Self-centeredness occupies a pivotal position in the depth-psychological and recovery literatures, functioning simultaneously as a diagnostic category, a spiritual diagnosis, and a paradoxical gateway to transformation. The recovery tradition, most prominently articulated in Alcoholics Anonymous and synthesized by Ernest Kurtz, identifies self-centeredness as ‘the root of our troubles’—a universal human vulnerability rather than a mere moral failing, one whose acknowledgment in community constitutes the first movement toward transcendence. Peterson’s Jungian reading of this formulation adds a crucial dialectical inversion: following Edinger, he argues that egocentrism is the ego’s imitation of the Self, such that compulsive self-centeredness may paradoxically accelerate the journey toward Self-realization. Hillman, approaching from archetypal psychology, traces a cultural dimension, observing that modern language has grown conspicuously self-centered, substituting reports of interior states for descriptions of the actual world—a symptom of the soul’s retreat from engagement with the polis. Yaden and the self-transcendence researchers frame self-centeredness as the phenomenological pole against which self-transcendent experience is defined, wherein diminished self-salience opens into connectedness. Taken together, these voices reveal a productive tension: self-centeredness as pathological isolation requiring communal remedy, and as an archetypal dynamism whose conscious acceptance may become the very mechanism of individuation.
self-centeredness is vulnerability and that both the self-centeredness and the vulnerability are shared must precede any open acknowledgement of sharing honestly in the mutuality of this vulnerability.
Kurtz establishes self-centeredness as a universal human vulnerability whose communal acknowledgment, rather than solitary conquest, is the precondition for genuine spiritual recovery.
, Not God A History of Alcoholics Anonymous, 2010thesis
Selfishness—self-centeredness! That, we think, is the root of our troubles. Driven by a hundred forms of fear, self-delusion, self-seeking, and self-pity, we step on the toes of our fellows and they retaliate.
Peterson, quoting Wilson, presents self-centeredness as the core spiritual dilemma driving all addictive and fearful behavior, and situates it within a Jungian framework of ego-Self dynamics.
, The Shadow of a Figure of Light, 2024thesis
egocentrism is the ego’s imitation of the Self, then it will be by conscious acceptance of this tendency that the ego will become aware of that which it is imitating; namely, the transpersonal center and unity of individuality, the Self.
Drawing on Edinger, Peterson argues that self-centeredness is not merely pathological but is the ego’s mimicry of the Self’s centrality, making its conscious recognition a potential pathway to individuation.
, The Shadow of a Figure of Light, 2024thesis
Each person is like an actor who wants to run the whole show; is forever trying to arrange the lights, the ballet, the scenery and the rest of the players in his own way.
The Big Book diagnoses self-centeredness as the fundamental posture of self-will run riot, presenting the ego’s compulsion to orchestrate all of life as the root of personal and relational failure.
, Alcoholics Anonymous, Fourth Edition The Official ‘Big, 2001thesis
Our everyday language gives evidence of this shrinking away from the world and into our private functions. The adjectives we use to describe events have become more and more self-centered.
Hillman identifies a cultural symptom of self-centeredness in the linguistic shift from describing the world to reporting one’s own affective states, linking depth psychology’s emphasis on interiority to collective narcissistic retreat.
, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis
In self-love, Tony was not speaking of narcissistic self-centeredness or navel gazing. He was speaking of embracing our wounded inner self and turning to our Higher Power for breath, life, and healing.
The ACA text carefully distinguishes narcissistic self-centeredness from therapeutic self-love, framing the latter as an outward-directed act grounded in Higher Power rather than ego inflation.
, ADULT CHILDREN OF ALCOHOLICS DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES, 2012supporting
self-transcendence, in the term’s most general sense, is often used by others to describe a generalized reduction of self-centeredness and selfish motivations.
Yaden positions reduced self-centeredness as the defining phenomenological signature of self-transcendent experience, situating it as the experiential opposite pole against which mystical and prosocial states are measured.
, The Varieties of Self-Transcendent Experience, 2017supporting
Unconscious individuality expresses itself in compulsive drives to pleasure and power and ego defenses of all kinds. These phenomena are generally described by negatively-toned words such as selfish, egocentric, autoerotic, and so forth.
Edinger cautions that negatively-toned labels for self-centered behavior, however justified, can obscure the underlying individuation dynamic that unconscious selfhood is striving to express.
, Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche, 1972supporting
the cult of self-esteem at all costs (as opposed to ‘if truly deserved’), seems too often to lead to mediocrity and an insufferable self-conceit.
McGilchrist, citing Baumeister, argues that institutionalized self-esteem culture produces a form of self-centeredness antithetical to genuine achievement, advocating instead for self-discipline grounded in ethical behavior.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
freedom from the Other switches into narcissistic self-relation, which occasions many of the psychic disturbances afflicting today’s achievement-subject.
Han diagnoses late-modern self-centeredness as a dialectical consequence of emancipation from external authority, where the removal of otherness generates narcissistic collapse and psychic exhaustion.
, The Burnout Society, 2010supporting
love for others and love for oneself are mutually exclusive should be stressed. If it is a virtue to love my neighbor as a human being, it must be a virtue—and not a vice—to love myself, since I am a human being too.
Fromm refutes the assumption that self-love is equivalent to self-centeredness, arguing that genuine other-directed love is psychologically inseparable from the capacity for respectful self-regard.
, The Art of Loving, 1956supporting
ego rightly emphasizes its central position. This basic fact of the human situation has its mythological equivalent in the divine birth of the hero and his filiation to ‘heaven.’
Neumann contextualizes ego-centeredness within the mythological structure of centroversion, suggesting that the ego’s self-emphasis is a necessary developmental feature rooted in the archetypal dynamic of consciousness itself.
, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019aside
The narcissistic person simply does not know how profound and interesting his nature is. In his narcissism he is condemned to carry the weight of life’s responsibilities on his own shoulders.
Moore reframes narcissistic self-centeredness not as excess self-love but as a failure to discover the deeper interior life, rendering the individual overburdened rather than self-indulgent.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992aside