Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey - Inner City Books

On Becoming Conscious 87
ess. Given decent mirroring in the early years, we stand a good
chance of acquiring a healthy ego. But again, this is not the same
thing as being conscious. There are lots of take-charge people with
very healthy egos—captains of industry, politicians, artists, entrepreneurs
and so on—who are quite unconscious. You can be a
leader, run things like a clock and manage others well. But if you
don’t take the time to introspect, to question who you are without
your external trappings, you can’t claim to be conscious.
Mature consciousness, according to Jung, is dependent on a
working relationship between a strong but flexible ego and the Self,
regulating center of the psyche. For that to happen one has to acknowledge
that the ego is not in charge. This is not a natural process;
it is a major shift in perspective, like the difference between
thinking the earth is the center of the solar system and then learning
that the sun is. This generally doesn’t happen until later in life,
when you look back on your experience and realize there was more
going on than you knew. Ergo, something other than “you” was
pulling the strings.
Becoming conscious, then, is above all not a one-time thing. It is
a continuous process, by the ego, of assimilating what was previously
unknown to the ego. It involves a progressive understanding
of why we do what we do. And a major step is to become aware of
the many ways we’re influenced by unconscious aspects of ourselves,
which is to say, our complexes.
Jung visualized the unconscious as an ocean, because both are inexhaustible.
Freud saw the unconscious, or subconscious, as little
more than a garbage can of fantasies and emotions that were active
when we were children and then were repressed or forgotten. Jung
accepted that for a while. He was an early champion of Freud’s
dogma, but in the end it just didn’t accord with Jung’s own experience.
Jung came to believe instead that the unconscious also includes
contents we never knew were there: things about ourselves
in our personal unconscious, and then, at a deeper level, the collective
unconscious, all the varied experiences of the human race, the