Origins of this [the Self], the keystone concept for both Jung's theory of psychic energy and his theory of psychic structure are as obscure as any of his other constructs.

Gary V. Hartman, M.A., Dipl. Jungian Analyst (St. Louis, Missouri)

The Self

Definition

In the center is a virtual nucleus I call the self, which represents the totality or sum of the conscious and unconscious processes.1 (1925)

I call this centre also the 'self,' a term that is meant to include the totality of the psyche in so far as this manifests itself in an individual. The self is not only the centre, but also the circumference that encloses consciousness and the unconscious; it is the centre of this totality, as the ego is the centre of consciousness.2 (1935)

The self is defined psychologically as the psychic totality of the individual.3 (1940/1948)

History...

Origins of this, the keystone concept for both Jung's theory of psychic energy and his theory of psychic structure are as obscure as any of his other constructs. The complete overhaul of Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (see Symbols of Transformation) in 1952, as well as the several revisions of the "two essays," 1926/1928 and 1935/1943 (see Two Essays), make tracing the evolution of "Self" extremely difficult. The task is impossible if one relies solely on The Collected Works. In addition, Psychological Types (1921), while otherwise only "slightly revised" in 1960, to its final form, had a definition of "Self" added.4 The unsuspecting reader could, therefore, easily assume that Jung was already using the term in 1921, the same way he used it in later writings. As far as I can determine, the current usage of "Self" only firmed up in Jung's mind between the years 1921 and 1935.

Not coincidentally to my mind, these dates overlap with Jung's relationship with the Sinologist, Richard Wilhelm. Jung met Wilhelm at the Weisheitsschule ("School of Wisdom") in Darmstadt "in the early twenties."5 In 1923 Wilhelm was "invited . . . to Zurich and he spoke on the I Ching at the Psychology Club."6 Wilhelm died in 1930. Jung links "Self" to Wilhelm and Oriental philosophy in a preface from 1934:

"The reader will find a development of the last chapter, [with reference to the concept of the self],7 in my commentary to The Secret of the Golden Flower, the book I brought out in collaboration with my friend Richard Wilhelm. I did not wish to omit reference to this publication, because Oriental philosophy has been concerned with these interior psychic processes for many hundreds of years and is therefore . . . of inestimable value in psychological research."8

From Wilhelm and his knowledge of Oriental, especially Chinese, philosophy, Jung derived confirmation, I believe, for his concept of a central, all-encompassing ordering principle, the Self.

Such a concept may seem to belie the dissociationist basis for Jung's psychology. Two factors should be considered in this regard. Jung, finally, was a Christian, the product of a long tradition of monotheism. The need, if it was such, to identify a single, unifying principle would have been strong in him. On the other hand, even the "polytheistic" systems of the East perceive a unity in the multiplicity: Atman in Hinduism, the Buddha Truth manifested in the thousand things, and, to some extent, the Tao of Chinese Taoism.

This same multiplicity extends to "Self" in Jung's writings. Most obviously, we encounter inevitable confusion in discussing "Self," because we use it to refer to ourselves or others in everyday speech. Jung, of course, used the word, "self," in this everyday manner. Identifying usages where he had the specific, technical terminology in mind can be a bit tricky.9 Considering this caveat, I will list a few of the earliest usages for the technical meaning. In the "Development" section I will then elaborate on each of the references at greater length.

Jung's earliest use of "Self" came in Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (1912): "'Smaller than small, (yet) greater than great in the heart of this creature the self doth repose . . .'"10 The quotation is from the Upanishads. In 1916, Jung referred to "the self, the unconscious or subconscious ego."11 Five years later, he would write that, ". . . the Self is the subject of my totality: hence it also includes the unconscious psyche."12 In the same work, Psychological Types, Jung says, "that Brahman is the reconciliation and dissolution of the opposites . . . a divine essence as well as the Self."13 By 1928, Jung had come very close to our current usage of "Self." In "The Relation Between the Ego and the Unconscious," he said, "I have called this middle-point the self . . . It might just as well be called 'the god in us.'"14 Incidentally, 1928 was also the year that saw the publication of The Secret of the Golden Flower. The Self truly was the flowering, the culmination of Jung's collaboration with Richard Wilhelm.

One final reference to the use of "Self," deserves mention, namely the quotation from 1935 above: "the self is not only the centre, but also the circumference that encloses conscious and the unconscious."15 This definition takes on additional significance considered against the backdrop of the statement from St. Bonaventure: "God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere." More on this later.

With the center/circumference description of the Self, Jung returned to his starting place. He came full circle to the paradoxical expression of the individual's participation in otherness which he only intuited when he wrote, "smaller than small, (yet) greater than great . . ."

and Development

A developmental summary of the concept of the Self occurs in The Collected Works. The summary comes as an editorial footnote in Chapter II of Psychological Types, CW VI.16 Curiously, it is not referenced in the index! The editors write that,

"[A preliminary formulation of the 'self' first occurs in 'The Structure of the Unconscious' (1916), Two Essays (1966 edn.), par. 512: 'The unconscious personal contents constitute the self, the unconscious or subconscious ego'" (emphasis the editors'). Thereafter the self does not appear to have been mentioned in Jung's writings until the publication of Psychological Types, and even as late as the 1950 Swiss edition it is at one point (p. 123) used interchangeably with the ego... "

The confusion which the editors allude to is understandable. I would suggest that Jung used the term, "self/Self," in three distinct ways, particularly in his formative writings. The reader can only determine the exact meaning from the context. At times, I suspect, Jung was not clear, himself, about which of the three usages he intended. He may well have intuited something of the nature of what he would ultimately call, "Self," and, in his early writings, have been groping toward a formulation of this intuition.

We might consider another way of thinking about the different usages for Self. It is possible that Jung identified three strands of significance in what was for him, "an undiscernible essence."17 Tracing the trail of these strands over a period of about thirty years, they merge into one somewhere toward the end of the twenties. If the reader hears a triune structure in this hypothesis, I would point out that it is not contrived, but simply the result of what I have observed in following the strands, myself.

The meanings that Jung used were:

1. Self as an ego-ideal, the potential of the individual's development;
2. Self as a more encompassing term for personality;
3. Self as the totality of the psyche with universal aspects.

1.) Self as ego-ideal:

"In the original" (of Psychological Types) "the 'self' had figured under the concept of the ego."18 The entry, "Self," reads, "v. Ego."19 Under the definition of "Ego," we find the following:

"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. In unconscious phantasy the Self often appears as a super-ordinated or ideal personality, as Faust in relation to Goethe and Zarathustra to Nietzsche."20 (emphasis mine) (1921)

Judging solely from the manner of his ordering, Jung subsumes Self to ego. The fact that Jung did not change this passage for the final version in 1960, suggests there was no discrepancy between his earlier and later thinking. I believe, however, that this was not the case.

While only an hypothesis, I would suggest that Jung's early use of the term, "Self," came out of his experience with "S. W." and her somnambulic alter-ego, Ivenes.

"At times she [S. W.] is anxious, shy, and extremely reserved; at others boisterous to a degree . . . The patient is obviously seeking a middle path between the two extremes; she endeavours to repress them and strains after some ideal condition. These strainings bring her to the puberty dream of the ideal Ivenes"21 (1902) (emphasis mine)

Jung goes on in this same paper to suggest that certain somnambulic manifestations may be "nothing but character-formations for the future personality, or their attempts to burst forth," having "a marked teleological meaning."22 This sounds more like an ego-ideal rather than the more numinous and cosmic qualities that the later "self" assumed in Jung's thinking. The telling argument for me lies in the parallels Jung draws to Goethe and Nietzsche and in Jung's use of the term, "ideal."

We find the thread of this ideal personality reappearing in Jung's 1928 chapter from the "Second Essay," "The Mana Personality." In the same section where he says, "I have called this middle-point the self,"23 he also refers to Goethe and Faust as well as Nietzsche and Zarathustra. He points out in this chapter, however, that the "dissolution" of the "mana personality" leads us back to the middle point of the self. The passage deserves to be quoted, if only because of its almost lyrical language.

"Thus the dissolution of the mana personality naturally leads us, through the assimilation of its contents, back to ourselves as an existing, living something . . . This something, though strange to us, is yet so near; it is altogether ourselves, and yet unrecognizable, a virtual middle-point of such a mysterious constitution that it can demand anything, relationship with animals and with gods, with crystals and with stars, without causing us to wonder, without even exciting our disapproval. This something demands all that and more, and therefore, with nothing in our hands which could fairly be opposed to these claims, it is surely wiser to listen to this voice . . . I have called this middle-point the self."24

Along with the mana personality, it seems that Jung's notion of the Self as simply a personality ideal also "dissolved" in the late twenties. In its place was left a concept far more encompassing and universal than personal.

2.) Self as a more encompassing term for the personality:

This second category overlaps somewhat with the first one. As I noted above, Jung categorized "self" under "Ego" in the "Definitions" chapter of Psychological Types. Five years earlier, in his first hesitant effort to formulate "self," Jung wrote the following:

B. The Composition of the Persona

1. The conscious personal contents constitute the conscious personality, the conscious ego.
2. The unconscious personal contents constitute the self, the unconscious or subconscious ego.
3. The conscious and unconscious contents of a personal nature constitute the persona."25 (1916) (emphasis Jung's)

Here Jung speaks of the self as an ego! What is more, at this point in the evolution of his psychology, he considered both ego and self subcategories of "persona." In all fairness to Jung, I must note that, in 1916, he was using "persona" synonymously with "personality," a larger term for the individual than "ego" (see Persona). Thus, Jung's tentative model for the individual psyche in the mid-teens looked like this: ego = conscious personality; self = unconscious personality; persona = ego + self.

It is Jung's experimentation, which makes his early writings so exciting and fascinating. Seen from the perspective of the later Jung, the reader finds himself in the position of observing those attempts which ended in theoretical cul-de-sacs and those which opened into the finally evolved concepts of the ultimate model.

Contemporary students of Jung's psychology miss the nuances of his development, because they read him, "back to front." They hear the Jung of 1916 with the ears of the completed and evolved concepts. A "front to back" reading, however, provides but another one-sided approach. One truly needs a "both/and" approach to appreciate the complexity and subtleties of Jung's thinking. Paraphrasing a statement of James Hillman's: the later Jung allows one to hear the early Jung; the early Jung deepens and amplifies the meanings of the later Jung.26

A linguistic aside might help to clarify further some of the difficulty that Jung (and his readers) have had in grasping the concept of the Self. In German, Selbst (self), can also be used without any possessive pronoun to interchangeably mean, "my - self" or "her - self" or "your - self." The sentence, Ich habe es selbst, translates, "I, myself, have it." In German, in other words, Selbst is personal. From the perspective of linguistic thought patterns, it would have been very difficult for Jung to have gotten away from the personalizing of "Self."

3.) Self as the totality of the psyche with universal aspects:

The passage which most directly influenced Jung's concept of the Self as we now know it, comes from the Shvetashvatara Upanishad:27

(19) "'Without hands, without feet, He moveth, He graspeth: Eyeless He seeth, (and) earless He heareth: He knoweth what is to be known, yet is there no knower of Him, Him call the first, mighty the man. (20) 'Smaller than small, (yet) greater than great in the heart of this creature the self doth repose . . . etc.'"28 (1912) (Emphasis mine).

In contrast to the quotation from Psychology of the Unconscious, Symbols of Transformation (1952) curiously omits the line, "in the heart of the creature the self doth repose . . .," from verse twenty, so that only the earlier version shows the connection between "smaller than small . . . " and Jung's "Self."

The passage reoccurs in 1921. Citing examples for the "union of opposites," Jung writes,

"That Self, smaller than small, greater than great, is hidden in the heart of this creature here. Man becomes free from desire and free from sorrow when by the grace of the Creator he beholds the glory of the Self. Sitting still he walks afar; lying down he goes everywhere. Who but I can know the God who rejoices and rejoices not?"29

This segment begins with the final sentence of the quotation from Wandlungen and adds the next line (20 and 21).

At this point, in order to remain true to chronological order, I need to diverge from the theme of the passage, "smaller than small," and refer to something else that affected Jung's concept of the Self in 1921.

Jung's work which best shows his struggle with Self is Psychological Types. a work that can only be understood if one bears in mind the various strands of meaning I have referred to. In the same volume we find Jung subsuming self to ego in the "Definitions" (see section 1, above) and extolling the "Self" as "smaller than small, greater than great." How are we to understand Jung here? There may be a key in the following passage.

"These quotations show, that Brahman is the reconciliation and dissolution of the opposites . . . It is a divine essence as well as the Self . . . it is also a definite psychological state, characterized by detachment from emotional fluctuations . . . Release from the fluctuations of affects, which means from the tension of opposites, is synonymous with the way of redemption . . . In a certain sense... Brahman is not only a state, but also a process. . . It is, therefore, not surprising that the symbolical expression of this Brahman concept in the Upanishads makes use of all those symbols which I have termed libido symbols."30

Based on this passage it seems that all those qualities, which Jung was later to ascribe to the Self he sees as libido. Jung goes on to say that "the Brahman concept . . . is in full harmony with that idea of a dynamic or creative element, which I have named 'libido.'"31 A bit farther on he writes,

"The idea of a creative world principle is a projected perception of the living essence in man himself. In order to preclude all vitalistic misunderstandings, one is well advised to make an abstract conception of this essence as energy."32 (emphasis Jung's)

Having established that Self and libido are identical, Jung then turns right around and says, "the energy-concept includes the idea of a determined, directed process eo ipso."33 What does the determining and directing? If we were reading Jung front to back, we would answer, "the Self, of course!" Reading the other way around, however, we could not answer so glibly. We would know that Jung still partially equates "Self" with ego, hardly a super-ordinate principle of order! No, the order and regulating function Jung attributes to the "reconciling symbol."34

At this point in the elaboration of his argument, Jung still misses something. Even the reconciling or uniting symbol requires super-ordinate determination. Where does the overall pattern come from? Jung makes one last attempt to answer the question, which he has posed to himself.

"The symbol is always derived from archaic residues, or imprints engraven in the very stem of the race . . . The imprint (engram) corresponds with a functional inheritance whose existence is not contingent upon ordinary sexual repression but proceeds from instinct differentiation in general."35

Several pages later Jung continues,

"This libido accumulation animates images which the collective unconscious contains as latent possibilities. Here is the source of the God-imago, that imprint which from the beginning of time has been the collective expression of the most power and absolute operation of unconscious libido-concentration upon consciousness."37

Jung's difficulty becomes clear. He has not consolidated his concept of the archetype yet, having only first used the term in 1919 (see Archetype). Within the few years after 1921, he will join "Self" and "archetype" to produce the Self we now know: the archetype of the Self. Thus ends the excursus into Psychological Types, a truly remarkable and landmark event in Jung's psychology!

By 1925 Jung, himself, attributes the origin of the concept to the Upanishads, when he indirectly refers to the "smaller than small" passage. In Analytical Psychology: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1925, he says,

"I have represented the self as a point in the middle of the diagram, but it could just as well be thought of as including the whole, or indeed as spreading over all the world. Indian philosophy describes the self as I have taken it as being smaller than small, yet greater than great" (p. 121) (emphasis mine).

Jung does not cite the reference from the Upanishads. He perhaps assumed that his listeners, being familiar with Psychology of the Unconscious and Psychological Types, would make the connection for themselves. The Oriental connotation and flavor of Jung's usage, "as spreading over all the world," suggests a more cosmic significance than the one usage cited above from Psychological Types, only four years earlier.

We find further confirmation of the Upanishads as Jung's source for "Self" in the published version of the Terry Lectures.

"I have chosen the term 'self' to designate the totality of man, the sum total of conscious and unconscious existence. I have chosen this term in accordance with Eastern philosophy, which for centuries has occupied itself with those problems that arise when even the gods cease to become human. The philosophy of the Upanishads corresponds to a psychology that long ago recognized the relativity of the gods."38

With the parallel to Rudra from the Upanishads, Jung moves the notion of the Self to the plane of the numinous, objective Other, the all-encompassing quality of Ganzheit39 ("wholeness," "completeness," "totality"). One can hear Emersonian transcendentalism here, although I can not locate any reference in Jung that would connect the two thinkers. From the early thirties onward, for Jung to speak of the Self is synonymous with "totality" or "wholeness."

The paradox of "smaller than small, greater than great" moves to a further paradoxical expression between 1925 and 1935: "the center but also the circumference." The 1935 definition cited at the beginning stems from a wonderful quote from St. Bonaventure: "God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and the circumference nowhere"39 (1940). (Other versions of this quote begin, "God is an intelligible sphere whose centre . . . "40 ) By 1959, Jung would substitute "self" for "God" in saying, "The self is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere."41 Paradox and universal otherness, though, are both aspects of the Self that all too often are overlooked by contemporary Jungians.

The best functional summation of the place and role of the Self in Jung's model of the psyche is the following passage from the "Kore" lecture at Eranos in 1941:

"I usually describe the supraordinate personality as the 'self,' thus making a sharp distinction between the ego, which, as is well known, extends only as far as the conscious mind, and the whole of the personality, which includes the unconscious as well as the conscious component. The ego is thus related to the self as part to whole. To that extent the self is supraordinate. Moreover, the self is felt empirically not as subject but as object, and this by reason of its unconscious component, which can only come to consciousness indirectly, by way of projection."42

The reader will perhaps pardon me, however, if I give first priority to the poetic rendition of Jung's initial definition:

"'Without hands, without feet, He moveth, He graspeth: Eyeless He seeth, (and) earless He heareth: He knoweth what is to be known, yet is there no knower of Him, Him call the first, mighty the man. 'Smaller than small, (yet) greater than great in the heart of this creature the self doth repose . . . "

Footnotes

1. Analytical Psychology: Seminar Given in 1925, p. 120.
2. "Dream Symbols of the Process of Individuation," The Integration of the Personality, p. 96.
3. "A Psychological Approach to the Trinity," CW XI, par. 232. This paper was "revised and expanded" in 1948. No English translation exists of the original lecture. Because Jung used this description of the Self as early as 1925, we can probably date the quotation from 1940.
4. Psychological Types, CW VI, p. v.
5. Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1961/1965, p. 373.
6. Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1961/1965, p. 373.
7. "The last chapter" Jung refers to is the one entitled, "The Mana Personality," added in 1928 to the 1917 version of "The Structure of the Unconscious." (See, Two Essays)
8. Preface to the Second Edition (1935) of "The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious," CW VII, p. 124.
9. The editors of The Collected Works have pointed this out in a note in CW VI. See note 16 below.
10. Psychology of the Unconscious, 1991, p. 118.
11. "The Conception of the Unconscious," Collected Papers, 1917, p. 472.
12. Psychological Types, 1923/1953, p. 540.
13. Psychological Types, 1923/1953, p. 246.
14. Two Essays, 1928, p. 265. Compare the same passage from CW VII, 1953/1972: "It might equally well be called the 'God within us'" ( par. 399).
15. See Note 2.
16. CW VI, par. 183, n. 85.
17. "The Relation Between the Ego and the Unconscious," Two Essays, 1928, p. 265.
18. CW VI, p. vi.
19. Psychological Types or The Psychology of Individuation, 1923/1953, p. 585.
20. Psychological Types, 1923/1953, p. 540
21. "Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena," Collected Papers, p. 82. (CW I, par. 132)
22. "Occult Phenomena," Collected Papers, p. 84. (CW I, par. 136)
23. "The Relation Between the Ego and the Unconscious," Two Essays, 1928, p. 265.
24. "The Relation Between the Ego and the Unconscious, Two Essays, 1928, p. 265.
25. "The Conception of the Unconscious," Collected Papers (1917), p. 472.
26. "Some Early Background to Jung's Ideas, Notes on C. G. Jung's Medium by Stefanie Zumstein Preiswerk," Spring 1976, p. 133.
27. Symbols of Transformation, CW V, par. 182.
28. Psychology of the Unconscious, 1991, p. 118.
29. Psychological Types, CW VI, p. 198. The verse is the same, the translation a bit different. See p. 245 in the 1921 version for a slightly different translation.
30. Psychological Types, 1923/1953, p. 246. (See also CW VI, par. 330)
31. Psychological Types, 1923/1953, p. 249. (See also CW VI, par. 336)
32. Psychological Types, 1923/1953, p. 250. (See also CW VI, par. 337)
33. Psychological Types, 1923/1953, p. 262. (See also CW VI, par. 355)
34. Psychological Types, 1923/1953. The term appears most notably as subheadings in Chapter 5, "The Type Problem in Poetry," e.g., "The Significance of the Reconciling Symbol" (p. 234), "Concerning the Brahmanic Conception of the Reconciling Symbol" (p. 247), etc.
35. Psychological Types, 1923/1953, pp. 295,296. (See also CW VI, par. 405) Jung also uses the term, "engram," in the "Definitions," page 556: "The primordial image is a mnemic deposit, an imprint ('engramm' — Semon), which has arisen through a condensation of innumerable, similar processes."
36. Psychological Types, 1923/1953, pp. 300-301. (See also CW VI, par. 412)
37. Psychology and Religion, p. 100.
38. Elie Humbert, C. G. Jung, p. 64.
39. "A Psychological Approach to the Trinity," CW XI, par. 229, n. 6.
40. Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW XIV, par. 41.
41. "Talks with Miguel Serrano," C. G. Jung Speaking, p. 401.
42. "The Psychological Aspects of the Kore," CW IX1, par. 315, 1949/50 version, i.e., 1941, or revised version, 1951/1963, as well?

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Copyright 1995 Gary V. Hartman. All rights reserved.

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