The Two Travelers’ Musings

About this poem

To Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Gustav Jung, the ego is the center of the field of consciousness, the place where our conscious awareness resides, and is merely a part of the psyche that Jung describes as the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious. The psyche is therefore a self-regulatory system beyond the processes of ego’s musings and the conscious brain. Thus, the ego in chivalrous battle with the psyche, can be regarded symbolically as an image of the ‘part,’ as reflected in the realization of one’s Personal Conscious engaged in psychological battle with the ‘whole,’ or greater unrecognized and more complete self of the human personality, as represented putatively and hypothetically by the Collective Unconscious. This poem, “The Two Travelers’ Musings,” depicts the eternal dialectical engagement of the ego with the psyche towards the teleological objective of Individuation, or psychological healing and wholeness. more »