Quest for the Self, Part 4

Murray Stein's book Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction, my ongoing focus of late, was last taken up in Quest for the Self, Part 3. The Self is perhaps the most mysterious component of the human psyche as mapped by the late Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung.

The Self can be thought of as the most important of the "archetypes" of the collective unconscious shared by every member of species Homo sapiens. Each of the several archetypes we all possess within ourselves represents "an innate potential pattern of imagination, thought, or behavior" (p. 233), and, while this pattern itself remains outside our ordinary waking consciousness, it is capable of representing itself as images of various sorts that become symbols in dreams, myths, fairy tales, art, and religious icons.

One of the symbols the Self can employ in its ongoing mission to shape and reshape our lives is the mandala, such as the one pictured at right. Another is the Celtic Christian cross shown at left, or any other Christian cross. The Self uses such abstract symbols to transform our consciousness because they have a form that represents wholeness, symmetry, and balance.

When we start talking about the Self "using" images and symbols to provoke in us a greater consciousness and wholeness, things are admittedly getting really weird from the everyday rational perspective. In this post, I'd like to sort through some of these "weird" ideas.

Let me begin with this quote from Stein (p. 197):

... we can think of the self [note that Stein does not capitalize this and other Jungian terms, as I do] as a cosmic entity that emerges in human life and renews itself endlessly ... .

The Self is, Jung believed, an imago Dei, an image of God. The images that it introduces into the human psyche are images of this image of God.

One of these images generated by the Self from outside the psyche, but showing up in the psyche per se, is the idea of the Hero. Archetypal images can be personifications, as with the ideal of the Hero, or they can simply be transformative, as with abstract cross/mandala images, which if meditated on and otherwise taken seriously, can bring us to higher stages of consciousness and personal development.


The thrust of the Self as the prime archetype in the collective unconscious is, in fact, to bring itself fully into the light of consciousness. We start out life with very little consciousness indeed: what consciousness there is represents a sort of "participation mystique" in which we as newborn infants are unable to distinguish between our own selves and everyone and everything surrounding is in our immediate environment.

As we learn to make such careful distinctions, what Jung called the "ego" becomes the center of the conscious psyche. At this and subsequent stages of conscious development, it is necessary for the ego to banish huge portions of the original contents of the psyche into the unconscious depths. We lose touch with many of the things that are contained inside the mind, including the images and ideals of which the Self and the other archetypes — which, Jung showed, are actually working from a region outside and beyond the psyche proper — form the basis. Yet these images and ideals still make themselves felt, popping up in our dreams and fantasies, where they often become the raw material for myths.

The Hero ideal, a manifestation of the Self archetype, typically shows up for the first time while we are children. It personifies what our inbuilt expectations of the hero are. Mythic heroes and those of film, TV, and popular fiction — think Superman — typically adhere to these expectations. Each of us goes through several stages of life in which we are particularly susceptible to Hero images.


There are many stages of conscious development and associated archetypal images that reflect the guidance of the Self. Stein lists some of these (p. 194): "the divine infant, the hero, the puer and puella, the king and queen, the crone and the wise old man [are all] expressions of this single archetype." (No, I don't know what the "puer" and "puella" represent, but I do know these are the Latin words for "boy" and "girl," respectively.)

As we go through these various stages and respond to these images and the ideas associated with them, Jung said we cycle repeatedly through four basic levels of conscious development. I won't try to describe these levels and cycles in detail here, but I mentioned the levels briefly in Quest for the Self, Part 3. The four levels are defined by the five circles of available psychic wholeness: Anthropos, humankind's spiritual ideal, the highest circle of attainable wholeness; Homo, our everyday ideal of humanistic perfection; Serpens, the serpent, symbolically the root of all animal wisdom; Lapis, representing the integrity associated with plant life and mineral formations; and Rotundum, the position in the hierarchy of wholeness which roots the entire hierarchy in the abstract place where physical matter emerges from pure energy.

Rotundum and Anthropos, surprisingly, coincide. Thus, any ascent or descent through these (actually) five levels, as we grow in wholeness during the course of a lifetime, turns out to be a repeated circular movement through four stages. This fact of circular movement that has to be repeated over and over again adds immeasurably, of course, to the great mystery of the realization of the Self.


Again, the main point to keep in mind is that by "realizing the Self" Jung means bringing it, the Self, to conscious awareness. The ego, therefore, has to accommodate itself to the entry of the (capital-S) Self into the realm of consciousness. This is something the ego is not about to permit without a struggle. Jung characterizes the process of "individuation" by which the Self is gradually realized as, per Stein, "not fundamentally a quiet process of incubation and growth [but] a vigorous conflict between opposites" (p. 189).

The "opposites" which together form the psyche are the conscious mind, centered on the ego, and the unconscious mind, wherein the archetypal images form. These two realms are engaged in, says Jung himself, "open conflict and open collaboration at once." Jung's great desideratum is that consciousness and unconsciousness be allowed to engage in, in Jung's own words,

... a fair fight with equal rights on both sides. Both are aspects of life. Consciousness should defend its reason and protect itself, and the chaotic life of the unconscious should be given its chance of having its way too — as much of it as we can stand. ... It is the old game of hammer and anvil: between them the patient iron is forged into an indestructible whole, an "individual." (Stein, ibid.)

This is why Self-realization through the process Jung called individuation has to proceed according to anything but a straight line. There are cycles within cycles, wheels within wheels. The Self feeds archetypal images and ideals into the hopper of the unconscious mind, which turns them into symbols that appear in our dreams and imaginings. The symbols alone are visible to ego-consciousness; the archetypes and their images remain hidden. If we respond to the symbols in the way that the Self, as the image of God, intends, we will in effect transform the hidden Self itself!

Jung schematized this Self-transforming process as a repeating cycle of letting each symbolized image or idea pass through the four levels of conscious development, ultimately arriving mysteriously back at the original level, in such a way as to cumulatively "change the originally unconscious totality [i.e., the Self] into a conscious one":

... an archetypal image enters the psychic system at the archetypal end of the spectrum [corresponding to both Anthropos and Rotundum as levels of conscious development] and an integration process ensues on each of the other three levels. (p. 195)

This integration process first arranges for the incipient idea corresponding to the archetypal image that generates it to "become clearer." Then this bright, shiny new idea shifts to the "shadow level," where it must be lived out in the real world — where the new idea inevitably "casts shadows" and provokes conflicts of a light-vs.-dark type. Other people, not given to accept the darker manifestations of the Self, are apt to start registering their disapproval of us at this point — as, I might add, are we ourselves. This seems to be why Self-realization is such a hammer-and-anvil affair.

If we can get beyond such tensions, the clarified and shadow-beset idea next descends to a yet lower level in the consciousness hierarchy, the "level of physis, which is extremely deep in the material substrate of the body, and the body itself begins to change" (p. 196).

Finally, at the fourth level, "the energy level itself is reached ... the submolecular and subatomic level of energy and the forms which shape it" are altered. Owing to the third and fourth stages, the imago Dei, if and when fully realized, is able to in effect move the proverbial mountain to Mohammad and generate the energy of a thousand splendid suns.

Jung, furthermore, likened the whole cyclic process, with its four repeating stages, to "a process of restoration and rejuvenation" — and not just of the individual human person as bearer of the imago Dei. Stein calls the Self, instead,

... a cosmic entity that emerges in human life and renews itself in its rotations through the psyche. Perhaps it relies on human individuals to become conscious of itself, to incarnate in the three-dimensional world of time and space, and also to rejuvenate itself and extend its existence. It subsists in the universe beyond the psyche. It uses our psyches and the material world, including our bodies, for its own purposes, and it continues after we grow old and die. We provide a home where it can emerge and reside, yet in our pride and ego inflation we take far too much credit for its genius and beauty. (p. 197)

Manifestly, this is the Jungian vision of God.