When we are born, the ego and the Self are one and the same. The Self is the “unifying center of the total psyche” comprised of both the conscious and the unconscious. Then, via the growth process of an individual’s responses to life’s events, the Self and the ego differentiate from one another and the ego becomes a separate entity—the center of the conscious personality. It becomes the filter through which we interpret the world around us and is responsible for how we let those interpretations shape our personalities. This process is how an individual is formed and is called individuation. “The individuation urge promotes a state in which the ego is related to the Self without being identified with it.” This is what happens when expectations meet reality and the differences must be internally settled.
The balance between the Self and the ego can be either fragile or robust at different times in life, but it must always be maintained. If they get too far out of sync with each other, psychological damage can ensue. Sometimes, our expectations and our reality match up too well, and ego inflation occurs. This is when we think too much of ourselves and feel superior to others. Our modern way of thinking associates an inflated ego with a narcissistic personality—the ego puts itself on a pedestal. Alienation, on the other hand, occurs when our expectations and our reality do not overlap enough and the ego and the Self cannot recognize each other. This is a dangerous area, because “whenever one experiences an unbearable alienation and despair it is followed by violence.” This violence can be either internal or external, and is something we are seeing a lot in our current society. This is because one of the biggest causes of alienation today is the widespread sense that life is meaningless. When we are young, we have daydreams about how our lives will play out and the impact we will have on the world. If those fantasies are not realized, or other dreams supplemented in their stead, meaninglessness can prevail. Meaninglessness leads to violence.
In his book, Edinger posits that the encounter with the Self is equivalent to the discovery of God. For those who don’t believe in God in an external way, the Self is an internal analogous being. Many stories in the Bible are exemplary of this, that the underlying meaning of Christianity is the quest for individuation. “The image of Christ,” Edinger writers, “gives us a vivid picture of the Self-oriented ego, i.e., the individuated ego which is conscious of being directed by the Self.” When our ego is inflated, we think and act in ways that make us feel superior to others, in a godlike manner. When we are alienated, we feel as though God has left us, and violence can occur. It is therefore necessary for the health of the individual to have a harmonious relationship to God, whether they perceive God to exist in the heavens above, or in the Self within.
All humans exist on both an individual level and a collective level, and while it is important to connect with yourself, it is equally as important to connect with others. “At the center of the experience of individuality is the realization that all other individuals share the same experience as ourselves of living in a single, sealed world, and that this realization connects us meaningfully with all other units of life.” While not everybody believes in an external God, we all possess a Self, and the realization that the Self is universal is paramount for connecting us to one another. Sadly, since the modern decline of religion and spirituality, we as a collective have become more and more alienated from one another. “The various pressures of Western society all subtly urge the individual to seek life meaning in externals and in objectivity,” not in any subjective understanding of either the Self or of God.
This is all another way of saying that as a collective, we do not have a healthy relationship between the Self and the ego. Some of us are deeply inflated, seeing everything we want reflected back at us in a social media driven materialistic world. Some of us are equally alienated, looking around at all the fancy things and thinking ‘is this really meaningful?’ It seems as though the chasm is only growing larger, as our society today does not seem to have a collective feeling of equilibrium or togetherness.
It is paramount for both the individual and the collective to keep the Self-ego axis in a healthy balance. This axis is also the bridge between the two. Let us never stop the maintenance.