The Ego-Self Paradox

This paper is an attempt to combine, in an organized fashion, various observations on the relationship between ego and self at different stages of development. An effort will also be made to give equal consideration to the two different aspects of human psychology, namely, the phylogenetic, archetypal, timeless determinants on the one hand and, on the other, the ontogenetic, individual factors deriving from one's personal life history. This consideration will include an attempt to combine the reductive and synthetic therapeutic techniques in a larger framework which gives justification to both. I agree heartily with Neumann when he states, “For us who, a generation later, can take our stand on the sum total of Jung's discoveries and experiences, the task must surely be to combine the aspects of the personal and the transpersonal, the temporal-genetic and the timeless, which have grown too far apart” (Neumann, 1959, p. 126).

Ego and Self

Jung originally described the phenomenology of the self as it occurs in the individuation process during the second half of life. More recently we have begun to consider the role of the self in the early years of life. Neumann, on the basis of mythological and ethnographical material, has depicted symbolically the original psychic state prior to the birth of ego consciousness as the uroborus, using the circular image of the tail-eater to represent the primordial self, the original mandala-state of totality out of which the individual ego is born (Neumann, 1954). Fordham, on the basis of clinical observations of infants and children, has also postulated the self as the original totality prior to the ego (Fordham, 1957).

It is generally accepted among analytical psychologists that the task of the first half of life involves ego development with progressive separation between ego and self; whereas the second half of life requires a surrender or at least a relativization of the ego as it experiences and relates to the self. Our