René Descartes, Meet Peggy Lee

“EGO” IS IMPLIED IN DESCARTES’ (IN)FAMOUS EPIGRAM: “COGITO ERGO SUM.” In English, it’s explicit: “I think, therefore I am.” I feel it should be emphatic.

Intended to be a statement that could not be denied, Descartes’ epigram only holds in a world without Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, Sufism, or any form of self-transcending mystical experience. As an unintended window into the psychology of the Enlightenment, however, it’s crystal clear and allows us to see a rather pathological over valuation of ego consciousness.

Already, we’ve stumbled into a fundamental confusion of terms. As a rule, in ordinary English usage, “ego” and “self” are more or less synonymous terms, both referring to our conscious sense of “I” as a stable, continuous center of identity. In part, this confusion derives from the somewhat odd tradition of translating Freud’s German terms (ich, es, uberich) into Latin (ego, id, superego) instead of into English (I, it, above-I). In addition, the therapeutic and theoretical emphasis Freud placed on developing a well-adapted ego, his bias if you will, has led us to devalue practically all human experience that might transcend ego-consciousness.

Carl Jung was both more precise in his terms (most of the time) and more empirical (i.e., less biased) in his evaluations of “non-ego” experience. Early on, Jung became a pioneer and leader of the nascent psychoanalytic movement. Freud and Jung soon split, however, as Jung began to observe and take seriously what we today call transpersonal phenomena. Thus, Jung recognized two centers in the psyche: the ego at the center of consciousness, and the self at the center of the psyche as a whole, both consciousness and the unconscious (i.e., the non-ego, the “it”).

(A brief aside: Obviously, all human experience must become conscious for it to be experience at all. So, the concept of non-ego or unconscious “experience” is necessarily fraught. Nevertheless, speaking of unconscious phenomena seems to work reasonably well as shorthand for the more complex realities of the psyche.)

For all intents and purposes (but with some pathological exceptions), consciousness is ego consciousness — and Jung gives us a number of insights into what this means. I’ll touch on three of them here.

As Jung struggled to understand his split with Freud, he developed a model of psychological types. He recognized that people who are habitually oriented toward the inner world (whom he called introverts) experienced life very differently than those oriented toward the outer world (whom he called extraverts). In addition to these attitudes of consciousness, Jung also recognized four fundamental functions of consciousness: sensation, intuition, thinking, and feeling. Sensation and intuition are perceiving functions. Thinking and feeling are judging functions. Sensation tells you something is there. Thinking tells you what it is. Feeling evaluates it. Intuition points to its potential. (If you’ve ever worked with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, you’ve heard this before.)

In this typological framework, therefore, Descartes and the Enlightenment were giving pride of place to thinking, which is only one of Jung’s four functions of consciousness. Descartes, thus, revealed his one-sidedness and made a psychological statement, not a metaphysical one.

A second insight into ego conscious came from Jung’s pioneering experimental work with word association. These experiments led him to coin the term “complex” to describe the association patterns being revealed. The ego, said Jung, is also a complex. It’s a relatively stable, autonomous, “feeling-toned” cluster of associated memories, images, value-judgments, and emotions built upon an unconscious (archetypal) core.

Pause a while to mull over and get a grip on what that last paragraph says. Among other things, it says the ego is built up, that it’s a structure developed over time through experience. Also, by saying the ego-complex has an archetypal core, it’s saying both that it’s a natural part of being human to develop an ego, and that the ego-complex is linked to something transpersonal.

While an ego-complex is inescapably human, it’s not always a good thing. Of course, you already know this. Still, in the myth of Narcissus, the ancient Greeks gave us a precise image of how the ego-complex might go horribly astray. Briefly, Narcissus was a beautiful, arrogant, aloof youth, who was led by the goddess Nemesis to a pond, where he saw his own reflection for the first time on the surface of the still water. He instantly became so enamored of this image, his own image, that he remained fixed to the spot until he finally wasted entirely away. The Narcissus myth shows us an ego so caught up in itself that it’s unable even to see the world around it. (Where do we see maladapted narcissism like this in the world today?)

The final insight ties together several “hints” I’ve already dropped. Near the top, I mentioned that Jungian theory differentiates between the ego and the self, seeing the ego as the center of consciousness, and the self as the center of the whole psyche, including the transpersonal. Then, while talking about the ego-complex, just above, I spoke of the ego-complex’s archetypal core. That core is the self, which manifests in consciousness through transpersonal images and experiences that, according to Jung, are indistinguishable from images of God. In 1972, Edward Edinger described the link between ego and self as the ego-self axis, a kind of “world tree” linking human and divine, but also a kind of continuum of psychological (and spiritual) development. Narcissus would be stuck at the ego-end of that continuum. Christ and Buddha would have integrated the self-end of the continuum and would be able to move freely across the spectrum.

Which brings me to Peggy Lee. In 1969, Peggy Lee had a Grammy-award winning hit with her recording of the Jerry Leiber-Mike Stoller song, “Is That All There Is.” The song tells the life story of someone experiencing tragedy, joy, and loss, then finally facing death. After each episode, she asks “Is that all there is?” — and responds, “If that’s all there is, my friends, then let’s keep dancing …” While the song is usually thought to express profound disillusionment and depression, I sense the singer’s disillusionment may instead be enlightenment. How else should one respond to a realization of ego-self wholeness, of mystical union, but by dancing? So, let’s keep dancing.