On Becoming Conscious 87
ess. Given decent mirroring in the early years, we stand a good chance of acquiring a healthy ego. But again, this is not the same thing as being conscious. There are lots of take-charge people with very healthy egos—captains of industry, politicians, artists, entrepreneurs and so on—who are quite unconscious. You can be a leader, run things like a clock and manage others well. But if you don’t take the time to introspect, to question who you are without your external trappings, you can’t claim to be conscious. Mature consciousness, according to Jung, is dependent on a working relationship between a strong but flexible ego and the Self, regulating center of the psyche. For that to happen one has to acknowledge that the ego is not in charge. This is not a natural process; it is a major shift in perspective, like the difference between thinking the earth is the center of the solar system and then learning that the sun is. This generally doesn’t happen until later in life, when you look back on your experience and realize there was more going on than you knew. Ergo, something other than “you” was pulling the strings. Becoming conscious, then, is above all not a one-time thing. It is a continuous process, by the ego, of assimilating what was previously unknown to the ego. It involves a progressive understanding of why we do what we do. And a major step is to become aware of the many ways we’re influenced by unconscious aspects of ourselves, which is to say, our complexes. Jung visualized the unconscious as an ocean, because both are inexhaustible. Freud saw the unconscious, or subconscious, as little more than a garbage can of fantasies and emotions that were active when we were children and then were repressed or forgotten. Jung accepted that for a while. He was an early champion of Freud’s dogma, but in the end it just didn’t accord with Jung’s own experience. Jung came to believe instead that the unconscious also includes contents we never knew were there: things about ourselves in our personal unconscious, and then, at a deeper level, the collective unconscious, all the varied experiences of the human race, the