Self

Definition

The self, in Jung’s usage, is two things said with one word, and he never fully separated them. It is the whole of the psyche, conscious and unconscious together, of which the ego is only the conscious part; and it is the centre of that whole, the ordering factor that the ego is not. Because most of that whole is unconscious, the self can never be known directly or completely. It can be inferred only from its effects and from the symbols the unconscious produces for it: circles and quaternities, mandalas, the stone, the god.

Two consequences follow that popular use tends to lose. The self is not a person’s self-image, self-esteem or sense of identity; those belong to the ego, and in Jung’s vocabulary the self is precisely what the ego is not. And the self is not a destination. Individuation, the process by which the ego comes into relation with it, is in Jung’s words never-ending, and the ego that believes it has become the self is, on his account, inflated rather than whole.

History

The term enters Jung’s vocabulary in Psychologische Typen (1921), and in two places. In the chapter on Schiller he already writes of a differentiation of the self from the opposites (CW 6 ¶183), but the word is defined only in the Definitions appended to the book, and there not under its own heading. The entry “Self” refers the reader to “Ego” (CW 6 ¶706), and it is inside the definition of the ego that the distinction is drawn:

I therefore distinguish between the ego and the self, in so far as the ego is only the subject of my consciousness, while the self is the subject of my whole psyche, the unconscious included. In this sense the self would be an (ideal) entity which comprises the ego. — C. G. Jung, Psychologische Typen (1921), Definitions, “Ich”, editor’s translation; Gutenberg #61543

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The same entry names Faust and Zarathustra as the self appearing in fantasy as an ideal personality; elsewhere in the book Jung equates the self with the Atman. The free-standing definition that readers find in the Collected Works, where the self is “the whole range of psychic phenomena in man”, in part a postulate, symbolised by the supraordinate personality, the circle and the quaternity (CW 6 ¶789–791), is not in the 1921 text. Jung wrote it for the German collected edition of 1960, as the editors’ note to CW 6 records.

In the 1928 essay “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious” the self became the name for a new centre of personality, a point between conscious and unconscious that Jung said might equally be called the God within us (CW 7 ¶399, as quoted in Sharp 1991), and he later referred readers there for his reasons for choosing the word (CW 12 ¶44). The Integration of the Personality (1939), the English edition of the Eranos lectures, is still cautious: the ego is dethroned to the centre of consciousness, but Jung would hardly dare to assume a centre in the unconscious (pp. 4–5); the self as totality is boundless, the concept a purely delimiting one like Kant’s thing-in-itself (p. 176). The Terry Lectures of 1937, published as Psychology and Religion, add a caution: the quaternities modern dreamers produce prove only the existence of an archetypal God-image, not of God (CW 11 ¶102), and the whole of a person is an ineffable totality that can only be formulated symbolically (CW 11 ¶140).

Psychology and Alchemy (1944) gives the formula that reference works usually quote:

The self is not only the centre, but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the centre of this totality, just as the ego is the centre of consciousness. — C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (1944), CW 12 ¶44

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Aion (1951) is the fullest treatment. Its fourth chapter warns that it is a catastrophe when the ego is assimilated by the self, and an inflation when the self is assimilated to the ego (¶45–47), and places it outside the personal sphere:

As for the self, it is completely outside the personal sphere, and appears, if at all, only as a religious mythologem, and its symbols range from the highest to the lowest. — C. G. Jung, Aion (1951), CW 9ii ¶57

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Wholeness is nonetheless empirical, Jung argues, because the psyche anticipates it in spontaneous mandala symbols (¶59), and since those symbols cannot be distinguished from the imago Dei, everything said of the God-image applies to them (¶60; also ¶42, ¶73). The fifth chapter makes Christ the exemplary symbol of the self (¶70); the closing chapter calls the self a complexio oppositorum (¶355) and a dynamic process rather than a static quantity (¶411). Answer to Job (1952) draws the conclusion: the God-image coincides not with the unconscious as such but with one content of it, the archetype of the self, from which it can no longer be distinguished empirically (CW 11 ¶757).

The debate

Everyone in analytical psychology uses the word; the disagreement is about what it refers to. Andrew Samuels (1985) made the self one of the markers separating his three schools, and defined the Classical School by its putting the integrating and individuating self first. That Zürich view keeps Jung’s three claims together: the self is the totality, it is the centre, and it cannot be told from a God-image. Edinger (1972) opens Ego and Archetype with exactly that: the Self, capitalised, is the ordering and unifying centre of the total psyche as the ego is of consciousness, and is “identical with the imago Dei”.

Michael Fordham objected in 1963 that Jung had produced two incompatible theories. If the self is the whole personality it can never be experienced, because the ego that does the experiencing is inside it; if it is a central archetype it cannot also be the totality that includes the ego. His alternative, built from infant observation, puts the self beyond both: a primary self, present at birth, which on meeting the environment begins a rhythmic cycle of deintegration and reintegration out of which ego, archetypal images and object relations arise; what Jung had called the centre he renames the “central archetype of order” (Samuels 1985, pp. 83 and 88; Jacoby 1990, p. 70). This is the root of the Developmental School.

Edinger’s contribution is the ego-Self axis, a term Samuels credits to Erich Neumann (1959) but which Edinger used with greater precision. He proposed a lifelong alternation of inflation, the ego identified with the Self, and alienation, the axis damaged, with individuation as the state in which the axis becomes conscious (Edinger 1972, pp. 3–7; Samuels 1985, p. 92).

Mario Jacoby (1990) set Jung beside Heinz Kohut, whose self psychology is psychoanalysis’s own version. Jacoby finds the two closer than either school admits: both treat the self as unknowable in its essence and as more than the ego. The difference he keeps is that Jung’s self embraces the unconscious totality and the God-image, whereas Kohut’s develops out of empathic relationship and claims nothing beyond the personal (Jacoby 1990, pp. 62–71).

The newest intervention is biological. Alcaro, Carta and Panksepp (2017) and then Oliver Dale and Andrew Howe (2026) read Jung’s self against Jaak Panksepp’s affective neuroscience, offering its inherited, subcortical emotional systems as a footing for Jung’s claim of inborn pattern. It is an argument, not a test.

Empirical status

None. No study has tested the self as a psychological construct, and no instrument measures it. Jung’s own definition, a totality most of which is unconscious and a concept that only marks a limit, puts it beyond measurement by design, a point Fordham made from inside the school. The nearest studies are adjacent rather than tests. Henderson, Rosen and Mascaro (2007) had 36 undergraduates reporting trauma symptoms draw, over three short sessions, either mandalas of their feelings or neutral objects; the mandala group reported fewer trauma symptoms a month later. That is an outcome study of drawing, not a measure of an archetype. The large mainstream literature on the self (self-concept, self-esteem, narrative identity) measures the ego’s representation of itself, which in Jung’s vocabulary is a different thing.

Appearances

Jung supplied his own catalogue, and most of it is religious. The mandala, Sanskrit for circle, is the symbol he studied longest, from Tibetan diagrams to the circles in his patients’ dreams (CW 12, Part II, chapter 3; Aion ¶351). The alchemical lapis, the philosophers’ stone that is also the filius philosophorum, “means nothing other than the self” (Aion ¶194). Christ “exemplifies the archetype of the self” (Aion ¶70), unitemporal as a man and eternal as God, a pairing Jung says expresses the self as well (¶116). The Atman of the Upanishads, “smaller than small, greater than great” (Aion ¶223), and the Tao are his Eastern parallels, named while insisting that the idea of the self is a product of cognition grounded in experience, not of faith (¶124). In dreams the self appears as the elephant, horse, bull, bear, fish and snake, the flower and the tree, the mountain and the lake (Aion ¶356). All of these are readings, applied to the material after the fact; Jung said as much when he called the concept an abbreviated description of a sum of experience rather than a thing (¶63).

Sources

• Jung, C. G. (1921). Psychologische Typen. Rascher. Definitionen 26 “Ich” and 50 “Selbst”; chapter V on the Brahmanic Atman. Project Gutenberg #61543. English: Psychological Types (H. G. Baynes, Trans., 1923); CW 6 ¶183, ¶706. Princeton University Press, 1971, ISBN 978-0-691-09770-1; the editorial note and the editors’ footnote to ¶789 record that the definition at ¶789–791 was written for the Gesammelte Werke edition of 1960.
• Jung, C. G. (1928). The relations between the ego and the unconscious. In Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. CW 7, Part II; ¶399 as quoted in Sharp (1991).
• Jung, C. G. (1938). Psychology and religion (The Terry Lectures, 1937). CW 11 ¶102, ¶140.
• Jung, C. G. (1939). The Integration of the Personality (S. Dell, Trans.). Farrar & Rinehart. Chapter 1, pp. 4–5 (the ego dethroned); chapter 4, p. 176 (self as totality and delimiting concept). Chapters 3–5 were revised into CW 9i and CW 12.
• Jung, C. G. (1944). Psychology and Alchemy. CW 12 ¶44 and ¶310; Part II, chapter 3, “The Symbolism of the Mandala”; Part III, chapter 5, “The Lapis-Christ Parallel”.
• Jung, C. G. (1951). Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. CW 9ii ¶42, ¶43–67, ¶70, ¶73, ¶116, ¶124, ¶194, ¶223, ¶351–357, ¶411. Princeton University Press.
• Jung, C. G. (1952). Answer to Job. CW 11 ¶757.
• Sharp, D. (1991). Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms and Concepts. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-48-9. Entry “Self”; online at https://www.jungpage.org/learn/jung-lexicon
• Fordham, M. (1963). The empirical foundation and theories of the self in Jung’s works. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 8(1), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1465-5922.1963.00001.x
• Fordham, M. (1976). The Self and Autism. Heinemann Medical. ISBN 978-0-433-30882-9.
• Edinger, E. F. (1972). Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche. Putnam for the C. G. Jung Foundation; Penguin edition 1973, ISBN 978-0-14-021728-5. Part I, chapters 1–2.
• Samuels, A. (1985). Jung and the Post-Jungians. Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 978-0-7102-0864-4. Chapter 1 (the three schools) and chapter 4, “The self and individuation”.
• Jacoby, M. (1990). Individuation and Narcissism: The Psychology of Self in Jung and Kohut. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-06464-4. Chapter 3.
• Kohut, H. (1971). The Analysis of the Self. International Universities Press. ISBN 978-0-8236-0145-5.
• Stein, M. (1998). Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction. Open Court. ISBN 978-0-8126-9376-8. Chapter 7.
• Henderson, P., Rosen, D., & Mascaro, N. (2007). Empirical study on the healing nature of mandalas. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 1(3), 148–154. https://doi.org/10.1037/1931-3896.1.3.148
• Alcaro, A., Carta, S., & Panksepp, J. (2017). The affective core of the self: A neuro-archetypical perspective on the foundations of human (and animal) subjectivity. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 1424. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01424
• Dale, O., & Howe, A. J. (2026). Affective neuroscience: Implications for the Jungian self and archetypes. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 71(3). https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5922.70086