20/08/2021
..”the ego with its futile willing and striving..” :
“[Jung]: ‘It is as though, at the climax of the illness, [of ego inflation] the destructive powers were converted into healing forces. This is brought about by the archetypes awaking to independent life and taking over the guidance of the psychic personality, thus supplanting the ego with its futile willing and striving … the psyche has awakened to spontaneous activity … something that is not his ego and is therefore beyond the reach of his personal will. He has regained access to the sources of psychic life, and this marks the beginning of the cure’. (CW 11: 534) The entire movement of Jung’s work is away from ego and toward a widening of consciousness that strikes its roots in and reflects other psychic dominants.. This.. necessitates a series of compensatory operations, e.g., sacrifice of intellect, development of fourth function, development of anima, introversion, shifting consciousness to the second-half of life and its focus on death, all of which is summed up as the “relativization of the ego,” for the sake of “psychic consciousness.” But precisely this latter is a consciousness structured by the anima archetype.”
James Hillman, Anima, Anatomy of a Personified Notion
