Carl Jung on the Ego and “Free Will.”
I have suggested calling the total personality which, though present, cannot be fully known, the self.
The ego is, by definition, subordinate to the self and is related to it like a part to the whole, Inside the field of consciousness it has, as we say, free will.
By this I do not mean anything philosophical, only the well-known psychological fact of “free choice” or rather the subjective feeling of freedom.
But, just as our free will clashes with necessity in the outside world, so also it finds its limits outside the field of consciousness in the subjective inner world, where it comes into conflict with the facts of the self.
And just as circumstances or outside events “happen” to us and limit our freedom, so the self acts upon the ego like an objective occurrence which free will can do very little to alter.
It is, indeed, well known that the ego not only can do nothing against the self, but is sometimes actually assimilated by unconscious components of the personality that are in the process of development and is greatly altered by them. ~Carl Jung; Aion; Pages 4-5; Para 9.
