by Ruth Snowden
The ego and the Self
The ego (from the Latin word for ‘I’) is the centre of consciousness and gives us our sense of identity. Freud had been the first to use this term, but Jung developed the idea and came to understand it in a rather different way. Freud said that the main task of the ego was to tell us what is ‘real’ and to protect the psyche, maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. Jung, on the other hand, emphasizes the ego’s role in helping us to function effectively in society. He does not really distinguish between ego and consciousness – in fact, he has a tendency to use the two words interchangeably, and sometimes combines them into one word, ‘ego-consciousness’. The ego organizes and balances the conscious and unconscious aspects of the psyche, giving it a sense of personal identity and purpose. Jung came to identify his own ego with his analytical Number 1 personality.
Jung stresses that the ego is not the same as the Self, which is the whole personality and includes both conscious and unconscious aspects of the psyche. Like the unconscious, the Self already exists when we are born, and the ego emerges out of it in the course of childhood development. It seeks biological goals, but is also interested in the spiritual and the numinous because it has a transcendent quality. The overall goal of the Self is to make the individual complete and whole. It is often depicted symbolically in images such as mandalas. The health of the ego depends upon the health of the Self.
We need to develop a strong and effective ego in order to function in the outer world. This is the chief task that we have to accomplish in the first half of life, as we learn to grow away from our parents and do things for ourselves. A strong ego can exert a balancing influence, keeping the conscious and unconscious aspects of the personality in equilibrium. An over-inflated ego, on the other hand, will form a dictatorial, intolerant personality. Such an ego can become highly unpleasant, even dangerous, seeing itself as all-important, almost god-like.
During the second half of life, the ego and the Self begin to confront one another and gradually we begin to understand that the Self is actually more important. At this stage, the personality can begin to integrate and eventually we may attain higher consciousness. Evidently, most people never reach this stage in the individuation process!
The shadow and projection
THE SHADOW
The shadow is an unconscious part of the personality that contains weaknesses and other aspects of personality that a person cannot admit to having. Everyone has a shadow, and the less consciously we are aware of it, the blacker and denser it is, because psychic contents that we repress can never be corrected.
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Insight
The shadow often contains characteristics which one cannot recognize as one’s own. But these are not always faults and weaknesses – they may be powerful aspects of our psyche that our ego regards as being taboo. Our dreams can be an especially rich source of shadow imagery.
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The ego and the shadow work together as a balancing pair. Jung related the shadow to his intuitive Number 2 personality. It is usually the first hidden layer of the personality to be encountered when a person begins psychological analysis. One of the primary tasks of the analyst is to begin to make a person aware of the relationship between the ego and the shadow. When a person has a very weak ego they may be in danger of becoming swamped by images from the shadow, rather as Jung himself was during his midlife crisis.
The shadow is the dark side of our nature – all that we see as being inferior or uncivilized. It often appears in dreams as a dark, usually rather negative figure, who is always the same sex as the dreamer. In waking life, it is particularly in interactions with people of the same sex that our shadow self is revealed. In same-sex groups, we tend to do things that we would not even think of doing when we are on our own. The reason we do this is often to be part of the group and not to appear foolish – rather as Jung discovered himself behaving when he was at school.
The ego wishes to hide shadow aspects of the personality, but in fact the shadow is not necessarily bad, so much as primitive in its outlook. If we face our shadow properly, then it can offer us integration between the conscious and unconscious parts of our psyche. By seeing our own shadow, we also see our own light. Once we can look at and understand these two opposites within us, we can find the middle ground.
PROJECTION
An over-inflated ego often projects the shadow onto other people. Projection is a process where an unconscious characteristic, a fault, or even a talent of one’s own is seen as belonging to another person or object. It is a normal and natural process and can be positive or negative in character. It is always accompanied by a strong emotional reaction to a person, object or situation. Obvious examples are falling in love (this is projection of the anima or animus, which is the opposite-sex aspect of the psyche, explored later in this chapter), or taking an excessive dislike to someone or something.
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Insight
The anima is the unconscious feminine side of a man’s personality and the animus is the unconscious masculine side of a woman’s personality.
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Projection is an indication that unconscious ideas are trying to break through into the conscious mind. It is not really the other person or thing that we love or loathe, but a part of our own psyche that is projected onto them. It is important here to distinguish between the idea of ‘falling in love’, which is like having a crush on someone, and the more stable type of love that develops with maturity.
A good example of projection, which also shows how it inevitably tends to break down eventually, is Jung’s ‘crush’ on Freud. We could say that Jung was projecting a ‘father archetype’ onto Freud. Whenever projection like this occurs, it is very difficult to behave rationally and objectively so the situation tends to lead to conflict. Jung found that, on the one hand he tended to hang upon Freud’s every word, seeing him as a sort of guru; on the other hand he felt a nagging resistance to his teachings and gradually became highly critical of him. This divided attitude shows that he was still unaware of the underlying subconscious issues that were involved in the relationship. As the psyche matures, it is often able to recognize and own its shadow characteristics and the projection is then withdrawn. When we project, we tend to drink in all the attitudes of the other person, and repress criticisms that are trying to surface from our own psyche. These criticisms often appear in dreams – outwardly, Jung thought of Freud as wise and experienced, but in one of his dreams he saw him as a peevish and petty royal official!
When the shadow is projected, the ego sees the other person or people as being evil and can conveniently deny any nasty aspects of itself. In order for true integration to occur within the psyche, it is necessary for us to accept our shadow and find ways in which the conscious personality and the shadow can live together. If we are brave enough to withdraw our shadow projections, then we become aware of our own shadow. This is difficult for us, and represents a huge moral task, because we are no longer able to blame others for our problems. We then become aware that whatever is wrong in the world ‘out there’ is also wrong with ourselves – the dark aspects of our own psyche become present and real. Jung says that if we can learn to deal with our own shadow, then we have done something very real for the world, shouldering our own tiny part of the gigantic burden of unsolved social problems.
Jung stresses that the psyche is not confined to the individual. Groups have a collective psyche that forms the spirit of the age, or zeitgeist.
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Insight
Zeitgeist is a useful German word, for which there is no real English equivalent. It refers to the spirit of the age – the current collective trend of thought and feeling. Obviously this varies enormously throughout history and in different cultures.
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This collective psyche readily forms a collective shadow, which can be exceedingly dangerous. For example, in the Second World War, the Nazis formed a collective shadow which they p
rojected onto the Jewish people, whom they then saw as being worthless and evil.
Jung urged mankind to take a good look at itself. He sensed dark uncontrolled shadow forces building up in civilized society. Society has a tendency to keep its problem aspects tucked away in separate drawers, and as a result these deadly, self-created dangers are often projected onto other nations. Jung gave as an example the perceived threat by the Western nations from the communist countries behind the Iron Curtain. He said that we must recognize that shadow projections are moral problems, which cannot be solved by arms races or economic competition. We need to look at our own shadow, instead of blaming ‘them’ all the time. Unfortunately, we have yet to learn this lesson.
The persona
The persona (from the same Latin word, meaning an ‘actor’s mask’) is like a mask that the ego creates in order to hide its true nature from society. It is our public face and may be assumed both deliberately and unconsciously. Whenever we relate to others we put on this mask, which has a dual function – to make an impression upon others and to conceal what we feel to be our true nature. The form of the mask depends upon the expectations and conditioning of society from parents, teachers, peer groups and so on.
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Insight
People often use the word persona incorrectly, when what they are really referring to is the personality. The persona is a mask – a public face that is assumed when relating to others.
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Figure 4.1 Hiding behind the persona.
It is necessary for each individual sometimes to assume a persona in order to function normally within society, because it gives some degree of protection to the vulnerable ego. We need it in order to be able to fit in with a certain culture, or to do a particular job for example. Problems only arise when a person totally identifies with the persona, which means that the person becomes nothing but the role they play. Behaviour becomes very rigid, and the person is fearful of ever dropping the mask. Such a personality becomes very confined and liable to develop neuroses. There is a failure to see the broader aspects of life beyond the ego’s own tiny role, and this situation is spiritually suffocating.
Every profession has its own persona, and it is quite easy for people to become totally identified with their professional image and hide behind it all the time. Jung went so far as to say that the persona is in fact a kind of false personality that an individual may ultimately end up believing is real. In his quietly humorous way, Jung describes meeting a very venerable man, whom one could almost describe as a saint. For three days, Jung’s feeling of inadequacy and inferiority in the face of this person built up and he was beginning seriously to consider how he could improve himself. Then the man’s wife came to him for analysis. This was a real revelation, as Jung realized that a man who becomes one with his persona can cheerfully project all his shortcomings onto his wife without her noticing – but she pays the price by developing a serious neurosis!
Anima and animus
The outer personality and attitude is what Jung calls the persona, but he believed that everyone also has an inner personality and attitude, which is turned towards the world of the unconscious. Jung used the word ‘anima’ to describe the personification of the unconscious feminine aspect of a man’s personality. The ‘animus’ is the corresponding masculine aspect of a woman’s personality. These unconscious aspects of the personality are seen as being very important in regulating behaviour. Their character is complementary to the character of the persona, so that they commonly contain all the human qualities that are absent from the persona. Jung gives the example of the aggressive tyrant who is tormented by inner fear and bad dreams, or the intellectual man who is inwardly sentimental.
THE ANIMA
The anima is usually personified by the unconscious as a female figure. This figure – referred to by Jung as a ‘soul-image’ – will appear in dreams as an archetypal figure, such as the seductress, harlot or divine female spirit guide. She represents a man’s feeling nature, which is fascinating and secretive. Because the anima is composed of feelings, she may distort a man’s understanding, which Jung assumes to be based on logic. She is often associated with earth and water imagery, such as caves, fertile soil, waterfalls or the sea.
Jung first became aware of his own anima when he was analysing his fantasies during his midlife crisis. He asked himself what he was actually doing, and was startled to hear a woman’s voice quite clearly announcing, ‘it is art’. He felt cross about this and replied that it was nothing to do with art, but the voice again insisted that it was. This voice was the voice of his anima. At first he found her to be a negative force and felt somewhat in awe of her, but he carefully wrote down all their conversations.
Jung soon realized that by personifying an archetype in this way he was able to bring it into relationship with his own consciousness. This helps to make the archetype less powerful. Jung found his own anima to be ‘full of deep cunning’. He saw her as being like everything that is ‘unconscious, dark, equivocal and purposeless in a woman’, and also mentioned ‘her vanity, frigidity, helplessness and so forth’. He realized that if he had taken what she said at face value, then he would have seen his work as being rather unreal, like watching a film, so that he would have felt detached from it. He seemed quite afraid of the potential power of the anima, saying that this kind of thinking could ‘utterly destroy a man’.
Jung also recognized the more positive aspects of the anima, seeing that it is she who communicates the images of the unconscious to a man’s conscious mind. Jung always questioned his own anima when he felt emotionally disturbed. He found that after a while she would always produce a useful image of some sort and his sense of unrest would vanish. For a man to be in touch with his anima is therefore healing and balancing. The anima is not a specific woman – her archetype contains all the ancestral impressions of what it means to be female. Her personified form in the individual psyche will depend very much upon a man’s personal knowledge of women, which is rooted in his relationship with his mother, plus impressions gained about other women as he is growing up. Passionate attractions occur when the anima is projected onto an actual woman, so that the man falls in love. If, on the other hand, the man over-identifies with the anima, he may become moody, resentful or effeminate. If a man’s anima is very weak, then he will find relationships with women difficult.
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Insight
Jung’s ideas about anima and animus may seem rather dated now, and somewhat chauvinistic. But the basic idea – that we all have an opposite-sex aspect in our psyche – is certainly still valid.
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THE ANIMUS
Jung does not say as much about the corresponding animus in women, probably because he had no direct experience of it in his own psyche and this limited his understanding. Emma Jung explored the idea of the animus further and you can read about this in two essays in Animus and Anima (see Further reading). The animus represents the thinking, logical part of the woman’s psyche and he can lead her towards knowledge and true meaning. It is made up of spontaneous, unpremeditated opinions that can affect a woman’s emotional life. The animus appears in dreams as heroes, poets, gurus and judges. He is also represented in imagery of the air and fire elements, such as swords or burning flames. The animus projects onto sporting heroes, intellectuals and so on. Projection of the animus onto a real man results in the woman falling in love.
Figure 4.2 Projection of the animus results in a woman falling in love.
If a woman over-identifies with the animus, she becomes dominating, opinionated and stubborn. The woman’s animus development is important in the way she relates to men – if it is weak, then she will have problems.
Ideas about the archetypal male or female from myths, dreams and fantasies can lead people to have very distorted ideas about the opposite sex. For example, the little girl who has been raised on Sleeping Beauty-type stories might constantly seek a handsome prince. Jung believed tha
t men are naturally polygamous, and that the anima compensates for this by always appearing as a single woman or female image. Women, on the other hand, are naturally monogamous, so the animus may compensate by appearing as whole groups of men.
If they function properly, both anima and animus should act like a sort of bridge or door between the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. For this reason, it is useful to get in touch with our anima or animus, because they have valuable messages for us. They also have a huge role to play in making relationships with the opposite sex successful. Together they form a ‘syzygy’ (from the same Greek word meaning ‘yoked together’). We are always looking for our ‘other half’ – the half that we feel is missing – in members of the opposite sex. This is another good example of Jung’s idea about the balanced opposites that are so basic to the functioning of the psyche.
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