the quest of the true self: jung's rediscovery of a modern...

The Quest of the True Self: Jung's Rediscovery of a Modern InventionAuthor(s): James W. HeisigSource: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 77, No. 2 (Apr., 1997), pp. 252-267Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1205772Accessed: 06/10/2010 08:32

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The Quest of the True Self: Jung's Rediscovery of a Modern Invention

James W Heisig / Nanzan Institute for Religion and

Culture

My people will live in the houses they build and eat the fruit of the vineyards they plant. ... They will wear out themselves what their own hands have made. (ISA. 65:21-22)

You cannot call up any wilder vision than a city in which men ask themselves if they have any selves. (GILBERT CHESTERTON)'

The idea of the quest of a "true Self" distinct from the everyday "ego" has become something of a permanent fixture in modern consciousness. Whatever one may think about the possibility or desirability of pursuing such a quest, the raw idea has found its way into the common language alongside of ideas like technology, industrialization, obligatory schooling, clinical hygiene, and rapid transit. Like these ideas, it is a rather recent invention whose meaning would not have been self-evident two hundred years ago and, indeed, would not have made very much of the sense it makes today at all. And like these ideas, too, it has enabled certain institu- tions to flourish in our times that would have foundered in an earlier age.

In order to become respectable to modern critical consciousness and to immunize itself against subversion by alternative modes of thought, this idea needed to be fitted out with its own distinctive history. Unlike ideas that deal directly with the ongoing creation of an external social order, the idea of the quest of the true Self in practice claims to deal with the unchanging inner structure of human nature. Accordingly, its justifying history is less concerned with showing the forward diachronic progress of human inventiveness than it is with discovering a synchronic "archetype" that is real in proportion as it remains unaffected by the pas- sage of time.

I do not mean to imply that the history of ideas about the transcenden-

IOrthodoxy (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1943), chap. 3. ? 1997 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0022-4189/97/7702-0004$02.00

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Quest of the True Self

tal structure of the human is thereby necessarily any more "mythical" than the history of social progress, or even that the underlying assumptions of the former are in general more transparent. Rather, I am per- suaded that the two kinds of history are braided together in our imagination so tightly that it does not make sense to reflect on one without the other. Only by rediscovering the time-worn, repetitive patterns at work in the most astonishingly novel inventions of the present can we break the spell that ideas of progress and development seem to have cast on us. Conversely, only by recognizing the epoch-specific, inventive nature of our most honored archetypes can we prevent ourselves from inflicting parochial truths on others as eternal verities.

My concern here with the quest of the true Self and its accompanying liberation from the everyday ego, then, is to question the quasi-mythical aura that has come to surround the ideas and to suggest that they are far more modern than we are normally given to believe. Whether one dis- misses the quest of the true Self as self-preoccupied vanity, or sees it as the central concern of life, or even if one simply does not care, the fact is, we do understand what the phrase is trying to point at: something la- tent in human inwardness, distinct from and superior to the everyday ego. There are differences of interpretation, regarding the meaning of the terms or their interrelationship, and these are not unimportant or without consequences. But to restrict the context for evaluating those differences to inner, subjective experience or to supposedly objective, classical texts, would be to neglect the epoch-specific lens of modern consciousness.

No doubt the mythologizing of the quest of the true Self has its salutary side. For one thing, it has fed the ongoing rapprochement between psychology and religion regarding the common concern for the renewal of spirituality beyond its past institutional forms. At the same time, it has provided those working on the borderlands between Buddhist and Chris- tian thought with a forum for sustained and fruitful dialogue. Standing in this forum, scholars from both sides who have struggled hard with the original texts and languages have argued convincingly for the differences of worldview out of which Judeo-Christian interest in the "soul" and East- ern notions of the "no-self" have emerged. This, too, has been salutary.

But none of this seems to affect the initial assumption that, after all, the quest of the true Self as it is discussed today is merely our contemporary rediscovery of what deserves to be recognized in essence as an age-old, perhaps universal, human endeavor. To the extent that this assumption becomes a dogma out of the reach of reason, it is no more than superstition. The fact that the dogma is so widely used not only in many of the quasi-religious, philosophical, psychological, and moral movements that have washed across the consciousness of the twentieth century with the

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The Journal of Religion

evangel of "self-improvement," but also in traditional world religions and in clinical psychology, does nothing to change that. Certainly, some mea- sure of superstition is necessary when it comes to the mysteries of the inner life. But when superstition is off and running before reason has had a chance to lace its shoes, its natural functions risk turning pathological. The belief in a Self truer and deeper than the everyday ego is, I suggest, a case in point.

A proper study of these questions opens up a field too vast for a single essay. It would mean sorting out the history of all the ideas that went into constructing the idea of the quest of the true Self and showing why this construct has captured the imagination of modern men and women as it has. It would also require a critical look at what function the rereading of history has played in securing this idea a place in common sense at the end of the millennium. We would have to cast our historical nets very wide and would have to rely on much guesswork and suspicion to put the catch in any kind of order. In the attempt, we should probably learn at least as much about human interiority as we do by applying the notion of the true Self to the questions that pester us about what it means to be human in today's world.

What I would like to do here is consider the problem of the invention of the true Self in light of what is perhaps the classical statement of the rediscovery of the Self in the twentieth century: the psychology of C.G. Jung.

EGO AND SELF IN FREUD AND JUNG

It was Freud's original contribution to see the ego as the center of conscious mind but not necessarily of the psyche as a whole, which included forces outside of the consciousness-the unconscious. The genius of his idea was that it gave expression to what was already familiar to ordinary experience and created a logic for reflecting rationally on that familiarity. It was a logic of energies, "libido," flowing hydraulically through channels innate to the psyche, of pressures building up and draining off, of burst- ing pipes, leveling off, rechanneling, and so forth. The role of the ego in this logic was a mixture of activities and passivities (or perhaps we might say, of freedoms and predeterminations). Simply put, the ego stood in the middle of the contradiction struggling to maintain a hold, an identity, on the whole, to defend its freedoms and expand them as far as possible. On the one hand, the individual ego is shaped by social conventions that hover over the ego like an unassailable heavenly vault-the superego. On the other, the ego is like a solitary raft floating on a great sea of primal desire, the "id," whose currents frustrate the attempt of the ego to navi- gate its way by the constellations above, let alone to set its own course. The abstract optimism that Kant had expressed for the "starry sky above

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and the moral law within" is replaced here with a pessimistic wisdom that is too close to common experience to dismiss out of hand.

The details of the logic need not detain us here. I would only note that the Latin terms-ego, superego, and id-adopted in English translations eliminated the offense that the terms Freud used-das Ich, das Uberich, and das Es-represented when first introduced to the German language. In so doing, they also help the reader slide easily over something im- portant that is going on in Freud's logic: the reification of psychic functions into psychic entities. As we shall see, this reification goes back a century before Freud, but it was through Freud that it first found its way into the popular imagination.

Jung's disagreement with Freud did not challenge this basic insight of an ego-centered consciousness driven by unconscious energies within a predetermined system. He simply reversed the orientation of the logic in the direction of the Kantian optimism, unable to persuade himself of Freud's conviction that the cosmos in general and human life in particular were not purposeful, that morality was entirely a matter of external pressures, and that the unconscious psyche was at bottom inimical to freedom. In place of the ego-superego-id model of the human, he devised an alternative model of psychic functions which he, as naturally as Freud had done, reified into entities. The entire map of the psyche as Jung eventually drew it is too complex to chart here and in any case is unneces- sary for understanding the basic idea behind his central novelty: the idea of the Self.

Jung eliminated the notion of a superego, "that deposit of centuries of public opinion," as he called it, and replaced it with a personal stratum of the unconscious that included both social mores and individual memo- ries. But the full weight of the accent that Freud put on superego in de- scribing the functions of religion, civilization, art, and so forth, Jung shifted to what he called the Self.

It should be noted that Freud only used the noun "self" once, and then in a pronominal sense.2 The choice seems to have been deliberate. Linguistically, the nominal form has been present in Western languages and Near Eastern languages at least from the second century, where it is used as a substitute for soul, personality, consciousness, mind, heart, and the like, either including or excluding the body. Freud's avoidance of the term was not due to his ignorance of it. His purpose seems rather to have

2 The English Standard Edition (ed. James Strachey [London: Hogarth, 1953-]) uses "the self" four times, only the first of them translating the German das eigenes Selbst (19:46). The others are loose translations of die eigene Person (14:126, 147) and das Inneres (4:67). In Jung's work, the word appears well over one thousand times in one or the other of the technical senses described in this essay.

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been to replace loose parlance with clear vocabulary. Be that as it may, the decision left Jung free to pick it up and define it in his own way, namely, as a natural correlative to the ego, distinct from but ontologically every bit as real as the center of conscious life. Jung's Self was a different center to the psyche, but unlike the phenomena of multiple personalities, which had traditionally been spoken of as a pathological multiplication of what is normally singular, it was a center at which the innate drive for

meaning and perfection crystallized. This would have been unthinkable without the counterfoil of the Freudian ego and superego.

The Self is not a univocal term in Jung. Not even in his later writings did he manage to dispose of the ambiguities. Though Jung tends to shift the meaning of his terms so as to cement his arguments,3 there is more to the lack of clarity in his notion of the Self than habitual imprecision. In addition to providing a cornerstone for a model different from Freud's, the idea of the Self had to bear the burden of giving the unconscious a

positive meaning that could hold its own against traditional Christianity. In particular, the idea of the Self was his attempt to siphon off the power that the idea of the soul held over the Western imagination. He intended it to perform the practical and theoretical functions that the notion of

soul-rejected by twentieth-century psychology, beginning with William

James-had done for Christianity. But if the Self was to take over the

ontological status of the traditional soul, it would do so without the moral

trappings, which Jung found abhorrent. Scrubbed clean of references to sin, divine judgment, and retribution, the idea of the soul was still left with ambiguities, inconsistencies, and mystery that had accrued to it

through centuries of use across a variety of cultures and languages. These accretions survive in his notion of the Self, both insuring its appeal and

allowing him to weave the idea of the Self across a loom as wide as Chris-

tianity itself, both in its official and in its arcane traditions. From there, it was but a short step to reach beyond to cognate ideas in other religions, Buddhism in particular.

In all of this, Jung was convinced that his own state of disaffiliation with official religion but respect for its tradition was a reflection of where the twentieth century was headed. The audience that his ideas have earned, despite the fact that great portions of them are simply inacces- sible to all but a very small audience, indicates that his instincts were far from wrong. This does not of itself excuse breaches of logic or imprecision of thought unless one happens to believe, as Jung did, that when all is said and done psychology should be proud of its deepest irrationalities, because the psyche itself is ultimately beyond the pale of our understand-

For fuller documentation on this point, see my Imago Dei: A Study of C. G.Jung's Psychology of Religion (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1979), pp. 103-22.

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ing. I do not dispute the point. But my sense is that Jung's estimation of when all is said and done with the work of reason was somewhat delin-

quent.

THE DEPENDENCY OF SELF ON EGO

Much of the criticism that pits the ego against the Self as opposites fails to take into account how far the apparently age-old idea of the true Self is dependent on a rather modern idea of the ego. There are two principal ways that our modern idea of an everyday ego serves to support the primacy of the true Self, and it is to these that I now turn.

The first way is to challenge the assumption head-on, to deny the reified ego as such and to expose all the metaphors that support the idea of an individual somehow in "possession" of a center of consciousness that acts vis-a-vis other things in the world. The true Self can then be pre- sented as a participation by the individual in a reality prior to any distinction between subjects and objects, between consciousness and world, even between thinking and doing. This critique of the ego emerges most clearly in Buddhist philosophy, where the contrast between mind and no-mind, I and not-I, has been present both in spiritual discipline and philosophy from the beginning.

A second way of arguing the primacy of the Self over the ego is to see the Self as the aim or perfection of the ego. The supporting metaphors of this way of thinking are familiar: the seed that falls into the ground dies and then resurrects in full flower; the ordinary individual who becomes a hero in slaying a mighty beast and laying hand to a lost treasure; and so forth. These symbols of transformation have a long history in Christian thought and served Jung as the basis for the opposition he set up between the ego and the true Self.

Nishitani Keiji and the Cartesian Ego

Among twentieth-century Buddhist thinkers, one of the most persistent advocates of the primacy of the Self over the illusory ego was Nishitani Keiji. Although he used Descartes as an example of the ego that is the opposite of the true Self, in so doing he ended up criticizing an idea that Descartes may never have had at all.

In shifting the primacy away from the subjective act of knowing, the Cartesian cogito, to the true Self, the critical point is to show why the true Self is any less subjective and self-centered than the subject of the cogito. The underlying assumption is that the subject of the cogito is seen as an entity more or less like das Ich of Freud and Jung-different from the

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person or psyche as a whole or from any of its particular functions, different, also, from any vital or spiritual principle like soul or mind.

References to Freud or Jung, or even to the psychology of the unconscious in general, are all but absent from Nishitani's works, but his idea of the ego shows clear affinities to theirs. In his words, the subject of the Cartesian cogito is an ego that is "a mode of being of the Self closed up within itself"4 and its overcoming consists in opening the self up by free-

ing it from its identity with the individual personality, mind, consciousness, or subjectivity. Nishitani makes a great deal of the subjective pronoun of the cogito (necessary in Japanese as in the Frenchje pense, doncje suis, but not present in the Latin, cogito, ergo sum). Nishitani then draws

special attention to this ego in order to set it up as the opposite of the true Self. The strategy is useful but anachronistic.

This is more than a grammatical question. Descartes could have said ego sum, but he did not, and in fact there is no reference to a substantive "ego" anywhere in the Meditations. What Descartes does do is show that every bodily, emotional, and mental function can be dismissed from consciousness except for one-thinking. One cannot not think and know that one is not thinking. Therefore, thinking is the function of consciousness

par excellence. Descartes tells us clearly in Mediation 6 that he does not distinguish between himself and his mind and his soul, but he does not- as his translators commonly do-refer to any of these as "the ego." He speaks of himself at bottom as "a thinking something" (res cogitans) or an "inward source" and nothing more.5 The idea of a Cartesian ego is a later invention used to interpret and criticize Descartes.

There is more involved here than mere linguistic convention. It has to do with reifying the first person that is the subject of conscious activity and making the ego an entity distinct from consciousness that somehow rules over consciousness. Descartes would no more have used that language than he would have spoken of "the he" or "the we" in anything but a grammatical reference. The mistake is made so often, and so matter- of-factly, only because the ego has become such a permanent part of ordinary language.

Similarly, traditional Buddhism could not have denied the ego in this sense, if only because it lacked such a notion in the first place. Nishitani's use of the Cartesian ego is aimed at defining a truer, deeper, enlightened Self as everything that ego is not, as "nonego," and that includes not only

4 Nishitani Keiji, Religion and Nothingness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 14-15 and passim.

5 Did he not himself claim, "No one before me, as far as I know, asserted that mind consisted in one thing alone, namely the faculty of thinking and its inward source"? Retie Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes (Paris: Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1957), 8, pt. 1: 347.

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traditional notions of subjectivity but modern ones as well. He describes the realization of Self as a "true self-centeredness" attained as a "nexus of

doing-being-becoming" in which "one is a task to oneself."' This task is not aimed at creating something that is not already there or transforming the ego into something else but is an awakening to the fact that "as it is" is already one with "as it should be." Thus the task consists precisely in breaking free of the ideal of cultivating and perfecting an individuality that includes the ego-centered consciousness. Ego and Self are not related as seed to flower or as ordinary mortal to conquering hero. The two are from the start as ontologically distinct as illusion is from true reality.

Fundamentally, the misreading of Descartes is not essential to Nishi- tani's own position, which is already well anchored in Buddhist philosophical tradition. Furthermore, insofar as his ideal of a nonreified, non- proprietary Self represents a critique of the modern reified ego, it seems to me continuous with a classical Buddhist idea and highlights an im- portant bias that has found its way into ideas of the Self associated with unconscious mind. This application of the classical idea to the modern ego only becomes really problematic when it involves the assumption that traditional Buddhist texts and practices already possessed enough of our modern idea of the ego to criticize it.

Jung's Polysemic Self

From the start, Jung's idea of the Self was a handmaiden of the modern idea of the ego in that not only did it assume the existence of a reified, proprietary ego, but it also canonized the assumption by carrying these qualities over to the Self.7 The two belonged ontologically on the same plane, entities "located" in the interiority of the skin-bound individual. The Jungian Self, like the Freudian ego, may be shaped by collective fac- tors, but in the end it is ultimately my Self, no more able to share in the Self of other individuals or be participated in by other individuals than the ego was able to escape the confines of the individual psyche. Jung's overriding concern was with broadening the notion of psyche to include unconscious as well as conscious elements, not to question the fiction of the individual mind as such or its self-enclosed nature. Compared with

6 See Nishitani pp. 260-62. See also Nishitani Keiji, Nishida Kitar6 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 118-33.

SJung was not unaware of the tendency to reify and even had his own psychological explanation for what took place. For instance, he writes in language that could well be turned on his own notion of the Self: "Neologisms tend not only to hypostatize themselves to an amazing degree, but actually to replace the reality they were originally intended to express" (C. G. Jung, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung [New York: Pantheon Books, 1961-], 11:290).

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Nishitani's idea of the true Self, Jung's self remains at bottom a form of "alter ego."

Historically, Jung's notion of the Self represents a sustained attempt to elevate the individual human being to a new and more central place in the scheme of things, an idea he inherited directly from the European thought of the last century. In his case, this meant redefining the psyche both as a private enterprise and as a predetermined constellation of hu-

manity's collective aspirations and transcendental wisdom. As the innate ideal of the psyche, the Self, together with its archetypal imagery, represented a harmonious constellation of these opposing forces. Jung called the process of realizing that ideal individuation.

In all of this, Jung did not seriously question Freud's basic conception of the psyche as a self-contained entity,8 even though he complained in an obituary tribute of the fact that the philosophical premises of Freudian

psychology were left unexamined because of "the Master's insufficient

philosophical equipment."9 If anything, he used this "fact" again and

again to ground his disclaimers of knowing anything about the wider world of metaphysical realities. The burden of justifying his separation from Freud rested, rather, on his ability to demonstrate the existence of an agent of the individuation process able to carry out a transformation clearly not within the powers of the ego alone. Without such agency, the Self would remain a mere illusion, an empty hope of the ego's pulling itself out of the swamp by its own pigtail.

To begin with, Jung redefined the ego as having a "dark" side. Even as the center of consciousness, it cast a shadow that it could not step over, namely, the "personal unconscious." Only by choosing to wrestle with this shadow side and dragging it into the light could the ego achieve enough clarity of vision to guide it beneath the personal layers of the unconscious to the wider, collective layers. Following Freud's idea of the spark of consciousness that monitors and remembers the content of one's dreams, Jung spoke of the ego as the agent that experiences the contents of the unconscious, as a sojourner into a mysterious underworld who returns home to consciousness to sort out the treasures gained during the journey.

In the end, however, not even the most clairvoyant ego, freed of the

8 There is one reference in one of his seminars to the unconscious as "the unknown in everything" (C. G. Jung, Lectures on Dream Analysis [privately printed], p. 54), but this idea did not find its way directly into his published work. In another seminar he talks of "mental contagion" in the case of a man whom he analyzed through his son's dreams (Dream Analysis: Notes on the Seminar given in 1928-1930, ed. William McGuire [London: Routledge, 1995], 1:18, 2:195), but he does not follow up on the consequences for the borderlines of the psyche.

9 Jung, Collected Works, 15:47.

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interferences of the personal unconscious, was able to achieve the unity of conscious and unconscious mind represented in the ideal of the Self. Because he rejected the idea of the ego as the center of the psyche from the start, he was obliged to posit another agent at the core of the unconscious, an agent capable of saving the ego from its own native limitations. He did so by expanding the notion of the Self from an ideal to a self- realizing ideal. In this way, the Self came to be defined as an inborn potency, always at least active enough to generate images of what it can itself become but also always in need of the stimulus of the ego to function to the full. Like the two wings of a bird, then, these two agents, the center of conscious mind and the center of unconscious mind, worked together to propel the psyche on to its goal of final unity.

This leaves the question of what it can mean for the ego to be individuated insofar as that means being saved from the confines of consciousness. If the goal is restricted to the lifetime of the individual psyche, then there is no question of Self absorbing ego and, thus, no question of the goal ever being actually attained. Jung avoids the asymptote by adding yet another quality to the Self. In addition to being an ideal and an agent working to realize the ideal, it is also a given reality. The totality of psyche, conscious and unconscious, is already the Self. In this regard, Jung was fond of Goethe's phrase, Werde, wer du bist (to speak of the Self). This maxim, like the many metaphors that honeycombJung's view of the psyche, is essential to his idea of the therapeutic process, but Jung insisted always that they were more: a real description of the real functioning psyche.

That is to say, there is no escaping the logical unbalance between the original acting ego and its other, the acting Self. For the ego to realize its full potency, it must embrace the unconscious as other. But the Self already embraces the ego as other even before it begins to act. Therefore, there is finally only one agent and the ego ends up being seen only as a form of self-deception-a danger that Jung rejected as "inflation of the unconscious." Furthermore, the activity of the ego continually reflects back on consciousness, which is always changing. But the activity of the Self had no such impact on the collective unconscious, which was a permanent given. This would seem to make us conclude that the agency of the Self affects only the ego, which thus becomes the aim of the all psychic transformation-a danger that Jung rejected as "inflation of the ego."

In the end we are left to conclude that Jung left the notion of the ego relatively unambiguous and concentrated the ambiguities in the notion of the Self. It was this tack that proved to be essential to the development of this thought. To appreciate this, we need to locate the general structure within which the polysemy ofJung's Self was able to flourish. I mention two aspects of it here, both of them relevant to his notion of the Self.

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Structural Assumptions Behind the Jungian Self

As I indicated earlier, Jung was concerned with a model of the psyche that would embrace without remainder the various notions of human

interiority that were present in the Western spiritual tradition. This was essential if he was to establish a direct connection, in the form of transcendental archetypal patterns, between the psyche and the collective wisdom of the past. As complex as the history of notions like soul, spirit, nous, and psyche is, and as ambivalent as the vocabulary is, Jung seems to have

accepted a kind of structural opposition that allowed him to dispense with historical contexts and move freely in and out of a variety of symbolic traditions as he described the interplay between ego and Self.

ego personal ephemeral knowable and controllable

Self collective eternal unknowable and uncontrollable

Contents aside, in order for ideas and images of this opposition and the unity of the opposites to be applied to historical materials, Jung was convinced that this pattern of the coincidentia oppositorum had first to be "dis- covered" in the psyche itself. Without that connection, the opposition and unity of opposites could not be identified as "archetypes" of the psyche.

Set up in this fashion, the psyche is a constellation of two histories, one particular and the other universal. If the particular history is open to judgment in light of the universal history (the Self as a critique of the ego), then there must be some guarantee that the universal history is true and reliable. Jung does not address this question often, but we may pull out three interlaced assumptions about the universal history of the psyche that also seem to lie behind his interpretations of symbolic traditions East and West:

1. The evolution of the psyche. -The psyche, like the body, was structured collectively, and in some sense could evolve like it. In Darwinian fashion, those symbols, images, and ideas that have survived the longest are those fittest to guide the process of individuation.

2. The preexistence of the psyche.--The psyche was not simply something that came into being independently of every other psyche (the independent creation of souls), destined to die forever or live on in some individual form. Somehow the cumulative effects of individuated persons found its way into the collective wisdom of the race.

3. The archaeology of the psyche.--Following the nineteenth-century biological principle that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," the individuation process allows the individual ego to relive the psychic history of the race from precivilized times up to the present.

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None of these assumptions requires that there be anything like a "group psyche" that exists independent of individual psyches anymore than there is a "humanity" that exists independent of individual humans. For

Jung, the simple biological idea of instinct was enough to account for the continuity.

Taken together, these two structural models permitted Jung to identify the Self with traditional religious representations of the Ultimate or Abso- lute. Indeed this identification was so radical that he was able to make the claim again and again that psychologically there is no distinguishing the Self from God or Christ or Buddha. And then to add, as if to forestall criticisms of the limits of psychology, that any metaphysical attempt to make such a distinction is ultimately meaningless if not downright wrong. For all that, the provenance of his idea of the Self from the modern ego makes his own metaphysical assumptions patent. The ontological reality of the Self as part of the psyche is as uncontested as ego consciousness itself, yet that reality exists only as the private property of skin-bound individuals.

In the end, we are left with at least six overlapping but logically distinct ideas of the Self at work in Jung's work, all of which ultimately locate the Self as the counterpart in human interiority to the conscious ego:

1. An original wholeness.-The totality of the individual psyche in its

actuality. 2. A potential for becoming.-An individuated totality in-the-making. 3. An agent of the collective unconscious.-The center of the process of

individuation. 4. An achieved wholeness.-The actual outcome of harmonious unity

among the powers of the psyche. 5. An archetype of the transcendent absolute. -Images of God, Buddha, Tao,

and so forth are indistinguishable from images of the Self. 6. An archetype of the union of the transcendent and the immanent. -Images of

Christ, Khidr, and the like are indistinguishable from images of the Self. I do not mean to question the fertility of this ambiguity when it comes

to the therapeutic value of Jung's scheme of the mind. My aim has only been to ground the suggestion that his notion of the Self as the goal of the psyche, the quest of the true Self and its reading of historical materials, would not have been possible without a distinctively modern notion of the ego not actually present in the materials as such.

THE REIFIED, PROPRIETARY EGO AND ITS OVERSIGHTS

In the Western intellectual tradition, up until about two hundred years ago, the terms ego and Self were used simply as reflexive pronouns that could refer to the person as functioning subject, individual, psyche, soul,

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and spirit. To the extent, and in the context, that it made sense to speak of my soul, my spirit, or my mind and heart, the intention was always to

qualify the meaning of the pronoun "I" or "myself." Every suspicious use of the nominal form I have come across has turned out to refer to the subject's functions, never to a functioning entity or organ distinct from the subject.

The introduction of the reified ego comes to Western intellectual

history, as nearly as I can figure, with Fichte. In his Wissenschaftslehre, he

suggests the idea of an "absolute ego" whose function is to posit the mutu-

ally defining distinction between the ego as functioning consciousness and the nonego (external world). This new way of referring to the subject, the reification of empirical awareness, marks a watershed in modern intellectual history. In speaking of an ego that was distinct from ordinary subjectivity, it was not his intention to redefine a traditional notion of soul but to provide consciousness with its own existing center.

For Fichte himself, the substantialization of the ego was meant to elevate its significance, not to denigrate it. But in the pursuit of this idea, it is clear that the use of the noun form das Ich'O promoted a kind of alienation of the personal pronoun from the first person, which depth psychology in turn carried over into the modern collective imagination. The result is that just as we have become accustomed to speak of work in terms of one's position or salary; of education in terms of the level of certified schooling; and of health in terms of the result of clinical tests, the idea of the ego helped turn specific assumptions about the psyche into certi- tudes. We learned to talk about an objective third person (the I) in the subjective first person singular (I) in such a way as to neutralize the personal element and personalize the neutral element (my self). We learned a new dialect that spoke in what the literary critic Yokomitsu Riichi sixty years ago aptly called "the fourth grammatical person.""I

In any case, it was but a short step to draw the connection between the absoluteness of Fichte's ego and the more impersonal dimension of soul as the principle that enlivens and enhances the conscious subject. This was the step that Hegel took with the notion of Spirit he worked out in the Phenomenology of Mind. He distinguishes between the private ego as

10 The first use of the noun the I appears in sec. 6 of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Uber den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre (1794). The consequences of the idea take up the greater part of his following volume, Grundriss des Eigenthiimlichen der Wissenschaftslehre (1795).

" Yokomitsu's idea of the fourth grammatical person, the "Self that views the Self," was based on Andre Gide's analyses of self-consciousness and the desire of the ego for liberation. In his case, he used the idea to establish a historical, racial (minzokuteki) connectedness between authors and their readers. Yokomitsu Riichi, "Junsui shasetsuron" (The theory of the pyre novel), Kaiz5 (April 1935).

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"thing" and its universal quality as "spirit" or "soul." This idea of a covert, mystical side of ego that is an "absolute negativity" of the open, conscious dimension of ego was meant to forestall the alienation of ego from itself and from other egos by appealing to another dimension of ego that "be-

longed" to one only in the sense that it was entrusted to one for care. Far from solving the problem of alienation in the reified ego, Hegel's strategy elevated that alienation to a dynamic at work in the whole cosmos of real-

ity. In this regard, it is a direct ancestor of the Jungian Self that was to follow a hundred years later.12

As explained above, Jung's reification of the overtly "other" within, the Self, begins in the reification of the ego as something distinct from one's

subjective activity itself. The apparent depersonalizing of the psyche, which the notion of the Self suggested, actually had the effect of locating the human more soundly at the center of things than ever before: the alienation of one from oneself set the scene for becoming fixated on

"finding oneself" again. On the face of things, the distinction between

ego and Self seemed to set up a healthy contrast within the psyche of the transpersonal macrocosm (Self) reflecting itself in the personal micro- cosm (ego). But Jung's idea of the macrocosm was entirely an intrapsychic affair, a process of personalized reflection whose ultimate discoveries were of greater human value than any extrapsychic, otherwise inacces- sible reality that it might reflect. That Jung's refusal to pronounce on Christian beliefs about the existence or nonexistence of a transcendent realm of spiritual beings was accompanied by a parallel indifference to the objective world of nature as a source of values to live by is not coinci- dental. Like the Christian myth he accused of having grown weak and incapable of directing the quest of modern men and women for their true selves, his system of values was incurably anthropocentric. His psychological reading of alchemical texts, for all the light it shed on the mystic side of the "art," demonstrates this anthropocentric tendency clearly and helps explain why he was unable to apply alchemical insights to the abuse of the natural world in industrialized society. As archetypal entities, ego and Self remained alienated from, or at least indifferent to, such questions in the Jungian scheme of things.

In like manner, the social dimension of the Self is also absent from Jung's model of the psyche, despite his insistence on a collective dimension in the unconscious. At the level of ego, the social dimension is re- duced to the collectivity of individual psyche, each with its own history of conscious light and unconscious shadow. At the level of the unconscious,

12 Ironically, Jung considered Hegel "a psychologist in disguise," but a disastrous influence who spoke in "the megalomanic language of schizophrenics," precisely because he tried to break through the alienation of the self-enclosed psyche. See Jung, 8:169.

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the radical spatial and temporal specificity of the social dimension is ab- sorbed into the collectivity of the archetypes where questions of morality are bracketed. This highlights the quality of the psyche as private property and opens the way to the criticism that his brand of depth psychology not only ignores social criticism but actively supports particular models of society. These questions have not yet been given sufficient attention by persons familiar with the primary sources of Jung's thought.

CONCLUSION

I have restricted the above treatment of the reified, proprietary notions of ego and Self to the Western, Judeo-Christian tradition, except for a

passing allusion to the philosophy of Nishitani. Jung's forays into Oriental

thought are well known and opinions about his success are divided.'3 The

question is not uninteresting, but more interesting still, or so it seems to me, is the question of the influence of modern ideas of psychology on the

present reading of classical Buddhist texts about ego or Self.•" When it comes to the question of the true Self, comparisons of Bud-

dhism and Christianity may be served by more serious attention to the Gnostic texts of the first and second centuries of our era, in which not

only the respective ideas of Self and ego of the two traditions but many of the ruling metaphors appear. My own study of these texts has per- suaded me that it was precisely the uncontrollable fertility of the Gnostic tradition that made it impossible for later Christian tradition to make do with any clear doctrine of the soul and all but made the esoteric, arcane tradition a requisite balance to formal theology. If this is the case, Gnostic literature may provide a better lodestone than contemporary psychology

'13 Two recent books on the subject may be mentioned here. A collection of essays strung together by D. J. Meckel and R. L. Moore under the title Self and Liberation: The Jung/Bud- dhism Dialogue (New York: Paulist, 1992) gives a fairly representative sample of the haphaz- ard of ideas that have been thrown into the pot and the lack of precise questions. The reprint of the "dialogue" that Hisamatsu Shin'ichi arranged between himself and Jung is symptomatic of the problems that faulty translation and dogmatic assumptions can cause. The fact that Jung warned strongly against publishing the discussion because of its unschol- arly and confused nature, while Hisamatsu welcomed it as chance to show how Zen might help psychoanalysis break free of its own biases, points to the further complications that arise when the academic conscience runs head-on into a missionary one. J. J. Clarke'sJung and Eastern Thought: A Dialogue with the Orient (London: Routledge, 1994) is the best start so far from the side of a thinker who appreciates Jung's ideas profoundly and has an admirable grasp of the collective European image of "the Orient."

14 Nakamura Hajime'sJiko no tankyii (The quest of the self) (Tokyo: Seidosha, 1989) highlights this need indirectly by the conspicuous absence of attention to the historical question. Charles Taylor's monumental Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989) includes a footnote in which he recognizes the need for this research (pp. 535-36, n. 4).

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for locating the central issues in historical comparisons of the quest of the true Self in Buddhism and Christianity.

No one even casually familiar with the history of spirituality will fail to realize that the foregoing pages represent no more than a simple footnote to the continuing autobiography of the human spirit that, happily, no amount of rational criticism will ever persuade to a halt. As the theologian Ladislaus Boros has wisely written, it is precisely the job of reflection on great religious ideas "to dispose of the reification that accrues to mystery,"15 but only so long, I would add, as the disposal process does not obscure the mystery. This is the spirit in which these pages were written. They rest on the conviction that ultimately the only true Self is the eternal

quest of the Self. And if one happens to come upon the Self on the way, there is finally no better advice than that of Zen Master Lin-chi-"kill it!"

The mottoes at the head of this essay were no more than memoranda to that effect, confirmed again and again in the process of composition. Chesterton's complaint about modernity's preoccupation with searching for the Self suffers almost nothing for being ripped out of its native context at the other end of our century. In the interim we have seen his vision at its wildest and watched its assumptions slowly domesticate themselves in ordinary language. But while our age may have learned the words to distinguish between the everyday ego and the true Self, its individuals have, by and large, still to learn how to distinguish between what they believe about their inward parts and what they have simply been made to believe. The accompanying words of the prophet Isaiah hold up before our eyes that very version: of making a home that we ourselves can in- habit, of investing our deepest passions in ideas that we ourselves can wear out. The only idea of human interiority worthy of our trust and the only true Self worthy of our quest are those that work toward that kind of freedom. In the end, anything else is morally unacceptable.

15 Ladislaus Boros, Mystery of Death (New York: Crossroad, 1973), pp. 134-35.

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