Much has been made from Jung’s Analytical Psychology about an ego / self “axis,” originally proposed by Erich Neumann to characterize a crucial axis in childhood development. While that axis may be crucial for childhood development, another axis seems a more likely crucial axis in adulthood: the personality / Self axis.
Most of the contemporary language about personalty could better describe someone’s persona—”he is outgoing, friendly, engaged in his work; she is retiring, a loner, reclusive, and studious.” They both relate to behavioral characteristics as perceived by others. The persona is an extension of the ego’s psychological type dispositions. With individuation, the ego’s type dispositions change. Other type dispositions are made available as the person becomes increasingly “whole.”
The split-off type dispositions embedded in the unconscious include the characteristics of the individual that have not yet been united with the more conscious ones. It is the purpose of individuation to integrate these complementary attitudes. When the unconscious and conscious attitudes are united in one person, it is difficult to predict the nature of the whole personality being born, much as it would be very difficult to predict that two hydrogen atoms (that freely burn) united with one oxygen atom (that supports combustion) would produce water.
Personality, encompassing the whole psyche, is more than either the subjective ego identity or the objective shadow identity. The greater personality transcends them both. Developing the whole unified personality is the aim and purpose of individuation. Yet among the plethora of precise and meticulous definitions Jung offered to illuminate the entire landscape of terms and definitions in his new model of Analytical Psychology, his definition of personality is absent. However, Jung still had much to say about personality.
He regarded personality as a process of discovery.
It is as if a river that had run to waste in sluggish side-streams and marshes suddenly found its way back to its proper bed, or as if a stone lying on a germinating seed were lifted away so that the shoot could begin its natural growth. (CW 17, par. 317)
He noted that personality develops in slow stages.
Personality is a seed that can only develop by slow stages throughout life. There is no personality without definiteness, wholeness, and ripeness. These three qualities cannot and should not be expected of the child, as they would rob it of childhood. (CW 17, par. 288)
He saw personality as unique.
All human beings are much alike, otherwise they could not succumb to the same delusion, and the psychic substratum upon which the individual consciousness is based, is universally the same . . . So in this sense, personality and its peculiar psychic make-up are not something absolutely unique. The uniqueness holds only for the individual nature of the personality as it does for each and every individual. (CW 17, par. 307)
He noted that when personality arrives, “one becomes two”—two centers emerge, one small and one great.
When a summit of life is reached, when the bud unfolds and from the lesser the greater emerges, then, as Nietzsche says, “One becomes Two,” and the greater future, which always was but which remained invisible, appears to the lesser personality with the force of a revelation. He who is hopelessly little will always drag the revelation of the greater down to the level of his littleness, and will never understand that the day of judgment for his littleness has dawned. But the man who is inwardly great will know that the long expected friend of his soul, the immortal one, has now really come, “to lead captivity captive”; that is, to seize hold of him by whom this immortal had always been confined and held prisoner, and to make his life flow into that greater life . . . (CW 9i, par. 217)
He observed that the ego does not necessarily welcome the arrival of the greater personality.
The transformation processes strive to approximate them to one another, but our consciousness is aware of resistances, because the other person seems strange and uncanny, and because we cannot get accustomed to the idea that we are not absolute master in our own house. We should prefer to be always “I” and nothing else. But we are confronted with that inner friend or foe, and whether he is our friend or our foe depends on ourselves. (CW 9i, par. 235)
He considered personality to be immortal and the ego identity, mortal.
This “other being” is the other person in ourselves—that larger and greater personality maturing within us, whom we have already met as the inner friend of the soul . . . to whom Nature herself would like to change us—that other person who we also are and yet can never attain to completely. We are that pair of Dioscuri, one of whom is mortal and the other immortal, and who, though always together, can never be made completely one. (CW 9i, par. 235)
He noted that personality hold’s life’s meaning and our connection with the infinite.
To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being and does not rise to personality, he has failed to realize his life’s meaning. (CW 17, par. 314)
The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance . . . In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted. (MDR, p. 325)
He found in Chinese philosophy a corollary to personality.
The undiscovered vein within us is a living part of the psyche; classical Chinese philosophy names this interior way “Tao,” and likens it to a flow of water that moves irresistibly towards its goal. To rest in Tao means fulfillment, wholeness, one’s destination reached, one’s mission done; the beginning, end, and perfect realization of the meaning of existence innate in all things. Personality is Tao. (CW 17, par. 323)
Personality differentiates humans from all other forms of animal life in this world, just as unique personality differentiates every individual person from all others. We all experience personality, yet it is still ineffable. Jung did not attempt to define it. He considered personality a mystery.
Yes, this thing we call personality is a great and mysterious problem. Everything that can be said about it is curiously unsatisfactory and inadequate, and there is always a danger of the discussion losing itself in pomposity and empty chatter . . . I should like to regard all I say here only as a tentative attempt to approach the problem of personality without making any claim to solve it.
Teaching Venues
I would not for anything dispense with this compass in my psychological voyages of discovery. C. G. Jung
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