The Self

 

What stranger passion

Than that in which so many
Sleeping things transform themselves
Into words that make

A silence of flowers?…

                                   Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Jung writes, “Intellectually the Self is no more than a psychological concept, a construct that serves to express an unknowable essence which we cannot grasp as such, since by definition it transcends our powers of comprehension. It might equally well be called the ‘God within us.’”

 At some point in time, Jung’s use of the term self was changed to Self, I have heard to avoid confusion with other schools of psychological thought and everyday speech that use the term self to describe a more conscious state of identity. In Jung’s writing there is an inconsistency in the capitalization of the word Self, which adds confusion. In this blog, I take the liberty of capitalizing all of Jung’s references to Self as they apply to the above definition. 

 At the age of twenty-one, single and pregnant, sitting in a psychology class at Boston University, I discovered the work of Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist who lived from 1875-1961. The core of his message has informed my life for forty-five years. Wrote Jung, “…the Self is our life’s goal.” Though my understanding of what that meant to Jung and what it means to me has shifted over time, it has always included an aura of mystery, of something suprapersonal that holds the totality of what psychology calls consciousness and the unconscious. An enigmatic wholeness.

Jung called the Self the ordering principle.

Gathering words to reflect and make sense or non-sense of my experiences, dreams, and emotions, I believe, engages the Self. I see memoir as a Truth telling of light and dark with a moral imperative where meaning and values matter.

In the first paragraph of the preface to my book I write: “As I look back over the years of writing this memoir, I note my deliberations over what to include and what to exclude in naming the essential. But an elephant is an elephant is an elephant, even when you’re blind.”

 The Self is the elephant in the memoir.