Comment On ‘A Suggested Analogy for the Elusive Self’

I am grateful to T. Y. Booth for his contribution, which fills one of the many gaps left by me in the book he so kindly mentions. His picture of a committee chaired by various members at various times strikes me as one way in which the self and the sub-personalities of the self interact. But of course it is only one way, when things are working fairly well. If we remember that the ‘sub-personalities’ are meant to denote the archetypal as well as the complex figures, then the notion of a committee seems hardly more adequate than the picture of a company of actors. It does not include the assembly of the gods, or the ‘forms of light’ at war with the ‘forms of darkness’, in short, all the experiences of, and conflicts between, the parts of the self which we have at different times. Granted that committees may have fractions and splits, good members and bad members, dictators, anarchic times and so on, we rarely find one faction being bound and gagged, put in chains, semipermanently asleep of half-starved and so on. In other words, the notion of committee hardly conveys the life and death struggles, the oppression and the violence which are ‘normal’ and which are part of the shadow side of ourselves.

‘A committee of sub-personalities’ as a description of the self would only apply to one state or condition of the person, when things are like that. How about ‘a universe’ or ‘a world’, or ‘speck of dust’? These are some of the words for the containing and for the not-containing aspect of the self which have been in continual use, but they are not neutral enough perhaps for a psychologist's purposes, unless deliberately defined as neutral. The ‘Self is not at all a neutral enough word for what Jung wanted to connote. It seems at first hearing to exclude’ notself experiences and images, especially the Western God image. It is a term which teaches or preaches and I must confess that that is what originally appealed to me about it.