It is the source or agent of everything else. Prior to its emanating anything, it is whole, self-sufficient, perfect. The godhead thus symbolizes the unconscious before the emergence of the ego out of it.
egoquotes
And doctrinairism are the disease of our time; they pretend to have all the answers. Where primitives identify themselves with the world itself, moderns identify themselves with the part of them that controls the world: the ego.
Adaptedness of the conscious mind by adding to it contents of the unconscious, our aim is to create a wider personality whose centre of gravity does not necessarily coincide with the ego, but which, on the contrary, as the patient’s insights increase, may even thwart his [sheer] ego-tendencies. Like a magnet, the new centre [i.e., self] attracts to itself that which is proper to it.
More accurately, the ego is in fact supplemented, not replaced, by the self. For the aim of both Gnosticism and therapy is, once again, the integration of ego consciousness with the unconscious, not the rejection of either one for the other: When, in treating a case of neurosis, we try to supplement the inadequate attitude (or adaptedness).
Jung identifies the Anthropos (Primal Man or Original Man), Christ, and the Son with God. The Anthropos begins as part of the unconscious godhead, emerges as an independent ego, eventually forgets his unconscious origin, must be reminded of it by the godhead, and then returns to it to form a unified.
Where id is, there shall ego be.
The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.
The ego is not master in its own house.
In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.
It is easy to show that the ego ideal answers to everything that is expected of the higher nature of man. As a substitute for a longing for the father, it contains the germ from which all religions have evolved.
