Conscious Ego Research Articles

The Religious Significance of Jung's Psychology

Endemic to Jung's understanding of the psyche is an elaborate theory of the universal psychogenesis of religion. This theory, coextensive with his psychology itself, would contend that the ground movement of the psyche is one in which the unconscious and its archetypal energies seek realization in consciousness. These energies carry with them a numinous power that, when experienced, creates the sense of the divine and so the religions. The process is a wholly self-contained dialectic whose main polarities are the conscious ego and the archetypal unconscious. This paradigm excludes agencies approaching consciousness from beyond the psyche as transcendental and particularly monotheistic religions would propose. Jung's dialogues with Buber and White failed because both realized that Jung understood divinity and humanity to be engaged in a mutually redemptive process as binary poles within an all encompassing psychic dialectic. Jung's psychology also contains a philosophy of history with religious consequence...

Where there is Power, there is no Eros: A Jungian Interpretation of the Weberian Legacy

This article examines the influence of Weberian rationality on the human unconscious. Using the work of the depth psychologist C. G. Jung, I conclude that Weber's ideal construct is too one-sided. This entirely masculine and conscious approach to organizing posits too much psychic energy with the conscious ego, and, accordingly, the feminine, and the entire unconscious, all that we are not consciously aware of, is repressed. Thus this article finds that modern-day careerists who identify their whole being with their work suffer from emotionally stunted lives. Moreover, this repressed state of being transcends the boundary of the individual's organizational and private life. Concluding that repression of feeling in our culture, and the integral part that modern organization plays within this societal context, is serious, this study calls for a tempering of rationality within organization. Following the Jungian perspective that anything repressed for too long turns violent and that psychic wholeness can be obtained only by integrating the masculine and feminine opposites, the article suggests that individuals, as well as society, must open an avenue to the unconscious that will permit the feminine its rightful existence along with the masculine.

Group Analysis with Ulcerative Colitis and Regional Ileitis: The Discovery of the Scream

Patients suffering from chronic physical disease or facing recurrence of disease within the foreseeable future usually experience in their conscious ego an intense desire to rid themselves of the disease. This desire is not a very helpful motivation for trying out something new in a group not directly orientated to the somatic disease but a group does give the prospect of not having to deal with everything on their own. In analytic group psychotherapy it can also mean re-finding connections in a supportive environment, creating links between somatic and mental processes, and the choice between staying as they are (which is familiar, and gives security) and being different.

An Added Degree of Complexity

Unconscious compensation, which is characteristic of the transcendent function, most often appears in moments of disorientation, emptiness, and solitude. The opposing viewpoint it offers provides the conscious ego with elements it hitherto lacked in order to confront a more complex reality. Two types of unconscious compensation are analysed: that of the ego by the self and that of the self by the ego (more common in borderline states). In the second case, the ego tends to gradually diminish the riches it intuits from the self to give them a communicable dimension.

Toward helping child analysands observe mental functioning.

Modern-day literature on classical psychoanalytic technique has emphasized developing the technical implications of the structural model. Such implications involve expanding the control of the conscious ego over other structures of the psyche. In this article, the author applies Paul Gray's work to child analytic technique and suggest ways that his approach may prove useful in the difficult task of helping child patients to get insight.

"In the neighborhood": aspects of a good interpretation and a "developmental lag" in ego psychology.

The significance of the conscious ego in the interpretive process has increasingly come under scrutiny. It is becoming clearer that the analyst's view of the conscious ego orients his interpretive approach, and subtly sets the goals of the analysis. At various times Freud championed the analytic importance of the conscious ego, and alternately rejected its significance. Hartmann's view of the ego stimulated research into a developmental line of the ego, while investigations of the ego in clinical psychoanalysis lagged far behind. The importance of the conscious ego in understanding resistances and levels of communication are explored.

The Art of Being Human: The Humanities as a Technique for Living

The Art of Being Human: The Humanities as a Technique for Living

The image of the Devil in C. G. Jung's psychology

Since the Renaissance, Western civilization has pursued the cult of a rational and conscious ego that believes that it can do, know, and organize everything. Never mind that, for example, a Bismarck, the great German chancellor who tried to follow the slogan "Where there is a will, there is a way" was constantly overcome by fits of crying. Once man, the splendid biped, was placed squarely on the center stage, he could conceive of no other function in this world beyond what his ego defined for him. As a consequence, the larger macrocosmic setting that was always vital for the Greeks receded to the periphery and concurrently all nonrational values, including religion, lost their numinous character. The case of religion is rather instructive: its demotion to a system of collective ethical behavior, interspersed with warm inner feelings, perhaps for the first time made us suspicious that it is possible to become ill from too much morality. This process of narrowing now seems to have run its course. For one thing, gods and demons that modern science had expelled from nature have found a new, though less spacious, abode in the human psyche. Above all it is the reality of evil that has become the source of deep and uncanny fascination for modern man. "That," according to Jung, "is the psychological situation in the world today. Some call themselves Christian and imagine that they can trample so called evil underfoot by merely willing to; others have succumbed to it and no longer see the good. Evil today has become the visible Great Power."1 We must add, however, that fascination with evil and the satanic in general is not necessarily an aberration of a sick mind. It may be the obverse (and neglected) side of the "thing" called religion, trying to attract our attention. Jung suggests that in order to find a way out of this quagmire, we learn not to succumb to anything at all. In particular, we must relinquish the illusion of absolute certainty as to the nature of good and evil.

Archetypal patterns in schizophrenia.

The purpose of this paper is to present briefly Jung's theory of archetypes and to illustrate it with specific case material. An archetype is described as an inherent pattern of psychic function common to all human beings and thought to be inherited with the brain structure. Archetypes present themselves in unconscious symbolism as certain characteristic recurring themes and figures of a mythological nature. Since religions and mythologies come from the same unconscious source as dreams and delusions, we find the same basic archetypal themes appearing in all such unconscious productions. Thus schizophrenic delusions are found to show many parallels with religious and mythological symbolism. The conscious ego of the schizophrenic has been overwhelmed by these archetypal contents and the patient often identifies himself with such suprapersonal figures as the mythological hero or the religious savior. Such figures represent basic forces of life which are collective or social in nature and transcend the indiv...