The psychoanalyst Fritz Perls objected that 'many psychologists like to write the self with a capital S, as if the self would be something precious, something extraordinarily valuable. They go at the discovery of the self like a treasure-digging. The self means nothing but this thing as it is defined by otherness'.
Well the Self is indeed a precious thing when we read Jung correctly.
In Wikipedia, under the Self we read
"Historically, the Self, according to Carl Jung, signifies the unification of consciousness and unconsciousness in a person, and representing the psyche as a whole.[2] It is realized as the product of individuation, which in his view is the process of integrating various aspects of one's personality. For Jung, the Self is an encompassing whole which acts as a container. It could be symbolized by a circle, a square, or a mandala."
This is a correct definition probably done by a Jungian interpreter but it lacks important aspects of the Self such as the "lived experience".
Jung's Self is, first and formost, his hypothesis to explain mystical experiences. The Self contains all opposites and manifests it self as a conjunction of opposites. And, as it has been already mentioned multiple times in previous posts, conjunction of opposites are mystical experiences in Jung's teachings.
In AION, Jung specifies (paragraph 303) that the Self is not a discovery, but a lived experience that occurs to man spontaneously. In a letter to Father Victor White, Jung wrote:
“The opposites are united by a neutral or ambivalent bridge, a symbol expressing either side in such a way that they can function together” (C. G. Jung letters, vol.II, p. 166); and in a footnote “The bridge is the ‘uniting symbol,’ which represents psychic totality, the self” (p. 166, fn 11)
In AION, Jung shows that Gnosticism and Alchemy were primarily concerned with mystical experiences. In the book, Jung uses the Moses quaternio from the Gnostics to explain the combination of opposites (complexio oppositorum) that appears in the mystical experience.
Each one of those characters represent a family of symbols and Jung arranged them in two pairs of opposites.
Parent Child
= Father or Mother Son or daughter
= Grandparent Child or grandchild
= Wiseman or Great Mother Apprentice-pupil
= Master Student
= Senex (old) Puer (young)
= World (God) Me
= Universe or Macrocosm Part or microcosm
= Totality Particle
That first pair of opposites represents the opposition particle-totality or me-universe.
Psychological experience of these symbols shows that even if four archetypes are in conjunction during the first mystical experience, it is the conjunction of the symbols of the horizontal axis that is predominant. For Jung, it was his becoming the god AION and Christ in his first mystical experience. It is often described as an encounter with God, the light, Nature, the Universe, the Sage, the Great-Mother.
An example of that experience can be found in the writings of Thomas Merton (1915–1968) where he recounts several peak experiences. His first experience took place in Rome when he was 18 years old. He was alone in his room at nightfall and, suddenly, he felt the presence of his father, who had died more than a year earlier. This presence was as vivid and real as if he had touched his arm or spoken to him. This sensation lasted only an instant, according to him. We recognize here the characteristics of the first mystical experience where the encounter between parent and child or the sage and the pupil is predominant.
Genevieve W. Foster (1902–1992) was a member of the Analytical Psychology Club of New York. She wrote the following account of her mystical experience:
"That is, I saw nothing unusual with my outward eye, but I nevertheless knew that there was someone else in the room with me. A few feet in front of me and a little to the left stood a numinous [i.e., divine] figure, and between us was an interchange, a flood, flowing both ways, of love. There were no words, no sound. There was light everywhere … Indoors and out, the world was flooded with light, the supernal light that so many of the mystics describe and a few of the poets.”
That is the lived experience of the Self. An extremely numinous symbol of conjunction of opposites that enters consciousness for a short moment.
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