Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey - Inner City Books

32
The Inflated Ego
An inflated consciousness is always egocentric and conscious
of nothing but its own existence. 117
Hearing the call is a numinous experience. Such events always have
a deep emotional resonance. Hitherto unconscious contents have
become conscious. What was previously unknown is now known.
That automatically results in an enlargement of the personality.
Cults, sudden “born again” conversions and other far-reaching
changes of mind—like Paul on the road to Damascus—have their
origin in such experiences. Whether for good or ill, only time will
tell. Consciousness is temporarily disoriented, life as one has
known it is disrupted, and when the ego is particularly weak the entire
personality may disintegrate.
The extreme possibility is schizophrenia, a splitting of the
mind—multiple personalities with no central control, a free-for-all
among the complexes. But the more common danger is inflation, an
unavoidable concomitant of realizing new things about oneself.
Inflation is a psychological phenomenon that involves an extension
of the personality beyond individual limits. This regularly
happens in analysis, as ego-awareness lights up the dark, but it is
common in everyday life as well. One example is the way in which
people identify with their business or title, as if they themselves
were the whole complex of social factors which in fact characterize
only their position. This is an unwarranted extension of oneself,
whimsically bestowed by others.
Here are two passages by Jung on inflation:
“Knowledge puffeth up,” Paul writes to the Corinthians, for the new
knowledge had turned the heads of many, as indeed constantly hap-
117 Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12, par. 563.
119