Carl Jung on the “Ego.” Anthology
Natural man is not a “self”—he is the mass and a particle in the mass, collective to such a decree that he is not even sure of his own ego. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 81.
I conjecture that the treasure is also the “companion,” the one who goes through life at our side—in all probability a close analogy to the lonely ego who finds a mate in the self, for at first the self is the strange non-ego. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 117.
But a conscious attitude that renounces its ego-bound intentions—not in imagination only, but in truth—and submits to the supra-personal decrees of fate, can claim to be serving a king. This more exalted attitude raises the status of the anima from that of a temptress to a psychopomp. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 380.
That center, that other order of consciousness which to me is unconscious, would be the self, and that doesn’t confine itself to myself, to my ego: it can include I don’t know how many other people. ~ Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 783.
On the whole my illness proved to be a most valuable experience which gave me the inestimable opportunity of a glimpse behind the veil. The only difficulty is to get rid of the body, to get quite naked and void of the world and the ego-will. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1, Pages 355-357
The ego says “I will,” the self says “thou shalt.” ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 568.
The self in its divinity (i.e., the archetype) is unconscious of itself. It can become conscious only within our consciousness. And it can do that only if the ego stands firm. ~Carl Jung; Letters Volume 1; 335-336.
I wouldn’t call the ego a creation of mind or consciousness, since, as we know, little children talk of themselves first in the third person and begin to say ‘I’ only when they have found their ego. The ego, therefore, is rather a find or an experience and not a creation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1; Pages 254-255.
The ego wants explanation always in order to assert its existence…Try to live without the ego. Whatever must come to you, will come. Don’t worry! …Don’t allow yourself to be led astray by the ravings of the animus…He will try every stunt to get you out of the realization of stillness, which is truly the Self. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1; Page 427.
Whatever happens in the fantasy must happen to you. You should not let yourself be represented by a fantasy figure. You must safeguard the ego and only let it be modified by the unconscious, just as the latter must be acknowledged with full justification and only prevented from suppressing and assimilating the ego. ~ Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1, Page 561
Individuation is not that you become an ego—you would then become an individualist. You know, an individualist is a man who did not succeed in individuating; he is a philosophically distilled egotist. ~Carl Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, Pages 39-40.
Superman is an inflated ego and a disappearing self. He lacks the spark. What would the rainbow be if it had no dark cloud behind it? ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 63.
When someone says, in the words of the “Our Father, ” “Thy will be done,” we must find out, if he is capable of taking both the inside and the outside, the ego and the world, into account. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 36.
I do not know whether Karma creates the ego or the ego creates Karma. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 43.
… something which existed before the ego and is in fact its father or creator. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Transformation of Symbolism of the Mass, Page 263.
The ego is the workshop where the self is made. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 35.
Whenever the creative force predominates, human life is ruled and molded by the unconscious as against the active will, and the conscious ego is swept along on a subterranean current, being nothing more than a helpless observer of events.” Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul; Pages 168-171.
Conscious and unconscious are not necessarily in opposition to one another, but complement one another to form a totality, which is the self. ~Carl Jung; from “e Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious”, 1928.
The unconscious [at times] produces contents which are valid not only for the person concerned, but for others as well, in fact for a great many people and possible for all. ~Carl Jung; “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious”, 1928.
Since the relation of the ego to the self is like that of the son to the father, we can say that when the Self calls on us to sacrifice ourselves, it is really carrying out the sacrificial act on itself. ~Carl Jung; “Transformation Symbolism in the Mass.”; CW 11; Par 398.
Every sacrifice is . . . to a greater or lesser extent a self-sacrifice. The degree to which it is so depends on the significance of the gift. If it is of great value to me and touches my most personal feelings, I can be sure that in giving up my egoistic claim I shall challenge my ego personality to revolt. I can also be sure that the power that suppresses this claim, and thus suppresses me, must be the self.
Hence it is the self that causes me to make the sacrifice; nay more, it compels me to make it . The self is the sacrificer, and I am the sacrificed gift, the human sacrifice. ~Carl Jung; “Transformation Symbolism in the Mass”; CW 11, par. 397.
The term “self” seems a suitable one for the unconscious substrate whose actual exponent in consciousness is the ego. The ego stands to the self as the moved to the mover, or as object to subject, because the determining factors that radiate outward from the self surround the ego on all sides and are therefore supraordinate to it. The self, like the unconscious, as an a priori existent out of which the ego evolves. It is, so to speak, an unconscious prefiguration of the ego. It is not I who create myself; rather, I happen to myself ~Carl Jung; “Transformation Symbolism in the Mass”; CW 11, par. 391.
And Gerhard Dorn cries out, “Transform yourselves into living philosophical stones!” There can hardly be any doubt that not a few of those seekers had the dawning knowledge that the secret nature of the stone was man’s own self. This “self” was evidently never thought of as an entity identical with the ego, and for this reason it was described as a “hidden nature” dwelling in inanimate matter, as a spirit, daemon, or fiery spark.
By means of the philosophical opus, . . . this entity was freed from darkness and imprisonment, and finally it enjoyed a resurrection. . . . It is clear that these ideas can have nothing to do with the empirical ego, but are concerned with a “divine nature” quite distinct from it, and hence, psychologically speaking, with a consciousness-transcending content issuing from the realm of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung; “Psychology and Religion” in CW 11, par. 154.
It is a figure comparable to Hiranyagarbha, Purusha, Atman, and the mystic Buddha. For this reason I have elected to call it the “self,” by which I understand a psychic totality and at the same time a centre, neither of which coincides with the ego but includes it, just as a larger circle encloses a smaller one. ~Carl Jung, CW 9I, 247.
It is of the greatest importance that the ego should be anchored in the world of consciousness and that consciousness should be reinforced by a very precise adaptation. For this, certain virtues like attention, consciousness, patience, etc., are of the greatest value on the moral side, just as accurate observation of the symptomatology of the unconscious and objective self-criticism are valuable on the intellectual side. ~Carl Jung; CW 9/2, par. 46.
This subjective knowledge of the self [is what is meant by]: “No one can know himself unless he knows what, and not who, he is, on what he depends, or whose he is (or to whom or what he belongs) and for what end he was made.” This distinction . . . is crucial. . . . Not the subjective ego-consciousness of the psyche is meant, but the psyche itself as the unknown, unprejudiced object that still has to be investigated. . . .
“What” refers to the neutral self, the objective fact of totality, since the ego is on the one hand causally “dependent on” or “belongs to” it, and on the other hand is directed toward it as to a goal ~Carl Jung; CW 9/2, par. 252.
The “supraordinate personality” is the total man, i.e., man as he really is, not as he appears to himself. . . . I usually describe the supraordinate personality as the “self,” thus making a sharp distinction between the ego, which, as is well known, extends only as far as the conscious mind, and the whole of the personality, which includes the unconscious as well as the conscious component. The ego is thus related to the self as part to whole. To that extent the self is supraordinate. ~Carl Jung; The Psychological Aspects of the Kore,” CW 9i, pars. 314f.
The ego is the subject of all successful attempts at adaptation so far as these are achieved by the will. ~Carl Jung; CW 9ii; para 11
Archetypal statements are based upon instinctive preconditions and have nothing to do with reason; they are neither rationally grounded nor can they be banished by rational arguments. They have always been part of the world scene representations collectives, as Levy-Bruhl rightly called them. Certainly the ego and its will have a great part to play in life; but what the ego wills is subject in the highest degree to the interference, in ways of which the ego is usually unaware, of the autonomy and numinosity of archetypal processes. Practical consideration of these processes is the essence of religion, insofar as religion can be approached from a psychological point of view. ~Carl Jung Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 353.
Once we have freed ourselves from the prejudice that we have to refer to concepts of external experience or to a priori categories of reason, we can turn our attention and curiosity wholly to that strange and unknown thing we call spirit. ~Carl Jung; Spirit and Life ; CW 8; Paragraph 626
From the psychological point of view, the phenomenon of spirit, like every autonomous complex, appears as an intention of the unconscious superior to, or at least on a par with, intentions of the ego. If we are to do justice to the essence of the thing we call spirit, we should really speak of a “higher” consciousness rather than of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung; Spirit and Life; CW 8, par. 643.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge. Carl Jung; Aion; CW 9; Part II; Page 14.
. . . one must learn . . . between intentional and unintentional contents of the mind. The former are derived from the ego personality; the latter, however, arise from a source that is not identical with the ego, but is its “other side”. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; P. 22.
Even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky ~Carl Jung; Book of Job; Para. 758.
The self is not only the centre but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the centre of this totality, just as the ego is the centre of consciousness. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 398 and Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12, par. 44.
Dreams…are invariably seeking to express something that the ego does not know and does not understand. ~Carl Jung Quotation, CW 17, Paragraph 187
The concept of the unconscious is for me an exclusively psychological concept, and not a philosophical concept of a metaphysical nature. In my view the unconscious is a psychological borderline concept, which covers all psychic contents or processes that are not conscious, i.e., not related to the ego in any perceptible way. My justification for speaking of the existence of unconscious processes at all is derived simply and solely from experience. ~Carl Jung; Definitions; CW 6, par. 837.
The individual ego is the stable in which the Christ-child is born. ~Carl Jung; Collected Works Vol. 11
Only a life lived in a certain spirit is worth living. It is a remarkable fact that a life lived entirely from the ego is dull not only for the person himself but for all concerned. ~Carl Jung; Spirit and Life; CW 8; The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche; Page 645.
You should be a vessel of life, so kill your idols. ~Carl Jung to his Ego, Liber Novus, Page 334.
You should be the vessel and womb of life, therefore I shall purify you. ~Carl Jung to his Ego, Liber Novus, Page 330.
May love be subject to torment, but not life. As long as love goes pregnant with life, it should be respected; but if it has given birth to life from itself it has turned into an empty sheath and expires into transience. ~Carl Jung to his Ego, Liber Novus, Page 327.
I speak against the mother who bore me, I separate myself from the bearing womb. I speak no more for the sake of love, but for the sake of life. ~Carl Jung to his Ego, Liber Novus, Page 327.
Therefore a wise man does not want to be a charioteer, for he knows that will and intention certainly attain goals but disturb the becoming of the future. ~Carl Jung to his Ego, Liber Novus, Page 311.
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