In Jungian psychology, the Self represents the totality of the Psyche - both conscious and unconscious - as well as the organising centre that guides the process of individuation. Unlike the ego, which constitutes the centre of conscious awareness and personal identity, the Self encompasses the whole of psychic life, including vast territories the ego can never fully illuminate or possess.
Carl Jung distinguished the Self as the Archetype of wholeness and integration - simultaneously the goal of psychological development and the guiding intelligence that orchestrates the journey toward it. This creates a paradox: the Self is both what we are moving toward and what moves us. It exists as potential from the beginning while requiring a lifetime to realise. The Philosopher’s Stone of alchemy served Jung as a primary symbol for the Self - something both infinitely precious and found everywhere, the goal of the magnum opus yet present from the start as the prima materia requiring transformation.
The Self manifests through dreams and active imagination as symbols of totality: the mandala, the divine child, the wise old figure, the union of opposites, geometric quaternity. These images compensate for the ego’s inevitable one-sidedness, calling it toward a centre it does not command. Encounter with the Self carries a numinous quality - the sense of touching something sacred, transpersonal, and infinitely greater than one’s familiar identity.
The relationship between Self and ego defines the task of individuation: not the inflation of ego into Self (a dangerous identification) nor the dissolution of ego before Self (a premature fana), but rather the establishment of an ego-Self axis - a conscious relationship in which ego serves as instrument of a greater wholeness it can acknowledge but never fully comprehend. This mirrors the Perennial Philosophy’s teaching across traditions: that the small self discovers itself grounded in or identical with a greater Self (Atman, Buddha-nature, the soul’s divine spark) - the “I” that seeks realising it participates in the “AM” of existence.
See also ego, individuation, wholeness, Archetype, mandala, coniunctio, Philosopher’s Stone.