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Jung's concept of the self as the totality of the psyche has not been adopted by psychoanalysis, where ideas about how the self functions are associated with the ego. Even Kohut's influential theory of the self has a narrow application when compared with Jung's idea that ‘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 the conscious mind’ ( Coll. Wks., 12, para. 444). Ryce-Menuhin has written a Jungian book, building on Fordham's extension of Jung's self theory into childhood, but in developing his thesis he gives an account of both Jungian and psychoanalytic contributions to a theory of the self. He writes: ‘This book attempts to move from a historically grounded reassessment of existing self theory in both the academic and the depth psychologists’ fields to an extension of ego theory, the ego developing out of self and becoming self's agent of consciousness.' (p. 19) The extension of ego theory is his original contribution of the ‘con-integrates’.
Ryce-Menuhin has built his con-integrate theory as an adjunct to Fordham's deintegration/reintegration model. He sees a gap in Jungian ego theory, and fills it by proposing a working model of ego processes: the ego develops through periodic deintegrative actions leading to specialised units of consciousness, and these he calls