ABSTRACT
In the more than 50 years Jung worked and developed his psychological theory, his ideas about the ego evolved so that the early formulations became reworked, expanded, and differentiated. This led to confusion as terms were used throughout whose meaning evolved. For example, the ‘self’ concept was an aspect of the ego in the original 1923 edition of Psychological Types (CW 6) and this viewpoint was not revised by Jung in that work until 1960. Finding a theory of ego in Jung's works, therefore, has been part textual and content analysis and part detective work. If there is a ‘golden thread’ that runs through his work, it is this: the ego is first a part of a psychodynamic process, second it has a developmental pathway, and third it represents a standpoint in which what is not ego can be seen and integrated. The ego concept for Jung, therefore, has elements of structure, dynamics, experience, and the transpersonal.
