Plotinian Ascent as Classical Root of the Ego-Self Axis

The ego-Self axis as Edinger formalizes it in Ego and Archetype is the modern psychological description of a structure the Neoplatonic tradition already knew. Plotinus describes the soul’s ascent to the Intellect and, beyond it, to the One in a passage that reads as an early phenomenology of what Jung will name the Self:

“Lifted out of the body into myself; becoming external to all other things and self-encentered; beholding a marvellous beauty; then, more than ever, assured of community with the loftiest order; enacting the noblest life, acquiring identity with the divine; stationing within It by having attained that activity; poised above whatsoever within the Intellectual is less than the Supreme” ([[plotinus-six-enneads|Plotinus, Enn. IV.8.1]], trans. MacKenna & Page).

Hadot, as Sharpe & Ure report, reads Plotinus’s Enneads as a philosophical practice whose stages correspond to “levels of inner life” — the soul moves from identification with bodily affect, through the self-centered intellect, to communion with the transpersonal source (Sharpe & Ure 2021). This is structurally what Edinger’s diagrams describe: an ego-center that differentiates from and then re-relates to the Self-center. The axis is Plotinian before it is Jungian.

The continuity is not a generic resemblance. Jung cites Plotinus and the Neoplatonic line throughout the later Collected Works; Edinger inherits the continuity without needing to argue for it. The thread is that the clinical construct of the ego-Self axis does not originate in the twentieth-century consulting room but in the antique discipline of the soul’s return. Plotinus and the Self traces the broader lineage; this thread names the specific root of Edinger’s axis.

Sources

• plotinus-six-enneads (Plotinus, Enn. IV.8.1): the soul’s ascent as communion with the divine-intellectual order.
• Sharpe & Ure 2021: Hadot’s reading of the Enneads as graduated levels of inner life.
• edinger-ego-and-archetype (Edinger 1972): the ego-Self axis as the modern clinical description.
• Jung: Plotinus cited as a precursor of the Self-concept across Mysterium Coniunctionis and Aion.