The Self

Primary source

• C. G. Jung, Psychologische Typen (Psychological Types), 1921, H. G. Baynes's English translation (Kegan Paul / Harcourt Brace, 1923), definition 16, 'Ego'; CW 6, editorial note, §706 (definition 16, 'Ego') and §§789-791 (definition 46, 'Self')The 1921 text already separates the two, in Jung's own words: 'Hence I discriminate between the ego and the Self, since the ego is only the subject of my consciousness, while the Self is the subject of my totality: hence it also includes the unconscious psyche. In this sense the Self would be an (ideal) factor which embraces and includes the ego' (Baynes 1923, definition 16; CW 6 §706 revises the wording). The editorial note to CW 6 records that for the Gesammelte Werke edition 'the text was slightly revised, partly with the help of the author, quotations and references were checked and corrected, and a definition of the "self", formulated by Professor Jung for the edition, was added. In the original the "self" had figured under the concept of the ego.' The much-quoted definition at §§789-791 — the self as a 'supraordinate personality' whose symbols include king, hero, saviour and the mandala (§790) — is therefore a late text, dating from 1960, while the ego/self distinction proper is 1921.
• C. G. Jung, Die Beziehungen zwischen dem Ich und dem Unbewussten ('The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious'), 1928, CW 7, §§399-400; the Collected Works text is translated from the Rascher edition of 1928 and its second edition of 1935Jung names the centre and immediately concedes its religious ambiguity: 'I have called this centre the self. Intellectually the self is no more than a psychological concept, a construct that serves to express an unknowable essence which we cannot grasp as such, since by definition it transcends our powers of comprehension. It might equally well be called the "God within us"' (§399); and 'the self has as much to do with the ego as the sun with the earth. They are not interchangeable' (§400). Because the CW text is translated from both the 1928 and the 1935 editions, it cannot be established from it alone that the 'God within us' sentence stood in the 1928 printing. Appendix 2 to the same volume prints 'The Structure of the Unconscious' (1916), where §512 uses 'the self' for something else entirely: 'The unconscious personal contents constitute the self, the unconscious or subconscious ego.'
• C. G. Jung, Aion: Untersuchungen zur Symbolgeschichte (Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self), 1951, CW 9ii, §§1, 9, 42, 44-45, 60, 73, 74, 76, 123-124, 308, 348-349, 351; chapters IV and V expand the paper 'Uber das Selbst' published in the Eranos-Jahrbuch 1948The self 'is not meant to take the place of the one that has always been known as the ego, but includes it in a supraordinate concept' (§1) and is 'the total personality which, though present, cannot be fully known. The ego is, by definition, subordinate to the self and is related to it like a part to the whole' (§9). The approach of ego to self 'must be a never-ending process' and requires 'a critical line of demarcation' (§44); 'it must be reckoned a psychic catastrophe when the ego is assimilated by the self' (§45). On the God-image: 'The self, on the other hand, is a God-image, or at least cannot be distinguished from one' (§42); symbols of unity and totality 'can no longer be distinguished from the imago Dei', and mandalas 'occur in patients principally during times of psychic disorientation or re-orientation', as 'magic circles' that 'bind and subdue the lawless powers belonging to the world of darkness' (§60); 'the spontaneous symbols of the self, or of wholeness, cannot in practice be distinguished from a God-image' (§73); and, decisively, 'Psychology, as I have said, is not in a position to make metaphysical statements. It can only establish that the symbolism of psychic wholeness coincides with the God-image, but it can never prove that the God-image is God himself, or that the self takes the place of God' (§308). On the shadow and the Christ image: 'In the empirical self, light and shadow form a paradoxical unity. In the Christian concept, on the other hand, the archetype is hopelessly split into two irreconcilable halves' (§76); the Christ-symbol 'lacks wholeness' since 'it does not include the dark side of things' (§74) and 'the Christ-image is as good as perfect', while 'the archetype denotes completeness but is far from being perfect' (§123). On the self as archetype, §351 has psychologists conjecturing 'an archetype of wholeness, i.e., the self' from dreams and active imagination. On the cross-cultural comparisons: 'the related ideas of atman and tao in the East' and 'some such archetype occurs universally' (§124), and the Self of the Kena and Brihadaranyaka Upanishads (§§348-349).
• Martin Buber, Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation between Religion and Philosophy, 1952, Harper, New York, 1952: the essay 'Religion and Modern Thinking', first published as 'Religion und modernes Denken' in Merkur (1952), together with the supplement replying to C. G. JungBuber's charge that Jung's psychology is psychologism — that God is reduced to a content of the psyche — and that Jung is a modern Gnostic. The order of the exchange runs: Buber's Merkur essay; Jung's reply in Merkur in May 1952 ('Religion und Psychologie', reprinted in CW 18); then Buber's supplement, which has the last word. Cited for what Buber argued and when, not as a verdict on Jung.

Scholarship

• Barbara D. Stephens, The Martin Buber-Carl Jung disputations: protecting the sacred in the battle for the boundaries of analytical psychology, 2001, Journal of Analytical Psychology, vol. 46, no. 3, pp. 455-491That the 1952 Buber-Jung exchange is a documented public dispute over the boundaries of analytical psychology and the place of the sacred within it; a peer-reviewed treatment of the episode.
• Warren Colman, 'The self', in Renos K. Papadopoulos (ed.), The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications, 2006, Routledge, London, chapter 7, pp. 153-174That the concept emerged only gradually in Jung's writings and that his first major statements about it do not occur until the 1928 version of 'The relations between the ego and the unconscious'; that the 1916 version of that essay uses individuality where Jung later wrote the self; and that it remains an unresolved difficulty how the self can be both the totality of the psyche and one of the archetypal contents within the psyche. Colman cites the God-image sentence as Jung 1951, par. 73, confirming that locator. The chapter is paywalled: these claims rest on the drafter's reading of it and are stated here without quotation marks because the exact wording could not be re-verified. Colman dates the added Psychological Types definition to 1950, where the CW 6 editorial note gives 1960; the entry follows the editorial note.

The tradition itself

• Jung, Aion, 1951The esoteric reading given on this entry — CW 9ii, on the indistinguishability of Self-symbols and God-images

Linked entries

• Part ofIndividuationAttested

  Individuation is the process Jung defined toward this centre, and Aion (1951, §44) adds that the ego's approach to it 'must be a never-ending process' — which is why the pair names a relation and not a finished state.

• Set againstThe ShadowAttested

  Aion (1951, §76) puts the shadow inside the self rather than against it — 'In the empirical self, light and shadow form a paradoxical unity. In the Christian concept, on the other hand, the archetype is hopelessly split into two irreconcilable halves' — and it is on that ground that Jung calls the Christ image perfect but not complete (§§74, 123).

• Part ofThe Archetype and the Archetypal ImageAttested

  Jung classes the self as an archetype — Aion (1951, §351) has psychologists conjecturing 'an archetype of wholeness, i.e., the self' from dreams and active imagination — so only its images are ever seen: mandalas, and the 'supraordinate personality' of king, hero or saviour (CW 6 §790). Warren Colman (2006) notes the unresolved difficulty of its being both the whole psyche and one archetype within it.

• Set againstThe PersonaAttested

  CW 7 §247 sets the persona against 'the unconscious self, one's real individuality' - but in the 1916 layer of the same volume 'self' means the unconscious personal ego (§512.2), not the later totality: one word, two constructs.