Ego Relativization

Ego relativization stands as one of the cardinal concepts in depth-psychological thought, designating the recognition that the ego is not the sovereign center of psychic life but a partial structure dependent upon, and circumscribed by, the larger archetypal field Jung termed the Self. The corpus reveals a spectrum of positions ranging from Jung’s own careful qualification — that relativization must not be carried so far that the ego is dissolved — to Hillman’s archetypal psychology, which elevates the ‘radical relativization and desubstantiation of the ego’ to a programmatic imperative. Jung’s alchemical writings provide the epistemological grounding: the discovery of a psyche outside consciousness necessarily relativized a previously ‘absolute’ ego position. Edinger elaborates the developmental consequences, mapping how the ego-Self axis undergoes progressive separation and reunion across the life cycle, while Neumann traces the historical dangers of secondary personalization when relativization fails and ego overvaluation reasserts itself. Hillman and the archetypal school push furthest, arguing that the equation of consciousness with ego constitutes a constellation of fallacies — literalistic, personalistic, naturalistic — and that consciousness derived from soul exceeds anything ego-centered models can contain. The central tension the corpus sustains is between relativization as therapeutic necessity and relativization as philosophical dissolution: a distinction on which the clinical and theoretical traditions diverge sharply.

In the library 15 passages

an attempt to bring to consciousness a standpoint outside the ego, involving a relativization of the ego and its contents… the position of the ego, till then absolute, became relativized…. It is part of the personality but not the whole of it.

Jung’s own formulation, quoted by Hillman, establishes ego relativization as the epistemological consequence of discovering an unconscious psyche beyond consciousness, ending the ego’s prior claim to absolute centrality.

Hillman, James, Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion, 1985thesis

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the radical relativization and desubstantiation of the ego — will be discussed below.

Goldenberg’s survey of archetypal psychology identifies radical ego relativization as one of its two defining programmatic thrusts, distinguishing it from classical Jungian doctrine.

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology, 1983thesis

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the radical relativization and desubstantiation of the ego — will be discussed below.

Identical formulation confirming that ego relativization, understood in its most radical form, is constitutive of the archetypal psychology program as distinguished from its Jungian source.

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983thesis

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it is merely the one-sided over-valuation of the latter that has to be checked by a certain relativization of values. But this relativization should not be carried so far that the ego is complete

Jung delimits ego relativization as a corrective against one-sided over-valuation of consciousness, explicitly warning against its excess and preserving the ego’s functional necessity.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Practice of Psychotherapy: Essays on the Psychology of the Transference and Other Subjects, 1954thesis

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The world of consciousness must now be levelled down in favour of the reality of the unconscious… the presumption of the ego can only be damped down by moral defeat.

Jung articulates the condition under which ego relativization becomes ethically necessary — when ego inflation assimilates the Self — requiring what he calls a ‘moral defeat’ to restore balance.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951thesis

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a corresponding relativization of the ego position in natural science. Cases of multiple personality were important because they confirmed the multiplicty of the individual

Hillman places ego relativization within a broader cultural-historical frame, linking it to the simultaneous fragmentation occurring in science, art, and psychiatry at the turn of the twentieth century.

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting

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when secondary personalization seeks to assert itself by devaluing the transpersonal forces, it produces a dangerous overvaluation of the ego. It is a typical false constellation of the modern mind.

Neumann diagnoses the failure of ego relativization as ‘secondary personalization,’ a defensive reduction of transpersonal forces that produces pathological ego inflation characteristic of modernity.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019supporting

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To put it together with ego limits consciousness to the perspectives of the cave which today we would call the literalistic, personalistic, practicalistic, naturalistic, and humanistic fallacies.

Hillman argues that identifying consciousness with the ego is not merely an error but a constellation of fallacies, implying that ego relativization is a prerequisite for any adequate theory of consciousness.

Hillman, James, Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion, 1985supporting

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Power motivation of all kinds is symptomatic of inflation. Whenever one operates out of a power motive omnipotence is implied. But omnipotence is an attribute only of God.

Edinger correlates resistance to ego relativization with the symptom of inflation, in which the ego usurps attributes — omnipotence, omniscience — properly belonging to the transpersonal Self.

Edinger, Edward F., Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche, 1972supporting

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the central aim of all religious practices is to keep the individual (ego) related to the deity (Self). All religions are repositories of transpersonal experience and archetypal images.

Edinger interprets religious practice as the collective, traditional means by which cultures have historically institutionalized ego relativization, preventing inflation through ritual relationship to the transpersonal.

Edinger, Edward F., Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche, 1972supporting

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progressive stages of ego-Self separation appearing in the course of psychological development… the ego-Self axis — the vital connecting link between ego and Self that ensures the integrity of the ego.

Edinger provides a structural diagram of ego relativization across development, showing that separation from the Self is necessary for ego formation while the connecting axis must remain intact.

Edinger, Edward F., Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche, 1972supporting

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dominants of, 325, 358ff, 367, 369f, 379 —, binding force of, 368… —, relativization of, 325 —, renewal of, 355, 358f, 368f, 372f

The index of Mysterium Coniunctionis explicitly cross-references ‘relativization of consciousness’ as a discrete topic, confirming that ego/consciousness relativization is a formally indexed concept in Jung’s alchemical opus.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, 1955aside

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taboo psychology… sin was the breach of a taboo… the tabooed object carried suprapersonal energies. To touch or appropriate such an object was a danger to the ego because it was transcending proper human limits.

Edinger reads the archaic concept of taboo as a cultural mechanism encoding the danger of ego transgression into the transpersonal domain, an early form of the relativization imperative.

Edinger, Edward F., Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche, 1972aside

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only a non-heroic ego can dispense with its strengths to permit integration of the products of the imagination.

Samuels, reporting Plaut’s position, implies that ego relativization — conceived as the ego relinquishing heroic control — is a prerequisite for imaginative integration rather than an end in itself.

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

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