Ego And Self: Their Definition And Difference

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

"The researcher should at least try to give his concepts some certainty and accuracy."

(Jung, 1921, 409)

This chapter examines some of the confusion associated with the use of the terms "ego" and "self," and attempts to answer the question: Why is this important?

Ego

The adherents of different schools are united in their desire to substantiate the existence in the psyche of some hypothetical "organ" similar to a physical organ - which they could call "ego". The definition given in the Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis (Samuels, Shotter & Plaut, 1986) would fit Rycroft's Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (1968) as well as Hinshelwood's Dictionary of Kleinian Psychoanalysis (1989). This definition would suit both Feyerburn and Winnicott, and many other modern scientists, and it sounds like this: “the concept of the ego is associated with such issues as personal identity, preservation of personality, invariability in time, mediation between the spheres of consciousness and the unconscious, cognitive processes and verification reality”(Samuels, Shotter & Plaut, 1986, 50).

Only in the continuation of this phrase does a divergence arise between Jungian views and other theories: "it (ie the ego) is thought of as something that responds to the demands of a certain higher authority, the self, the ordering principle of the whole personality." This part of the definition clarifies the position of the ego in the hierarchy of psyche structures. In 1907, when Jung was 32 years old (Jung, 1907, 40), he, like other scholars, believed that the ego was the king of the castle. However, Jung later came to believe that the ego is the usurper and the rightful king is the self.

There is a consensus that the concept of ego is associated with a person's perception of himself and his body. But even this position is not so unambiguous. Most people, when they say this, mean only a limited area of a person's conscious experience of their bodily sensations. So, for example, we determine the shape of our body and have an idea of the skin as its border, we know about the space that we can cover with our hands, we learn about our weight when we sit or move. We are aware of age-related changes in our own body. Certain bodily functions - walking, grasping, urinating, defecating, salivating or crying are recognized and partially controlled by us.

However, in parallel with the mechanism of awareness of bodily experience, we have an ego-based relationship to external and internal reality. In a state of mental health, we are mindful of the limitations imposed on us by time and space, that is, about our physical and mental capabilities. We are able to more or less correctly judge what is really achievable for us materially or emotionally, and what we can refuse without prejudice to ourselves - be it something material (leftover food, clothes that have become small) - or from the area emotions. If someone is sure that he can fly like a bird or destroy the world with one sneeze, then this means that he does not have an ego capable of realistically assessing his own bodily functions; people who do not know how to get rid of excessive material ballast (old newspapers, cups of yogurt, furniture, money and other savings) - as a rule, have similar problems with the release of physical and emotional surplus.

Bodily functions that can be controlled to a certain extent - for example, breathing or the work of the heart - but are mostly involuntary and not given to conscious perception, belong to the domain of the unconscious and are partially associated with the ego - which Jung, following Freud, sometimes considered not fully conscious … Being at the junction of consciousness and unconsciousness, these body functions often become the place of manifestation of psychosomatic symptoms, if any unconscious material seeks to penetrate into consciousness through bodily manifestations.

Jung went further than Freud and considered the mental displays of those bodily functions that we are not aware of and cannot control: blood flow, growth and destruction of cells, chemical processes of the digestive system, kidneys and liver, brain activity. He believed that these functions are represented by that part of the unconscious, which he calls the "collective unconscious." (Jung, 1941, 172f; see Chapter 1).

With the exception of Lacan, the views on ego functions are largely the same for most of the major scientists. Lacan is the only one to whom the ego is presented in a completely different way, as a psychic instance, the purpose of which is to distort truthful information coming from internal and external sources; for Lacan, the ego is by its very nature prone to narcissism and distortion (Benvenuto & Kennedy, 1986, 60). Other authors view the ego as a mediator in negotiations with both external and internal reality.

There is a wide variety of opinions as to whether there is more than the ego in consciousness. The debate also continues about whether the ego already exists at the moment of a person's birth or not, whether it develops gradually from the id or the primary self, whether the ego is primary, while the self (meaning the self as a conscious self) develops later, following ego development.

Different approaches to the clinical concept of the self

Most authors agree that a person has psychic experience, which should be considered the experience of experiencing the self. Thus, I or "self" is the name of another alleged object of the psyche. However, there is no unity in the idea of whether the self, along with the ego, is an acting psychic mediating organ, or whether it is a more passive entity. The use of the term "self" is much more complex and much less consistent than in the case of "ego." This inconsistency occurs not only in the works of different theoreticians, but often in the works of the same author. The works of Jung are particularly complex and ambiguous in interpreting the concept of "self", despite the fact that this concept plays a very important role for him. Redfern's comprehensive exploration of what he described as "real confusion" now prevails in the use of both terms is highly instructive (Readfearn, 1985, 1-18).

Hinshelwood laments that Klein “often substitutes for one another the terms“ego”and“self”(Hinshelwood, 1989, 284).

By selfhood, Kohut means something like "a sense of one's own identity." However, he also includes in this concept much of what other authors attribute to the ego, including mediation and purposefulness (and in this he agrees with Jung). The self appears to him as the “core of the personality” (Kohut, 1984, 4-7).

Winnicott mentions the “maturational process”, which implies “the evolution of the ego and self” (Winnicott, 1963, 85). In his interpretation, "self" refers to the "True Self" - "spontaneous, developing spontaneously" component of the personality; if “the true self is not allowed to manifest itself openly, then it is protected by the malleable“false self, false self”(Winnicott, 1960a, 145). Kalched refers to these representations of Winnicott when he mentions the "personality spirit" and its archetypal defenses (Kalched, 1996, 3).

Stern (approaching the issue from the point of view of developmental theory) speaks of four types of perception of one's self, manifested, in particular, in an infant and a small child (Stern, 1985).

Fonaggi and colleagues correlate attachment theory with the development of the child's ability to reflect and the emerging perception of himself. They also trace how the self is involved in child development (Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist & Target, 2002, 24).

Rycroft defines the place of the self in the theory of psychoanalysis as follows: "the self of the subject is how he perceives himself, while the ego is his personality as a structure about which an impersonal generalizing judgment can be made" (Rycroft, 1968, 149). Such a specific interpretation of the self in psychoanalysis excludes any unconscious components of the psyche. This is a common definition that is not used as a special one.

Milrod summarizes the various meanings of the term "self" found in the latest psychoanalytic literature: this term can refer to a person, his personality, to his ego as a mental structure, to a mental reflection of individuality, to a kind of over-order, the fourth mental component that exists along with Id, ego and superego, or fantasy. According to Milrod's own point of view, the psychic representation of the self (self) is a substructure of the ego (Milrod, 2002, 8f).

Jung, for his part, uses the term "self" in a special way to include the unconscious part of the psyche in this concept, and in his system the self is definitely not enclosed within the ego. According to Jung, the self observes the ego and opposes it, or at other stages of psychological development includes it. This is the most significant difference between psychoanalysis and analytical psychology, which also affects clinical work. Jung developed his concept for a long time and was not always consistent in his attempts to define and understand the collective unconscious. For the first time he uses the term “self” back in 1916, however, the term “self” is absent in the dictionary of terms in his book “Psychological Types”, published in 1921. Only 40 years later, in 1960, when he published his Selected Works, Jung included this term in the glossary. There he defines the self as "the unity of the personality as a whole" - it is "a mental integrity consisting of conscious and unconscious contents" and, thus, it is "only a working hypothesis", since the unconscious cannot be cognized (Jung, 1921, 460f) … In other works, while still in search of this definition, Jung designates with this term either the unconscious psyche, or the totality of the conscious and unconscious, which is not the ego. In any case, it assumes the possibility of a dialogue between the ego and the self, in which the self is assigned the role of the "king."

Self structure - various hypotheses: id, unconscious fantasy, archetype

Both Freud and Klein consider the ego to be the main organized part of the psyche. Both write about the structure of the super-ego, and also seek an answer to the question whether the “id” also has some kind of internal structure and whether it is capable of contributing to the structuring of our experiences in addition to physical, instinctive reactions. Of course, in this kind of reasoning they find no place for selfhood.

Freud believed that the "id" has no internal organization, no other task, except for the satisfaction of instinctive needs and the search for pleasure. At the same time, from 1916-1917 until his death in 1939, he writes about "traces of memories in our archaic heritage", traces that induce a person to respond to certain stimuli in a certain way. These traces seem to include not only subjective contents, but also predispositions, and can be activated as an alternative to memories of personal experiences when personal memory fails (Freud 1916-1917, 199; 1939a, 98ff; cf. also 1918, 97).

M. Klein believed that unconscious fantasies exist in a person from birth and are intended to structure instinctive impulses into mental representations (the formation of internal objects). (Writing the building word "fantasy" in the Greek version, "phantasy", and not "fantasy", as usual, allows you to distinguish unconscious images from fantasizing, which is a conscious process). For Klein, the infant's impulses, emotions, and fantasies are "innate"; they meet external reality through projections. Then they are reintrojected in a transformed form and form the core of the internal object, representing a fusion of innate pre-existing fantasy and the external world (Klein, 1952, 1955, 141). Recently, developmental psychologists and neuroscientists have challenged this opinion, believing that this ability of the psyche can manifest itself in a child no earlier than six months of age. (Knox, 2003, 75f).

Bion, who attended some of Jung's seminars, describes the infant's process of achieving satisfaction in much the same way as Klein:

“The baby has a certain innate predisposition - the expectation of the breast … When the baby comes into contact with the real breast, his pre-knowledge, the innate expectation of the breast, the a priori knowledge of the breast, the“empty thought”about it, is combined with the recognition of reality, and at the same time develops understanding”(Bion, 1962, 111).

Thus, both Klein and Bion imagined that a newborn child already at the moment of birth possesses a certain structural element that is not related to the ego; it is a psychic, not just an instinctive structure, and it mediates the infant's encounter with the outside world.

The archetype in Jung's concept is similar to this non-ego innate psychic structure that determines how we perceive and respond to our external and internal environment. The idea of the archetype became central in his idea of the structure of the entire psyche as a whole, of its potential capabilities and development. Jung developed his theory over a long period, starting in 1912, gradually overcoming obstacles and contradictions. According to this theory, just as a person is born with a definite body structure, adapted to "a completely definite world, where there is water, light, air, salts, carbohydrates," in the same way he has an innate psychic structure adapted to his psychic environment. medium (Jung, 1928a, 190). This structure is archetypes. Archetypes provide the opportunity for our development as human beings. They unite each of us with all of humanity, since they are the same for all people - both living and dead thousands of years ago - as well as the structure of bones, organs and nerves. Jung, unlike Freud, does not consider them "trace memory", since archetypes convey not subjective content, but structure. Despite his early, not entirely successful term "primary image", which seems to imply the presence of contents, Jung insisted that archetypes are unfilled forms suitable for filling with universal universal human experience at any time and in any place, be it birth, sexuality, death; love and loss, growth and decay, joy and despair. Each archetype contains the polarities of both instinctive bodily-physical and non-body psychic reactions - to cold and heat, to black and white, to any life events.

Jung's overarching teaching on archetypes has been argued to be consistent with modern neuroscience (Knox, 2003). Archetypes are the psychic equivalents of the so-called neural connections of the brain: we are born with these structures, but whether they are activated or not depends on our life experience. (Pally, 2000, 1). If a person experiences any specific experience (for example, he is afraid of an angry mother), then this experience is registered in a specific neural connection, already ready for activation. Likewise, a particular experience must be registered by the psyche in the appropriate archetypal structure (in this case, within the Terrible Mother archetype). Thus, the archetype is one way of thinking about "mind" in relation to "brain", but without identification. Deep interconnections between the physical and the mental are at the heart of both archetype theory and neuroscience. After intensive psychotherapy, changes in neural connections are recorded - it is the intensity of affect that causes physical changes (Tresan, 1996, 416). The theory of archetypes and neuroscience open up a direct path for us to comprehend psychosomatic symptoms in the entire unity of the physical and mental.

The important role of the self

Our approach to clinical material is determined by how we understand the relationship between the self and the ego. Freud believed that the ego develops from "id", according to Jung - its basis is the unconscious. Freud tended to see id as a constant threat to the ego, although he noted that “cooperation” is one of the ways in which the unconscious builds a relationship with consciousness (Freud, 1915e, 190). At the same time, Freud did not believe that the unconscious is capable of introducing something useful into consciousness; in his opinion, the task of the ego is to "tame" the "id": "subdue" it, "bring it under control", "control" it. (Freud, 1937, 220-235). Jung took a different view. He believed that the unconscious could enrich the ego, if only it did not overflow it. He wrote about a "dialogue" between the ego and the unconscious / self, in which both participants have "equal rights." (Jung, 1957, 89). According to Jung, the goal of mental development is not for the ego to "subjugate" the unconscious, but in that it recognizes the power of the self and gets along with it, adapting its actions to the needs and desires of its unconscious partner. He argued that the self possesses a wisdom that exceeds the individual's understanding of himself, since the self of one person is connected with the selves of all other human (and possibly not only human) beings.

According to Freud, in a state of mental health, the ego is the main agent of the psyche. "Psychoanalytic treatment," he writes, "is based on the influence that the unconscious is experiencing from the side of consciousness." (Freud, 1915e, 194; Freud's italics). The activity of the unconscious, penetrating into consciousness, Freud says, "reinforces" the activity conceived by the ego. Such cooperation is possible only when the energy coming from the unconscious can be transformed into ego-syntonic. Jung views this relationship in exactly the opposite way. In his opinion, the analysis is based on such an influence on consciousness from the unconscious, in which consciousness is enriched and improved. The attitudes of the ego are not reinforced, but are modified in such a way that its errors are compensated by the attitudes of the unconscious. Something new is constellated - a third, previously unknown position, inconceivable to the ego itself (Jung, 1957, 90). Moreover, while in Freud the initiative always belongs to the ego, even if it is not realized by it, in Jung the initiator is the self, which “wants” to realize itself.

For Jung, the self is primary: it comes into the world first, and on its basis the ego arises. Fordham follows Jung, believing that the primary self of the infant is the original psychosomatic unity, which gradually, as the ego grows, differentiates into psyche and soma. The self for Jung is also primary in the sense that it is a broader concept than the ego; in addition, she constantly, throughout her life, feeds the creative forces of the psyche, which are manifested in dreams with their nightly updated images, in poetry or in solving scientific puzzles. It seems inexhaustible - after all, only that part of it becomes known to us that penetrates into our consciousness, and we will never be able to assess the full range of its capabilities. But we know from experience that it is the self that "rules" in our life - if we allow some anthropomorphism here (and it is, perhaps, admitted), then we can say that it is precisely her needs, desires and intentions that determine what our life will be like: what we will do, with whom we will enter - or not enter into marriage, what diseases we will get sick, up to when and how we will die. It's like in the theory of chaos, accepted in modern physics: deep order and purposefulness are hidden in the seeming randomness and disorder of life.

Freud compares the analyst to a detective who tries to solve the riddle of a crime using the manifestation of the unconscious as a key (Freud, 1916-1917, 51). Jung's approach is fundamentally different: he considers all clinical material - dreams, psychosomatic symptoms, behavioral features, neurotic or psychotic manifestations, phenomena of transference or countertransference - as "angels", that is, messengers of the unconscious trying to convey the message to consciousness. Jung believed that our task is to help the patient to become aware of these messages, with all their content and meanings; The “envoys” will be able to get rid of the watch only when the “letter” is delivered, then the need for them will disappear.

Jung often humanizes the self, speaking of it as a person who lives within the unconscious and has its own goals and aspirations. The self, he writes, “is, so to speak, also our personality” (Jung, 1928a, 177; Jung's italics). He tries to separate from the “second self” this “unconscious” personality, possibly “sleeping” or “dreaming” (Jung, 1939, 282f). In practice, we are unable to distinguish between the instinctive, impersonal impulse emanating from the archetype (or "id") and the unconscious urge of the subject himself. However, our attitudes, and perhaps clinical practice, will change if we agree with what Jung writes in the same passage:

"The cooperation of the unconscious [with consciousness] is meaningful and purposeful, and even if it acts in opposition to consciousness, its manifestation is still reasonably compensatory, as if restoring the disturbed balance." (Ibid, 281).

If we imagine the unconscious in this way, it means that we seriously listen to it, as to another person, expecting from him purposeful, intelligent actions that compensate for the attitudes of consciousness. This other person may be troublesome, but we know that she is not only a problem.

Jung's self-archetype

In 1912, after his break with Freud, Jung entered a period of deliberate, conscious cooperation with what he felt as the strongest pressure of his unconscious (although he did not yet think of him as a "self"). The culmination of this period was 1927, when he once dreamed that he was with a friend in Liverpool.

Jung writes:

“We went out into a wide square, dimly lit by street lamps. Many streets converged to the square, and city quarters were located around it along the radii. In its center was a rounded pond with a small island in the middle. While everything was dimly visible due to rain, hazy haze and poor lighting, the island shone in the sunlight. On it stood a lone tree, a magnolia sprinkled with pink flowers. Everything looked as if the tree was illuminated by the sun - and at the same time itself served as a source of light. (Jung, 1962, 223)

Jung comments:

“The dream reflected my state at that moment. I can still see the greyish-yellow raincoats glistening with the rain. The sensation was extremely unpleasant, everything around is dark and dim - that's how I felt then. But in the same dream a vision of unearthly beauty arose, and only thanks to it I could continue to live. (ibid., 224)

Jung realized that for him "the goal is the center, and everything is directed towards the center," and the center is the self, "the principle and archetype of direction and meaning." From this experience arose "the first hint of my personal myth", of a mental process aimed at individuation. (ibid.)

The archetype of the self is an organizing principle, the function of which is to integrate, unite, push towards the center all the infinite possibilities existing in the psyche, and thus create a state of greater psychological integrity. Later researchers note that, according to the theory of archetypes, the archetype of the self also includes the opposite pole: the predisposition of mental units to disintegration, confrontation or stagnation. This issue has been explored by two contemporary Jungian analysts: Redfern in The Exploding Self (1992) and Gordon, who believes that the tendency towards unification can become destructive if it is so strong that it does not allow de-integration processes at all. differentiation and separation (Gordon, 1985, 268f). These studies warn us against idealizing the archetype of the self as a centering principle, against orienting psychotherapy towards it as a balanced and orderly whole. Hillman's preference for a polytheistic view of the structure of the psyche as opposed to a monotheistic one also encourages us to value diversity in the structure of the inner world and not rely on an unshakable order in it. (Hillman, 1976, 35).

In Aion (1951, 222-265), Jung devoted an entire chapter to enumerating and examining in detail the inexhaustible abundance of symbols of the self. Since the self is an archetype and, therefore, an unfilled form, one image can express only a limited part of its potentialities. Each of us fills this form with images from our own experience, so that our experience is personalized and humanized. The specific experience of an individual, his individuality, is embodied (begins to be) at a specific moment in time - this is how Jesus comes into the world as the son of God.

That particular language that is spoken about God - for those who care - can become a link between the theories of depth psychology and other important areas of human experience. For us psychotherapists, it provides a way to understand the language and problems of those patients who are in a state of severe stress, unable to establish a relationship with their own "God"; it allows us to go beyond thinking about “God as an internal object,” according to Klein's theory. Black (1993) offers his own version of this Klein model, taking into account the existence of our inner God.

Individuation

Jung often uses the image of the spiral: we move, revolving within our ego around the self, gradually approaching the center, meeting again and again in different contexts and at different angles, with the core of our self. We often encounter this in clinical practice: the self-image with which the patient comes to the first session can serve as the key to all our future work.

Individuation is a path of more and more complete awareness of oneself. Jung defined individuation in 1928:

“To walk the path of individuation means to become an undivided individual, and since individuality embraces our innermost, deepest, incomparable uniqueness, individuation also implies the formation of one's own self, coming to oneself. We can thus translate the word “individuation” as “becoming personality” or “self-realization”. (Jung, 1928a, 173).

Previously ignored or seemingly unacceptable aspects of the personality reach consciousness; contact is established. We cease to be a house, partitioned off into separate parts isolated from each other; we become an individual, an inseparable whole. Our "I" becomes real, acquires actual, and not only potential existence. It exists in the real world, "is realized" - as they say about the idea, embodied in life. Jung writes: “The psyche is an equation that cannot be 'solved' without taking into account the factor of the unconscious; it is an aggregate that includes both the experiential ego and its trans-conscious basis. " (Jung, 1955-1956, 155).

The individuation process is the work of solving this equation. It never ends.

Notes (edit)

Quoted from: W. R. Bion. Theory of thinking // Journal of Practical Psychology and Psychoanalysis (Quarterly Scientific and Practical Journal of Electronic Publications). 2008, March 1, iv. Per. Z. Babloyan.