ego
As the psychologist James Hollis puts it, “Your ego prefers certainty to uncertainty, predictability over surprise, clarity over ambiguity.8 Your ego always wants to shroud over the barely audible murmurings of the heart.” The ego, says Lee Hardy, wants you to choose a job and a life that you can use as a magic wand to impress others.
David Brooks • The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life
Our ego spends so much energy creating a fragmented identity—constantly categorizing, dividing, and keeping us trapped in dualistic thinking. Jung called this “directed thinking” (CW 7, para. 483), where the mind separates everything into binaries: self and other, good and bad, light and dark. This way of seeing the world reinforces our sense of is... See more
Jennifer Leela • Carl Jung’s Path to Spiritual Awakening: A Journey Toward Wholeness
Jung has said that to be in a situation where there is no way out, or to be in a conflict where there is no solution, is the classical beginning of the process of individuation. It is meant to be a situation without solution: the unconscious wants the hopeless conflict in order to put ego-consciousness up against the wall, so that the man has to re
... See moreRobert A. Johnson • Owning Your Own Shadow
The Ego, Jung tells us, is that part of the psyche that we think of as "I." Our conscious intelligence. Our everyday brain that thinks, plans and runs the show of our day-to-day life. The Self, as Jung defined it, is a greater entity, which includes the Ego but also incorporates the Personal and Collective Unconscious. Dreams and intuitio
... See moreSteven Pressfield • The War of Art
In the classical and developmental psychologies, the unity of the healthy ego is the essential structure of the psyche. The question of the dissolution of the ego or Self is almost always seen as regressive and detrimental, a fusion, or a return to the mother. Some analysts, however, have raised a different perspective, one that has challenged ego
... See moreDr. Stanton Marlan • The Black Sun: The Alchemy and Art of Darkness (Carolyn and Ernest Fay Series in Analytical Psychology Book 10)
We use the term “ego” to signify the inauthentic “I” or self (with a small “s”) that develops to survive in difficult environments and to become acceptable to the conventional world. We view ego as the result of many inevitable adaptations to forces that cannot tolerate the authentic expressions of the Self—helplessness in a small boy develops into
... See moreSteven Wolf • Romancing the Shadow
The Ego is that part of the psyche that believes in material existence.
Steven Pressfield • The War of Art
One of the hardest things to do as a counselor or therapist is to get clients to separate their Egos from their emotions without at the same time repressing the emotions. There is a really good psychological exercise for doing this that can help; it’s called focusing, originated by Eugene Gendlin. We ask our clients, when they sense the onset of st
... See moreRobert Moore • King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine
When your thoughts become your identity that is called ego. Ego is a case of mistaken identity. You believe that the illusory thoughts that come and go are your true self. Your true self is the dimension of you that does not come and go.