It seems a positive menace to the ego that its monarchy can be doubted.
The forlornness of consciousness in our world is due primarily to the loss of instinct, and the reason for this lies in the development of the human mind over the past aeon.
The more power man had over nature, the more his knowledge and skill went to his head, and the deeper became his contempt for the merely natural and accidental, for that which is irrationally given – including the objective psyche, which is all that consciousness is not.
In contrast to the subjectivism of the conscious mind the unconscious is objective, manifesting itself mainly in the form of contrary feelings, fantasies, emotions, impulses and dreams, none of which one makes oneself but which come upon one objectively.
Even today psychology is still, for the most part, the science of conscious contents, measured as far as possible by collective standards.
The individual psyche has become a mere accident, a “random” phenomenon, while the unconscious, which can manifest itself only in the real, “irrationally given” human being, has been ignored altogether.
This was not the result of carelessness or of lack of knowledge, but of downright resistance to the mere possibility of there being a second psychic authority besides the ego.
It seems a positive menace to the ego that its monarchy can be doubted.
The religious person, on the other hand, is accustomed to the thought of not being sole master in his own house.
He believes that God, and not he himself, decides in the end.
But how many of us would dare to let the will of God decide, and which of us would not feel embarrassed if he had to say how far the decision came from God himself? ~Carl Jung, Undiscovered Self, Page 61
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog