Author Topic: What is this...ego complex?  (Read 15542 times)

Sealchan

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What is this...ego complex?
« on: April 07, 2011, 05:47:33 PM »
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The self-conscious ego is a late development in the psyche, so it is logical to think that the more archaic aspects of the psyche constellate the ego, and not the other way round. Since we are very much enveloped in the ego and its doings, alchemy probably compensates this, to focus on another centre of the psyche, namely the self. The self is archaic, which is why it is symbolized by a snake, the uroboros, or the serpens mercurialis. The alchemical operations are performed on the self, and they occur semi-autonomously. This is my view. The ego has developed so strongly in the latest millennium so it threatens to separate from the soil of the unconscious. Like Saint-ExupĂ©ry's Little Prince, the rootless ego goes to live on the little asteroid B-612. That's why it's necessary for the ego to  take root in the unconscious soil, as it threatens to lose contact with both instinct and archetypal meaning. Jung says that modern people are more and more suffering from instinctual atrophy.

Mats Winther

This quote is taken from the thread The Complimentarian Self which Mats Winter started.  This line of thought was diverging from that discussion and since it was helping me to get to thinking about things I thought I would make my next reply in a new thread.

What is the ego?  Let's start with Jung's definition "from" Psychological Types:

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Carl Gustav Jung proposed the following definition of the ego: "By ego I understand a complex of ideas which constitutes the centre of my field of consciousness and appears to possess a high degree of continuity and identity. Hence I also speak of an ego-complex" (Jung, 1921, p. 425).

Jung actually conceives the ego-complex (or complex of the ego; Ichkomplex) as both a content and a condition of consciousness, which is definitive because, he writes, "a psychic element is conscious to me only in so far as it is related to my ego-complex" (p. 425).


Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/ego-analytical-psychology#ixzz1IsAcPrbd

Its the old question of which came first, God or the Universe?, the chicken or the egg? (Let go my eggo!)

If the ego is a complex then it probably could/should be seen as having emerged from the unconscious.  But there is no reason to suppose that the unconscious made it any more than the conscious.  That is, at the level of complexes in the world of the psyche, there are, apparently, unconscious complexes and conscious ones and the ego is simply circularly defined as the complex to which consciousness is attached.  But what made the unconscious complexes in the same psyche?  

It is easy to say the unconscious because we could simply define everything that is not specifically a part of the ego as the unconscious.  But I don't think this is useful.  I think that once we attach the ego to an emergent layer of energic order in the brain (ie. make it a complex) we must also recognize that on that playing field, the unconscious is also one or more complexes.  So then the conscious and the unconscious (psyche) arise from another layer of reality that is neither conscious or unconscious.

I guess Jung made a distinction between the potentially knowable unconscious, the personal unconscious, and the inherently unknowable unconscious, the collective unconscious.  I suspect that the latter is the archetypal unconscious and is what I think are the patterns that the conscious function of intuition can discover by virtue of the structure of the brain.  So if the personal unconscious is potentially knowable perhaps it is composed of complexes of the unconscious and the collective unconscious is really just a deeper layer of the world that is not properly called conscious or unconscious, it is the structure and function of the brain.  Of course, any emergent phenomenon such as the psyche is going to interface with the layer below it, presumably the structure and function of the brain and, of course, with the layer above it, the collective or society.

So in my particular cast of Jungian theory, the ego is simply the "favored" complex in the psyche while the others are "unfavored".  This, of course, is not a satisfactory understanding. But such a characterization helps to point out that this is, indeed, a circular definition on Jung's part.  I think at this time, this circular definition has outlived its use.  What makes sense to me is that the ego is the strongest complex in the psyche, that consciousness is a winner-take-all proposition and that the ego-complex only is overwhelmed by that which it has co-created in the context of the whole of the psyche.  No complex is an island, but perhaps two complexes can "distance" themselves from each other so much that one can have the experience of being overwhelmed.  

When one experiences the loss of personal control that comes with being possessed by a so-called "autonomous" psychic complex, I believe that what is happening is this: the strongest voice of the psyche always determines consciousness.  In special circumstances, the relative power of the ego-complex can be lowered through the lever arm of the co-created unconscious complex.  When the ego-complex puts itself in an "enantiodromatic" situation, this is what occurs.  What you experience then is a shift in personality from one complex to the other.  The unconscious complex, being the less developed no matter its relative strength at the time, is invariably disagreeable to the usually dominant ego.  That is because although it is temporarily the stronger complex, it is only so under special circumstances.  It is powerful but has a short half-life, so to speak.  The unconscious complex is usually much less well adapted to the collective and to the rest of the psyche.  Only the ego-complex has the staying power to be on top most of the time.  
But when the ego submerges and looses its sense of control, the perspective of consciousness changes from one complex to the other.  There is no discontinuity except from the perspective of the usual ego consciousness which has the greater store in the memory systems.  Because all of this takes place in the one brain with its one system of memory, the ego complex can generally remember (often with great displeasure) the shift and what took place while it happened.  This is where the usual ego has to hem and haw about what just happened.  And with some great inner strength the ego can then admit to loosing control and yet take responsibility for what happened when it had lost control.

So for me, the ego, the shadow, the animi and the Self are really just different aspects of the order, the complexes, of neural behavior that arises out of the structure and function of the brain and arises into the world and the co-created culture that other brains have co-produced.  This is all a matter of complex adaptive systems and defining the ego must be done in this context now that the sun has risen well into the sky of depth psychology.

The Self is "merely" the anticipated "final" order to which the ego moves.  That is, the kinds of symbols that emerge from the unconscious that an ego causes to occur as it struggles with autonomous complexes, when studied comparatively across individuals and societies and through a developed science of such comparison greatly aided by the conscious function of intuition, provides one with the sense of a common (collective) order (archetype) that we humans all are "moving towards".

In this sense it is the natural formation of the complexes in the psyche, one of which is invariable the relatively strongest, caused by the two non-conscious layers above and below the layer of the psyche, namely the brain and the collective culture, that cause the formation of complexes in the individual.  The ego is the center of strongest complex formation and the Self is that mystical center about which we all seem to move toward if we are paying attention to such things.  Otherwise we can operate fairly well, with a little obligatory ritual now and then, without having any clear sense of this.  But for how many does the notion of a God stand in as a cultural connection to the idea that the ego is not the ultimate and final center for a developing individual?