Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey - Inner City Books

120 The Inflated Ego
pens. The inflation has nothing to do with the kind of knowledge,
but simply and solely with the fact that any new knowledge can so
seize hold of a weak head that he no longer sees and hears anything
else. He is hypnotized by it, and instantly believes he has solved the
riddle of the universe. But that is equivalent to almighty selfconceit.
118
An inflated consciousness is . . . . incapable of learning from the
past, incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable
of drawing right conclusions about the future. It is hypnotized by itself
and therefore cannot be argued with. It inevitably dooms itself
to calamities that must strike it dead. Paradoxically enough, inflation
is a regression of consciousness into unconsciousness. This always
happens when consciousness takes too many unconscious contents
upon itself and loses the faculty of discrimination, the sine qua non
of all consciousness. 119
Every step toward greater consciousness creates a kind of Promethean
guilt. Through self-knowledge, the gods are, as it were,
robbed of their fire; that is, something that was the property of unconscious
powers is torn out of its natural context and subordinated
to the whims of the conscious mind. The one who has “stolen” the
new knowledge becomes alienated from others. The pain of this
loneliness is the vengeance of the gods, for never again can one
return to the fold. Prometheus’s punishment was to be chained to
the lonely cliffs of the Caucasus, forsaken of God and man. An eagle
fed on his liver, and as much as was devoured during the day,
that much grew again during the night.
Fortunately, few of us have to go through all that. The ancient
notion of the liver as the seat of the soul may linger on, but nowadays
common sense and the reactions of others to an assumed godlikeness
are usually enough to bring one down to earth.
However, there is still the feeling of having been chosen, set
118 “The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious,” Two Essays on Analytical
Psychology, CW 7, par. 243, note 1.
119 Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12, par. 563.