Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey - Inner City Books

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The Self-Regulation of the Psyche
Only what is really oneself has the power to heal. 39
If I were asked to choose one remark of Jung’s that informs my attitude
as an analyst, that would be it. The whole process is there, including
the idea that neurosis is an attempt at self-cure. And what is
really oneself can only be discovered through holding the tension
between the opposites until the “third”—something not logically
given—manifests. How this third, the so-called transcendent function,
makes itself known depends on individual psychology and
circumstances. But in Jung’s model it always represents the creative
intervention and guidance of the Self, the archetype of wholeness,
which functions as the regulating center of the psyche.
In plainer words, the Self is a transpersonal power that is beyond
the control of the ego. It can be experienced, but not easily defined.
In fact, there is no difference between the Self as an experiential,
psychological reality and the religious concept of a supreme being,
except that the traditional idea of God places Him somewhere “out
there.” In Jung’s model of the psyche, the Self is inside.
Here are some significant comments by Jung on the Self:
Intellectually the self is no more than a psychological concept, a
construct that serves to express an unknowable essence which we
cannot grasp as such, since by definition it transcends our powers of
comprehension. It might equally well be called the “God within .” 40
Sensing the self as something irrational, as an indefinable existent,
to which the ego is neither opposed nor subjected, but merely at-
39 Two Essays on Analytic Psychology, CW 7, par. 258.
40 Ibid., par. 399. Note that Jung did not capitalize the word “self,” but in modern
Jungian writing it is conventional to do so in order to differentiate the Self as archetype
from the ego-self.
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