ABSTRACT
It is peculiarly difficult to talk about the self in a depth psychological context. While Freud avoided the word self (selbst), using it only once, Jung appears, at first glance, to make up for this omission by using the word more than a thousand times in the Collected Works. However, when we take into account that Jung’s term ‘Self’ differs greatly from the ordinary use of the word, it becomes apparent that it is almost more difficult to discuss questions of selfhood in a Jungian context than it would be in any other. Bearing this in mind, in what follows I shall use Self (capital S) to refer to Jung’s concept, and self (lower-case s) wherever I am referring to the more demotic usage. Many thousands of pages have been devoted to exploring the complexities and paradoxes of the Jungian Self, but very few to questions such as: what does Jung say about the nature of human selfhood, what is it to be a self, does it even make sense to talk about the self from a Jungian perspective? It is of course not the case that Jung says nothing about the self. How could it be, given that his subject is the human psyche? But it is precisely because the Self looms so large in his writing that the self is often in danger of being overlooked, not to say obscured. The prime source of material on the self in Jung is his writings on the process of individuation, concerning, as they do, the achievement of conscious selfhood in the broadest sense or, in Nietzsche’s phrase, how one ‘becomes what one is’. When we examine these passages, what we find is a fundamental ambiguity at the heart of his psychology. The
idea of self which predominates in these settings is disproportionately onesided, and its exclusive emphasis on interiority, unity, self-identity, undividedness and metaphysical transcendence, conflicts at the most fundamental level with Jung’s more radical and revolutionary intuitions with regard to the psyche as a mode of being-in-the-world as an embodied social being.
