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Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche QUOTES

Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche QUOTES

1 " The Self is the ordering and unifying center of the total psyche (conscious and unconscious) just as the ego is the center of the conscious personality. Or, put in other words, the ego is the seat of subjective identity while the Self is the seat of objective identity. The Self is thus the supreme psychic authority and subordinates the ego to it. The Self is most simply described as the inner empirical deity and is identical with the imago Dei. "

― Edward F. Edinger , Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche

2 " And if it is true that we acquired our knowledge before our birth, and lost it at the moment of birth, but afterward, by the exercise of our senses upon sensible objects, recover the knowledge which we had once before, I suppose that what we call learning will be the recovery of our own knowledge . . . PLATO* "

― Edward F. Edinger , Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche

3 " Through his researches, we now know that the individual psyche is not just a product of personal experience. It also has a pre-personal or transpersonal dimension which is manifested in universal patterns and images such as are found in all the world’s religions and mythologies. "

― Edward F. Edinger , Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche

4 " He must give up his identification with original unconscious wholeness and voluntarily accept being a real fragment instead of an unreal whole. "

― Edward F. Edinger , Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche

5 " the experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego. "

― Edward F. Edinger , Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche

6 " [The Self is] expressed by certain typical symbolic images called mandalas. All images that emphasize a circle with a center and usually with the additional feature of a square, cross, or some other representation of quaternity, fall into this category…There are also a number of other associated themes and images that refer to the Self. Such themes as wholeness, totality, the union of opposites, the central generative point, the world naval, the axis of the universe. . .the elixir of life – all refer to the Self, the central source of life energy, the fountain of our being which is most simply described as God. Indeed, the richest sources of the phenomenological study of the Self are in the innumerable representations that man has made of the deity. "

― Edward F. Edinger , Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche