Ego in Psyche’s Embrace

Karl Constantine FOLKES 1935 (Portland)



Our life is a loop
When we think of nothing else
But only our ego;
Going around in circles
To return and to haunt us.  

So life is a loop
That takes us all in circles;
Repeating our ills
With all our misadventures,
And without compensation.

Psyche invites us
With compassionate offers
Of compensation;
To transform that loop of life,
By therapeutic healing.

Ego should listen
To beckoning of psyche,
Whose only desire
Is individuation—
Ego in psyche’s embrace.

Seek then for psyche,
For the soulmate of ego,
Who provides healing,
Who considers our welfare,
With tender loving kindness.

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. 

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Written on June 04, 2022

Submitted by karlcfolkes on June 04, 2022

Modified by karlcfolkes on June 06, 2022

35 sec read
466

Quick analysis:

Scheme AXBCD ACXEF DEFXG FHXFX HBGXD
Closest metre Iambic trimeter
Characters 595
Words 119
Stanzas 5
Stanza Lengths 5, 5, 5, 5, 5

Karl Constantine FOLKES

Retired educator of Jamaican ancestry with a lifelong interest in composing poetry dealing particularly with the metaphysics of self-reflection; completed a dissertation in Children’s Literature in 1991 at New York University entitled: An Analysis of Wilhelm Grimm’s “Dear Mili” Employing Von Franzian Methodological Processes of Analytical Psychology. The subject of the dissertation concerned the process of Individuation. more…

All Karl Constantine FOLKES poems | Karl Constantine FOLKES Books

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1 Comment
  • teril
    You write so beautifully about wholeness- the most important thing - whether using the words of psychology or metaphysics or religion.
    LikeReply1 year ago

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