Analysis of Ego in Psyche’s Embrace

About this poem

The splitting of ego and separation from psyche refers to the fractured division of ego functioning in narcissistic fashion and demonstrating manifold complexes. This malady of splitting, is reflected in Friedrich Nietzsche’s (1882) Gay Science philosophy (“Die froliche Wissenchaft”) of the loop of “eternal recurrence” where freedom, action, and will power, although epiphenomenal in nature, take precedence over the centrality of spirit or psyche, and where the human personality can only return to wholeness by therapeutic engagement of the ego with the psyche, in a compensatory process which Jungian psychology calls individuation, and which restores the fractured parts of ego back to wholeness and completion, with ego reconciled and in psyche’s loving embrace. As Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Gustav Jung, so wisely reminds us (C.G. Jung, in Collected Works 8, paragraph 261), “The psyche [or Holy Spirit] is the starting point of all [in-depth] human experience, and all the [in-depth] knowledge we have gained.” Without the involvement of psyche, we are all like empty vessels, moving like puppets without a soul. more »