---
slug: papadopoulos-the-self-6479fd0b
title: "Papadopoulos on The Self"
author: "Renos K. Papadopoulos"
work: "The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications"
section: ""
year: "2006"
tradition: jungian-core
themes:
  - the-self
fragment: |
  I call this centre `the self' which should be understood as the totality of the psyche. The self is not only the centre, but also the whole circum-ference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the centre of this totality, just as the ego is the centre of consciousness.
lead_in: ""
reflection: |
  Jung's geometry here is precise and worth sitting with slowly. The ego is a center — that much feels intuitive, even flattering. But the Self is two things at once: another center, and also the entire circumference. It contains the ego the way a circle contains a point. The ego does not rise into the Self; it is already held inside something it cannot fully perceive from where it stands.
  
  This is where the geometry gets uncomfortable. The circumference includes what is unconscious — which is to say, what the ego has not yet met, has refused, has no language for, has been carrying without knowing it. When individuation is spoken of as expansion, as becoming more, as growth into wholeness, the circumference is being imagined as a horizon to reach. But Jung's formulation doesn't support that reading. The circumference is already drawn. The question is not whether to reach it but whether the ego can bear the recognition that it has never been the whole — that it is a point inside something that has always exceeded it, and that the exceeded portion is not an achievement waiting ahead but a fact that was already true before the question was asked.
reflection_v0_3: |
  The geometry here is worth slowing down for: Jung gives the Self two functions at once, centre and circumference, and they are not in tension — they are the same claim made twice. A centre without a bounding edge is just a point floating in nothing; a circumference without a centre has no inside. What Jung is after is a container that also organizes, a totality that also orients. Edinger spent much of his career unpacking exactly this double role, arguing that the ego's entire developmental task is to come into right relation with something that is simultaneously its ground and its limit. The quiet consequence of this geometry is that the ego cannot stand outside the Self to evaluate it — the evaluator is already enclosed. You are always, on this account, inside what you are trying to understand.
parent_id: Papadopoulos_2006_The_Handbook_of_Jungian_Psychology__par0057
source: oracle-v3-retrieve
generated: 2026-04-17
regenerated: 2026-04-18
prompt_version: v2.7
status: draft
---

Papadopoulos writes:

> I call this centre `the self' which should be understood as the totality of the psyche. The self is not only the centre, but also the whole circum-ference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the centre of this totality, just as the ego is the centre of consciousness.

— Renos K. Papadopoulos

Jung's geometry here is precise and worth sitting with slowly. The ego is a center — that much feels intuitive, even flattering. But the Self is two things at once: another center, and also the entire circumference. It contains the ego the way a circle contains a point. The ego does not rise into the Self; it is already held inside something it cannot fully perceive from where it stands.

This is where the geometry gets uncomfortable. The circumference includes what is unconscious — which is to say, what the ego has not yet met, has refused, has no language for, has been carrying without knowing it. When individuation is spoken of as expansion, as becoming more, as growth into wholeness, the circumference is being imagined as a horizon to reach. But Jung's formulation doesn't support that reading. The circumference is already drawn. The question is not whether to reach it but whether the ego can bear the recognition that it has never been the whole — that it is a point inside something that has always exceeded it, and that the exceeded portion is not an achievement waiting ahead but a fact that was already true before the question was asked.

---

Renos K. Papadopoulos · *The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications* · 2006