The Relation of Ego to Consciousness   Jung therefore writes a great deal about ego-consciousness throughout his published works. For my purposes here, I will discuss  primarily the first chapter of the late work Aion, entitled “The Ego,” as well as some related texts and passages. These summarize  his position adequately and represent his mature thinking on the subject. At the end of this chapter I will also include some refer-  ences to Psychological Types.   Aion can be read on many different levels. It is a work of Jung’s later years and reflects his profound engagement with Western  intellectual and religious history and their future, as well his most detailed thoughts about the archetype of the self. The first four  chapters were added to the book later to provide the new reader with an introduction to his general psychological theory and to  offer an entry point into the vocabulary of analytical psychology. While these introductory pages are not detailed or particularly  technical, they do contain Jung’s most condensed discussions about the psychic structures called ego, shadow, anima, animus,  and self.   Here Jung defines the ego as follows: “It forms, as it were, the centre of the field of consciousness; and, in so far as this com-  prises the empirical personality, the ego is the subject of all personal acts of consciousness.”² Consciousness is a “field,” and what  Jung calls the “empirical personality” here is our personality as we are aware of it and experience it firsthand. The ego, as “the  subject of all personal acts of consciousness,” occupies the center of this field. The term ego refers to one’s experience of oneself  as a center of willing, desiring, reflecting, and acting. This definition of the ego as the center of consciousness is consistent  throughout all of Jung’s writings.   Jung continues this text by commenting on the function of the ego within the psyche: “The relation of a psychic content to the  ego forms the criterion of its consciousness, for no content can be conscious unless it is represented to a subject.”³ The ego is a  “subject” to whom psychic contents are “represented.” It is like a mirror. Moreover, a connection to the ego is the necessary  condition for making anything conscious—a feeling, a thought, a perception, or a fantasy. The ego is a kind of mirror in which  the psyche can see itself and can become aware. The degree to which a psychic content is taken up and reflected by the ego is the  degree to which it can be said to belong to the realm of consciousness. When a psychic content is only vaguely or marginally con-  scious, it has not yet been captured and held it in place upon the ego’s reflective surface.   In the passages that follow this definition of the ego, Jung makes a crucial distinction between conscious and unconscious fea-  tures of the psyche: consciousness is what we know, and unconsciousness is all that we do not know. In another text, written at  about the same time, he makes this a little more precise: “The unconscious is not simply the unknown, it is rather the unknown  psychic; and this we define ... as all those things in us which, if they came to consciousness, would presumably differ in no respect  from the known psychic contents.”⁴ The distinction between conscious and unconscious, so fundamental in Jung’s general the-  ory of the psyche, as it is in all of depth psychology, posits that some contents are reflected by the ego and held in consciousness,  where they can be further examined and manipulated, while other psychic contents lie outside of consciousness either tempo-  rarily or permanently. The unconscious includes all psychic contents that lie outside of consciousness, for whatever reason or  whatever duration. Actually, this is the vast bulk of the psychic world. The unconscious was the major area of investigation in  depth psychology, and Jung’s most passionate interest lay in exploring that territory. But more of that later.   Often in his writings Jung refers to the ego as a “complex,” a term that will be discussed extensively in the next chapter. In the  Aion passage, however, he simply calls it a specific content of consciousness, stating by this that consciousness is a broader cate-  gory than the ego and contains more than only the ego.   What is consciousness itself, this field in which the ego is located and where it occupies and defines the center? Most simply,  consciousness is awareness. It is the state of being awake, of observing and registering what is going on in the world around and  within. Humans are not, of course, the only conscious beings on earth. Other animals are conscious as well, since obviously they  can observe and react to their environments in carefully modulated ways. Plants’ sensitivity to their environment can also be  taken as a form of consciousness. By itself, consciousness does not set the human species apart from other forms of life. Nor is  consciousness something that sets human adults apart from infants and children. In the strictest sense, human consciousness  does not depend for its essential quality upon age or psychological development at all. A friend who observed the birth of his  daughter told me how moved he was when, after the placenta was removed and her eyes were cleaned, she opened them and  looked around the room, taking it in. Obviously this was a sign of consciousness. The eye is an indicator of the presence of con-  sciousness. Its aliveness and movement is the signal that an aware being is observing the world. Consciousness depends not only  on sight, of course, but on the other senses as well. In the womb, before the infant’s eyes are functioning to see, it registers  sounds, reacts to voices and to music, and indicates a remarkable degree of responsiveness. We do not yet know exactly when the  embryo first attains a level of awareness and reactiveness that could definitely be called conscious, but it is early and it is certainly  in the prenatal period.   The opposite of consciousness is deep dreamless sleep, the total lack of responsiveness and sentient awareness. And the perma-  nent absence of consciousness from a body is practically a definition of death, except in cases of longterm coma. Consciousness,  even if it is only the potential for future consciousness, is the “life factor”; it belongs to living bodies.   

What development does to consciousness is add specific content. In theory, human consciousness can be separated from its  contents—the thoughts, memories, identity, fantasies, emotions, images, and words that crowd its space. But in practice this is al-  most impossible. In fact, only advanced spiritual adepts seem able to make this distinction convincingly. It is truly a sage who can  separate consciousness from its contents and keep them apart, whose consciousness is not defined by identifications with se-  lected thoughts and images. For most people, consciousness without a stable object to ground it seems to be an exceedingly  ephemeral and transient thing. The substantiality of consciousness and the feeling of solidity are typically provided by stable ob-  jects and contents such as images, memories, and thoughts. Substance and continuity in consciousness are made of these. Yet, as  evidence from stroke victims attests, the contents and even the ego functions of consciousness—thinking, remembering, naming  and speaking, recognizing familiar images and persons and faces—are actually more transient and fragile than is consciousness  itself. It is possible to lose one’s memory entirely, for example, and still be conscious. Consciousness is like a room that surrounds  the psychic contents that temporarily fill it. And consciousness precedes the ego, which becomes its eventual center.   The ego, like consciousness, also transcends and outlasts the particular contents that occupy the room of consciousness at any  particular moment. The ego is a focal point within consciousness, its most central and perhaps most permanent feature. Against  the opinion of the East, Jung argues that without an ego, consciousness itself becomes questionable. But it is true that certain ego  functions can be suspended or seemingly obliterated without destroying consciousness completely, and so a sort of ego-less con-  sciousness, a type of consciousness that shows very little evidence of a willful center, an “I,” is a human possibility at least for  short periods of time.   For Jung, the ego forms the critical center of consciousness and in fact determines to a large extent which contents remain  within the realm of consciousness and which ones drop away into the unconscious. The ego is responsible for retaining contents  in consciousness, and it can also eliminate contents from consciousness by ceasing to reflect them. To use Freud’s term, which  Jung found useful, the ego can “repress” contents it does not like or finds intolerably painful or incompatible with other contents.  It can also retrieve contents from storage in the unconscious (i.e., from the memory bank) so long as (a) they are not blocked by  defense mechanisms, such as repression, which keep intolerable conflicts out of reach, and (b) they have a strong enough asso-  ciative connection to the ego—they are “learned” strongly enough.   The ego is not fundamentally constituted and defined by the acquired contents of consciousness such as momentary or even  chronic identifications. It is like a mirror or magnet that holds contents in a focal point of awareness. But it also wills and acts. As  the vital center of consciousness, it precedes the acquisition of language, personal identity, and even awareness of a personal  name. Later acquisitions of the ego, such as recognition of one’s own face and name, are contents that cluster closely around this  center of consciousness, and they have the effect of defining the ego and enlarging its range of executive command and self-  awareness. Fundamentally, the ego is a virtual center of awareness that exists at least from birth, the eye that sees and has always  seen the world from this vantage point, from this body, from this individual point of view. In itself it is nothing, that is, not a  thing. It is therefore highly elusive and impossible to pin down. One can even deny that it exists at all. And yet it is always  present. It is not the product of nurture, growth, or development. It is innate. While it can be shown to develop and gain strength  from this point onward through “collisions” with reality (see below), its core is “given.” It comes with the infant.   As Jung describes the psyche, there is a network of associations among the various contents of consciousness. All of them are  linked directly or indirectly to the central agency, the ego. The ego is the center of consciousness not only geographically but also  dynamically. It is the energy center that moves the contents of consciousness around and arranges them in orders of priority. The  ego is the locus of decisionmaking and free will. When I say, “I am going to the post office,” my ego has made a decision and  mobilizes the physical and emotional energy necessary to do the job. The ego directs me to the post office and gets me there. It is  the executive who sets the priorities: “Go to the post office, don’t get distracted by your wish to go for a stroll in the park.” While  the ego can be regarded as the center of selfishness (ego-ism), it is also the center of altruism. In and of itself, the ego, as Jung  understood and described it, is morally neutral, not a “bad thing” as one hears it referred to in common parlance (“oh, he’s got  such an ego!”) but a necessary part of human psychological life. The ego is what sets humans apart from other creatures of nature  who also possess consciousness; it also sets the individual human being apart from other human beings. It is the individualizing  agent in human consciousness.   The ego focuses human consciousness and gives our conscious behavior its purposefulness and direction. Because we have an  ego, we possess the freedom to make choices that may defy our instincts for self-preservation, propagation, and creativity. The  ego contains our capacity to master large amounts of material within consciousness and to manipulate them. It is a powerful  associative magnet and an organizational agent. Because humans have such a force at the center of consciousness, they are able  to integrate and direct large quantities of data. A strong ego is one that can obtain and move around in a deliberate way large  amounts of conscious content. A weak ego cannot do very much of this kind of work and more easily succumbs to impulses and  emotional reactions. A weak ego is easily distracted, and as a result consciousness lacks focus and consistent motivation.   It is possible for humans to remain conscious while suspending much of normal ego functioning. By will we can direct our-  selves to be passive and inactive and simply to observe the world within or without, like a camera. Normally, though, it is not pos-  sible to maintain a volitionally restrained observational consciousness for a great length of time, because the ego and the wider  

psyche usually become quickly engaged by what is being observed. When we watch a movie, for example, we may begin by sim-  ply observing and taking in the people and scenery. But we soon begin to identify with one character or another, and our emo-  tions become activated. The ego readies itself to act, and if one has difficulty distinguishing between movie images and reality  (another ego function) one may be tempted to engage in physical behavior. The body then becomes mobilized, and the ego aims  at and intends a particular course of action. Indeed, movies are structured so that viewers will take sides emotionally and support  whatever a particular character is doing or feeling. Engaged in this way, the ego becomes activated as a center of wishing, hoping,  and perhaps even intending. It is conceivable that one would make a major life decision while watching a movie as a conse-  quence of the feelings and thoughts generated in consciousness by these images. People have been known to leave a movie the-  ater and become violent or lustful as a direct result of the impact of the movie. The ego has become enlisted by emotion, identi-  fication, and desire, and uses its directive function and energy to act.   As becomes evident, the ego’s freedom is limited. It is easily influenced by both internal psychic and external environmental  stimuli. The ego may respond to a threatening stimulus by taking up arms and defending itself; or it may be activated and stimu-  lated by an interior urge to create, or to love, or to seek revenge. It may also respond to an ego impulse—that is, narcissistically. It  may in this way be seized by a need for revenge, for example.   Waking consciousness is focused, then, by the ego’s registering of internal and environmental stimuli and phenomena and  putting the body into motion. The origins of the ego, to say it again, extend back before earliest childhood and infancy. Even a  very young infant notices shapes in its environment, some of which seem pleasurable, and it reaches out for them. These very  early signals of an organism’s intentionality are evidence for the primordial roots of the ego, one’s “I-ness.”   Reflecting on the nature and essence of this “I” leads to profound psychological questions. What is the ego fundamentally?  What am I? Jung would simply say that the ego is the center of consciousness.   The “I” feels, perhaps naively, that it has existed forever. Even notions of earlier lifetimes sometimes take on a feeling of truth  and reality. It is an open question whether the “I” changes essentially in the course of a lifetime. Is not the “I” that cried for  mother at two the same one that cries for a lost love at forty-five or over a lost spouse at eighty? While many features of the ego  clearly do develop and change, particularly with regard to cognition, self-knowledge, psychosocial identity, competence, etc., one  also senses an important continuity at the heart of the ego. Many people have been moved to find the “child within.” This is noth-  ing less than the recognition that the person I was as a child is the same person I am as an adult. Probably the essential core of  the ego does not change over a lifetime. This could also possibly account for the strong intuition and conviction of many people  that this core of the ego does not disappear with one’s physical death but either goes to a place of eternal rest (heaven, nirvana) or  is reborn in another life on the physical plane (reincarnation).   A child first says “I” at about two. Until then it refers to itself in the third person or by name: “Timmie want” or “Sarah go.”  When a child is able to say “I” and to think self-referentially, placing itself consciously at the center of a personal world and giving  that position a specific first-person pronoun, it has made a great leap forward in consciousness. But this is by no means the birth  of the primordial ego. Long before this, consciousness and behavior have been organized around a virtual center. The ego clearly  exists before one can refer to it consciously and reflectively, and the process of coming to know it is gradual and continues  throughout a lifetime. Growing into self-consciousness is a process that passes through many stages from infancy to adulthood.  One of these Jung describes in some detail in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, when he speaks of walking out of a cloud at about the  age of thirteen and realizing for the first time: “Now I am myself.”⁵   By virtue of this capacity to achieve a high level of self-knowledge and self-awareness-that is, a self-reflective ego—human con-  sciousness differs from animal consciousness, at least so far as we presently know. This difference is attributable not only to  human verbal capacity, which gives us the ability to talk about the “I” that we know we are and thereby to enrich its complexity,  but to the sheer self-mirroring function present in human consciousness. This function is prelinguistic and postlinguistic. It is  knowing that one is (and later, that one will die). By virtue of having an ego—this built-in mirror within consciousness—we can  know that we are and what we are. Other animal species also clearly want to live and to control their environments, and they show  evidence of emotion and consciousness as well as intentionality, reality testing, self-control, and much else that we associate with  an ego function. But animals do not have, or have much less of, this self-mirroring function within consciousness. They have less  of an ego. Do they know that they are, that they will individually die, that they are separate individuals? It is doubtful. The poet  Rilke held that animals do not face death the way humans do, and that gives them the advantage of living more fully in the  present moment. Animals are not self-conscious in the same way that humans are, and without language they cannot express  whatever self-consciousness they do have with any degree of sophistication nor differentiate themselves from others with the  kind of linguistic tools humans possess.⁶   After a certain point in development, the human ego and human consciousness become largely defined and shaped by the cul-  tural world in which a person grows up and becomes educated. This is a layer, or wrapping, of ego structure that surrounds the  central ego. As a child grows into a culture and learns its forms and habits through family interactions and educational experi-  ences in school, this ego wrapping becomes thicker and thicker. Jung refers to these two features of the ego as “Personality No. 1”