EGO, ARCHETYPE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
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Ego is Latin for I. It is the organizing and self-regulating center of waking consciousness. A healthy developed ego is characterized by reflection, will-power, self-esteem, courage, self-assertiveness and leadership ability. The ego's primary purpose is to protect us from chaotic and irrational impulses arising out of unconscious drives and instincts. The ego is like a ship surrounded by the great ocean of the unconscious. If the ocean becomes to stormy due to collective or personal crisis, our ego center can be threatened and engulfed. Once it is engulfed, it's not so easy to find our center again. There is a loss of personal identity and the self-worth that it's built on. This is the beginning of Depression. The story of the Titanic from its maiden voyage to its fatal encounter with an iceberg is an excellent psychological metaphor for the extremes on either side of the ego: Inflation and Depression. If we like the Titanic, believe we are unsinkable, there will more often than not be an iceberg somewhere in our future to sink our self-important inflated attitude. If we don't sink into depression, we might actually arrive back in our ego-center a wiser and more balanced person.
The following schema shows the extremes above and below a healthy ego center:
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EGO INFLATION
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"An inflated consciousness is always
egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own existence. It 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."
--Jung
To much ego and we become egomaniacs. An inflated sense of self-importance easily becomes a god complex. In the drawing LEFT by artist and poet William Blake a young man is trying to possess the moon. He has a very long stick and is saying, "I Want! I Want!" In this state we think and believe we have no limits. The power drive becomes corrupted and madness follows. Famous examples include Mussolini and Hitler below. The middle photo shows Mussolini acknowledging the adulation of a crowd in Venice's Piazza San Marco in 1934. The Hitler photo (far right) is interesting because it comes from a sequence of studio photos taken in 1925. Hitler was practicing the fine art of mass manipulation. |
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DEPRESSION
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"There are moments in human
life when a new page is turned. New interests and tendencies appear which
have hitherto received no attention, or there is a sudden change of
personality (a so-called mutation of character). During the incubation
period of such a change we can often observe a loss of conscious energy: the
new development has drawn off the energy it needs from consciousness. The
lowering of energy can be seen most clearly before the onset of certain
psychoses and also in the empty stillness which precedes creative work."
--Jung The collective epidemic of our time is depression. Like a black hole once the energy needed to support the ego collapses, the light of ego-consciousness vanishes into the abyss of the unconscious. Symptoms of depression include mood alterations, loss of energy, lack of interest, poor concentration, disturbed sleep or appetite and feelings of worthlessness. An inner critical voice chants a familiar mantra usually beginning with I'm not: "I'm not good enough!, I'm not smart enough!, I'm not pretty enough, I'm not rich enough." "Medication aborts the (healing) process. It is incomplete and the person (patient) is discouraged by the prevailing view that this is something that should not have happened." --Dr. John Weir Perry, M.D. Rather than getting in touch with our body and our feelings we head for the medicine cabinet. Part of the mythogem of depression in America and the rest of the world is our immediate pharmaceutical solution: Zoloft, Prozac, Paxil, and Luvox to name a few. These are the new (and not so new) Olympian gods that promise to drive the underworld titans back to their instinctual home. However, drugs betray the one-sided nature of our psychological education. In order to work with our own unconscious in any meaningful way, our ego structure must be developed within the context of the whole Self. This means awareness, recognition, development and some integration of the other parts of psyche, e.g. particularly the shadow, anima and animus. |
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THE WORK OF DR. JOHN WEIR PERRY, M.D.
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Although not specifically connected with
clinical depression, the work of John Weir Perry deserves a mention here. Perhaps
one of the foremost authority's in the mental health field for many years
was Dr. John Weir Perry. After finishing his M.D. at Harvard Medical School
and training at the C. G. Jung Institute of Zurich, he went on to establish
Diabasis. This was residential facility for young adults in their 20's with acute psychosis, e.g. a schizophrenic condition. Medication was not used in the treatment. In an 1997 interview, Dr. Perry spoke of an earlier study done at San Francisco State Hospital. With his colleague Dr. Julian Silverman, they set up a double blind experiment to identify which patients did well without medication. Using randomly assigned cases, each patient received a similar capsule of either thorazine or a placebo. Half the patients on the unit received medication and the other half the placebo. No one except the researchers knew which was which. The results: the half on medication had a return rate of 73 per cent and those who received the placebo (no medication) had a return rate of 8 per cent. At one point in his career Dr. Perry was invited to present his findings on psychosis as a healing process to members of The New York Academy of Sciences. |
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