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In my previous post in the Why Myths Still Matter series, I referred to the key, and, for me, the most poignant scene in Christopher Nolan’s new film, The Odyssey (2026). The hero Odysseus, lost, disoriented, discouraged, bracketed, spiritually broken and exhausted, guided by the goddess Athena (in Jungian terms, representative of his anima, the inner feminine and the wisdom she carries), builds a makeshift raft from the remaining beams of his completely destroyed ship, throws it into the water, lies on it and surrenders to the tides, winds and currents that take him where he needs to go.<\/p>\n
He is a broken and defeated man, but he finds the inner courage, or despair, to relinquish control and trust the power of the mysterious wisdom of the sea and the gods, i.e. the unconscious, instead of continuing to rely on his heroic masculine ego to forcefully and stubbornly solve the challenge of returning to Ithaca.<\/p>\n
The psychotherapist of the great Swiss Carl Gustav Jung (1955\/1963) once said, with a cutting laconism, that “the experience of the Self is always a defeat for the ego”. He had in mind that, in order to reach maturity and become more complete, more balanced, more conscious and more authentic, that is, to go through the process of individuation, the ego must finally give up inflated superiority, authority and megalomaniacal illusions about its supposedly inviolable place at the center of the psyche and personality.<\/p>\n
The ego can really be the center of the conscious personality, says Jung. (1961), but the self includes, embraces and absorbs even the unconscious, standing at the “center of this whole”. Our ego, the part of personality that we all have and need, must learn, usually around midlife or later, to happily and humbly play second fiddle and put itself at the service of what Jung (1961) called the self, by which he understood the “totality of the personality” and its true center.<\/p>\n
Sometimes the ego and the self conflict with each other about what we want or for what we need at a given moment, but both must be recognized and heard. Learning to recognize, listen to, and honor one’s core needs and desires, not just those of the ego, is one of the Herculean tasks of midlife and requires all of our courage, insight, commitment, and heroic strength.<\/p>\n
Indeed, I prefer to think of this “defeat of the ego,” however harrowing and humiliating, as a traumatic but potentially transformative process. Like Odysseus, we are insulted, humbled, disappointed, and defeated by unexpected events, which may take the form of external difficulties and afflictions, of seemingly impossible situations, of enigmatic psychiatric symptoms, or of crises and internal conflicts that painfully show us that we are not as masters of ourselves as we imagined, but subject to the higher and relatively autonomous powers of the unconscious, the daimonic. (see Diamond, 1996) and of life itself.<\/p>\n
Of course, the ego furiously resists such awareness, displacement, and dethronement, trying to maintain the illusion of complete control and dominion over inner and outer reality. This resistance of the ego to surrender to itself is so strong, so persistent, and so all-encompassing, and we are so identified with the ego or with our person, that is, with the idealized, embodied image of the ego \u2014 that sometimes it takes an existential crisis or a seemingly insurmountable trauma to force the ego to come down from its narcissistic tower and take its rightful place. The once proud, all-powerful, and domineering ego must finally admit that it submits to itself, not the other way around. Our usual approach to life and to solving problems is inadequate in the face of the crisis before us. We need to open up and become ready for a new way of seeing and responding to life.<\/p>\n
Life, inevitably, brings us exactly what is required. A type of psychological electroshock therapy. This is one way to understand what happens to Odysseus on his unpredictable odyssey, and what happens to each of us in our own odyssey. Sometimes the first appearance of the self is experienced as a crisis or trauma that collapses our life. When our ego is defeated or thwarted by the higher forces of life or the unconscious, we tend to experience deep depression, worry, confusion, narcissistic wounds, anger, resentment, and bitterness. The inflated ego, despite its best efforts, has not been able to unravel the problem or solve the puzzle, has not found how to remain in control, how to preserve its precious self-importance. But it is precisely in that humiliating defeat and in the hopelessness and despair that follows it that the unconscious is activated \u2014 and specifically what Jung called the transcendent function of the psyche \u2014 giving us a new attitude, an insight, an approach or perspective to the problem or to the seemingly intractable impasse, and the way to overcome or solve it in a constructive and creative way, just like the wounded Greek heroes, Hercules and Odyssey.<\/p>\n
Paradoxically, just like Hercules who cleaned the stables of Augia, this “defeat of the ego”, no matter how excruciating, is necessary: it removes the obstacles and blockages accumulated for a long time, frees, clears and releases the life-giving waters of the unconscious self, making its regenerative, rejuvenating, healing and creative powers more accessible to us. After all, it’s what makes the successful journey to finding and fulfilling our destiny possible \u2014 just like the Odyssey.<\/p>\n
Originally published in Psychology Today. Brought to Albanian Tesheshi.com.<\/p>\n
Stephen Diamond, Ph.D., is a clinical and forensic psychologist in Los Angeles and author of the book “Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil, and Creativity”.<\/p>\n
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