2025thesis
The ego is, by definition, subordinate to the self and is related to it like a part to the whole. Inside the field of consciousness it has, as we say, free will.
Jung defines the ego’s position as structurally subordinate to the Self while retaining the subjective experience of free will within its own field, establishing the fundamental asymmetry that governs ego-Self relations.
, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951thesis
Basically there are three possible religious positions concerning these terms creature and creator. First is what I call credo containment. Second is secular, rationalistic alienation, usually accompanied by inflation. And third is ego/Self dialogue, or individuation.
Edinger taxonomizes the ego’s fundamental existential positions relative to the Self/creator, identifying individuation as the only stance that sustains genuine psychological development.
, Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung’s Answer to Job, 1992thesis
Whereas in the first half of life the central position of the ego does not allow the workings of centroversion to come to consciousness, the middle period is characterized by a decisive change of personality.
Neumann maps the ego’s positional history developmentally, showing that the ego’s central, dominant position in the first half of life must yield to centroversion becoming conscious in the individuation crisis of midlife.
, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019thesis
the unshaken position of the ego appears in the retention of the idea of a ‘being’ or ‘personality’ as the reference point and positive substrate of psychology. This is the expression of what I call the ‘anthropological fallacy’
Giegerich argues that imaginal psychology’s failure to dislodge the ego from its central position perpetuates an anthropological fallacy, confounding psychology with anthropology and blocking genuine soul-inquiry.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
The ego will be torn between these two opposites of sensuality and spirituality and will try to keep to the middle ground. This middle ground then becomes tremendously important because the combination of spirituality/sensuality which forms is a genuinely new product.
Samuels illustrates how the ego’s positional struggle between unconscious opposites, when held rather than resolved unilaterally, generates the transcendent function’s genuinely new synthetic product.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis
Jung said that the ego arises from the clash between the individual’s bodily limitations and the environment. Subsequently, the ego develops from further clashes with the external world and also with the internal world.
Samuels summarizes Jung’s developmental account of how the ego’s position is never given but arises from and is continuously reshaped by conflict with both external reality and internal psychic forces.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
seeing the ego as an ally of imagination underscores the inadequacy of the hero—or any other single image—as a representation of ego-consciousness. For example, only a non-heroic ego can dispense with its strengths to permit integration of the products of the imagination.
Samuels argues that the ego’s positional stance toward imagination — whether heroic and rigid or permeable and flexible — is as decisive for psychological health as any structural account of ego-Self relations.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
The ego stands to the Self as the moved to the mover … The Self … is an a priori existent out of which the ego evolves. It is, so to speak, an unconscious prefiguration of the ego.
Edinger’s citation of Jung establishes the ego’s position as secondary and derivative within the Self-ego axis, with the Self functioning as ontological ground and guarantor of the ego’s integrity.
, Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche, 1972supporting
we may postulate that any negotiation with these six positions must activate the degree of self-awareness that is appropriate to each one of them
Lambert, as presented by Samuels, proposes that distinct developmental ego positions — oral through depressive — each demand and generate a qualitatively different degree of self-awareness, pluralizing the concept of ego position.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
The sixth possibility is that the ego-complex may be too weak to preserve the individual’s unity and integration so that these crack and cannot hold under the impact of the multiplicity and primitivity of the unconscious.
Samuels enumerates the pathological extreme of ego position — structural weakness that renders the ego unable to hold its ground against the overwhelming multiplicity of unconscious contents.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
To become conscious of oneself, to be conscious at all, begins with saying ‘no’ to the uroboros, to the Great Mother, to the unconscious. And when we scrutinize the acts upon which consciousness and the ego are built up, we must admit that to begin with they are all negative acts.
Neumann grounds the original ego position in a constitutive act of negation and differentiation from the unconscious matrix, making opposition itself the precondition for ego formation.
, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019supporting
The ego sums up all that is involved in separation, sense of boundary, personal identity and external achievement ‘with all the images associated with one’s own body and one’s own personality’
Gordon, via Samuels, defines the ego’s positional identity as fundamentally separative — constituted by boundary, distinction, and personal achievement — in structural tension with the Self’s drive toward fusion and wholeness.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
The ego is a focal point within consciousness, its most central and perhaps most permanent feature. Against the opinion of the East, Jung argues that without an ego, consciousness itself becomes questionable.
Stein articulates Jung’s defense of the ego’s central position within consciousness as an epistemological necessity, distinguishing his view from Eastern traditions that seek ego dissolution.
, Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction, 1998supporting
there are enormous differences in the quality of ego-consciousness depending on which zone is centred upon. I want to underline the idea of different ego styles.
Samuels draws on Plaut’s zonal theory to argue that ego position is not monolithic but varies qualitatively depending on the bodily-developmental zone that is centered, producing a typology of ego styles.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
the ego must also not become the Self, as this poses a threat to individuation
Dennett specifies that a critical ego position for individuation is the maintenance of distinction from the Self — ego inflation through identification with the Self is as obstructive as ego weakness.
, Individuation in Addiction Recovery: An Archetypal Astrological Perspective, 2025supporting
for Hillman, following the principles of his archetypal psychology, we arrive at the proposition that the heroic ego, far from being about separation from the mother, simply leads us back to her.
Samuels presents Hillman’s paradox that the heroic ego position — ostensibly one of separation and autonomous strength — is structurally self-defeating, looping back into the maternal-unconscious it claims to have escaped.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
a strong regression from the depressive position to the earlier paranoid-schizoid position may take place. This would also impede the processes of introjection of the complete object
Klein details how the ego’s positional regression from the depressive to the paranoid-schizoid position — a failure of developmental consolidation — disrupts introjection and arrests psychological maturation.
, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, 1957supporting
the ego is able to introject and establish the complete object and to go through the depressive position. If, however, the ego is unable to deal with the many severe anxiety-situations arising at this stage… a strong regression from the depressive position to the earlier paranoid-schizoid position may take place.
Klein frames the ego’s successful navigation of the depressive position as contingent on adequate integration and the capacity to contain anxiety, with regression marking a failure of this positional advance.
, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, 1957supporting
ego-defences, which have tended to be seen negatively and as dispensable in a state of mental health, are now understood as a part of maturation.
Samuels notes Fordham’s rehabilitation of ego defences as constitutive of the ego’s positional stability rather than merely pathological reactions, reframing the ego’s protective stance as developmentally necessary.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985aside
the intention of psychoanalysis is ‘to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the super-ego, to widen its field of perception and enlarge its organization, so that it can appropriate fresh portions of the id’
Flores cites Freud’s therapeutic goal as the consolidation and expansion of the ego’s position vis-à-vis the id and super-ego, providing the Freudian baseline against which Jungian ego-relativization is implicitly contrasted.
, Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations An, 1997aside