Within the continuum of Self, imaginal spaces become discernible only when compared to other spaces far enough away to be differentiated and objectified. The act of positioning then imposes the illusion of distinguishable sectors for the subject-eye. A rainbow, a symbol of the Self associated with the Biblical Yahweh is one such phenomenon. Each region of red or blue or purple resides within a sector of the visible spread of wavelengths. Each sector is divided by a blurred penumbral edge, one color fading into another. At the center of any discrete sector it is easy to consciously discern color. At the edges it becomes consciously arbitrary. The ego’s ability to distinguish by contrasting figure and ground diminishes, the closer one comes. The farther away from this subjectively differentiated sector, the better able we are to distinguish one color from the next. We are talking now about the corners of the spaces we inhabit, and again, relatedness is at issue. Where do we stand? Too close, and the one color becomes the only color. Too far away and one succumbs to the illusion that the discreteness perceived is an objective reality to be held over perception.
 
 
 

Note: These excursions in thought are for those of us who enjoy thinking about the structure and dynamics of psychology.  The questions at the end of the primary reading are designed to verify that you have read the primary reading  for  Continuing Education Credits. There will be no questions asked regarding these additional readings that will apply to gaining Continuing Education Credits.
 

Jung imagined the psyche as having an alternate center dislodged from that of ego-consciousness (Philipson, 1994). While this notion might at first seem benign, there are certain difficulties with other psychologies that have a different take. The psychoanalytic view of ego (Ich) took shape sometime in the 1920s after Freud changed his original delineation of the unconscious and preconscious-conscious into the id, ego and super-ego (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973). Ego consciousness in this scheme held a lofty seat in the psyche’s topology. Apart from the drives (treib) emanating from the basic instincts of the id, Freud relegated the unconscious to a kind of storehouse filled with the grains of repressed ego spillage. Freud considered the real drives of personality to be biological (a Darwinian alignment). Whether eros and thanatos, pain and pleasure or, in the later Neo-Freudians version, social instinct and objectaims, the ego comes into existence specifically to deal with the tensions created within the biological organism between the drive to fulfill the desires, and the realities of the world. The unconscious is thought to have been created by the organism’s need to put aside (repress) certain instinctual drives when confronted with reality.

Jung saw things another way. The Self in his view was distinctly not the ego. The ego was viewed as just another complex in the psychic landscape, arising from within the more expansive Self-matrix (Dourley, 1992). Jung subordinated ego to Self, not the other way around. Ego emerged for the teleological purposes of the Self (Edinger, 1992). This view was then fundamentally opposed to psychologies claiming ego consciousness to be the hub around which psyche revolved. And for this reason, no matter how close ego-based psychologies appear to come to Jung’s psychology, there is always a fundamental gap between them rooted in the theoretical presuppositions associated with terms like "unconscious" and "Self."

The Self was described by Jung as an ordering principle but in the final analysis surpasses description. It makes sense, then, that the idea would escape nineteenth-century medical thinking. As a technical term it was distinguished by Jungian convention through its use of a capital "S." This distinction offset it from the self of a local nature, as in "yourself," or "herself," or "myself." In Jungian lexicography, these would be more closely aligned with the notion of ego. Freud certainly did not use the term self with this in mind. In fact, the whole notion of self, local or otherwise, never really fit very well with any of the traditional structures of Freud’s model (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983).

In search of an adequate image with which to present his intuitions of the Self, Jung employed the electromagnetic spectrum in which color could be imagined as either continuous or discrete, or both at the same time. "Red" was an occurrence continuous with other events of a spectral idea, but also discrete as a thing-in-itself. It was perceived as a singular event among a plurality of others.

That the spectrum’s upper psychic ultraviolets were invisible suggested an image of unconsciousness corresponding to the realm of spirit. The psychic infrareds corresponded to an unconsciousness associated with the realm of soma and physis from which matter condensed. The physical thing we know as a rock or a tree could be a discrete event derived from the bandwidth of psychic infrareds. A thought or idea might be a discrete event, but derived from the bandwidth of the psychic ultraviolets. Within the larger purview of the Self, all are continuous . . . .  a rock, a soul, an idea, a tree. Consciousness itself when viewed as a discrete event contained within a larger relational matrix then becomes a subtle ordering of images with "a delicate, sensitive and intangible movement that is quite different from the order of explicate matter, yet is inseparable from it within the common spectrum of orders." (Peat, 1987)

Jung’s reference to this possible spectral nature of the psyche articulated an elegant preliminary intuition of interconnectedness in which the world of the corporeal was no longer dissociated from the world of ideas and images. Psychologically, the continuum describes everything as being connected to everything else. This is not so outlandish from a current scientific perspective, just ahead of its time. Within our physics, ample physiological evidence suggests this feature of connection and relationship may be even more "real" than what we perceive as being the objects (Capra, 1975, Gleick, 1987). If so, the possibility of latent psychological connections between an individual and, for instance, a tree or a rock, may be just as valid as any other connection. And this introduces the possibility of similar connections between the psychic unconscious of seemingly discrete centers of consciousness (described by projective identification), or between body and imaginal ends of the psyche (the psycho-somatic). The point is then simple: The relational fibers that form the dialectic interval between subject and object may be more "real," than the object itself.
 
 
 

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Michael Staples