Self-awareness

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Self-awareness is the awareness of the I -Identität or knowledge of the individual to his identity .

Self-awareness according to Karl Jaspers

Jaspers contrasts self- awareness as a result of inner perception ( intuition ) with object awareness as a result of external perception. He distinguishes four formal characteristics of self-awareness:

  • the sense of activity as awareness of activity
  • the awareness of the simplicity of the self in the same moment
  • the awareness of identity from the beginning, d. H. in the sequence of times, the passage of time
  • the self-awareness in contrast to the outside and the other

Activity awareness

Drive components are pushed forward by feelings . Regardless of whether it is about perceptions, ideas, thoughts or feelings, everything psychological receives the “special tone” of the personal (the “mine”, the “I”). Jaspers calls this process personalization . Other authors refer to this peculiar quality of the personal as the ego quality .

Unity of the I.

The self-awareness is always connected to values . If the subject is confronted with values ​​that do not correspond to his value system, phenomena of doubling of personality , shadow , obsession, ego anachoresis , the strangeness of one's own behavior, e.g. B. in compulsive acts.

Identity of the self

The simultaneous unity or doubling of personality is to be distinguished from the unity of personality that remains the same or changes over time. It is not always assumed that people identify with their previous behavior, as the personal value system also changes over time. A prime example here is early childhood amnesia .

Inside and outside world

The distinction between the inside and outside world appears to be a matter of course, but in individual cases it can be more or less eliminated. Baudelaire's descriptions of the decline in personality may be based on the effects of hashish poisoning. Baudelaire felt his pipe as personified similar to certain pantheistic ways of thinking , see the All-One or the → Participation mystique .

Self-awareness according to CG Jung

Preliminary remarks, overview

The I or I-consciousness is at the center of the field of consciousness. It is made up of a complex of ideas and identifications , which Jung also calls the 'I complex'. A conscious perception exists only for the objects that are associated with this limited ego complex. In addition to this conscious ego complex, Jung assumed other ego-close complexes. They are unconscious and in their entirety will also be referred to as the personal unconscious. Unconscious psychological content is closely linked to the individual life story of a person and is supplied with information via two approaches. On the one hand, it is about content that was previously conscious and subsequently excluded from the ego-consciousness as something forgotten or repressed in the further course of the biography, on the other hand it is primarily unconscious elements that had never fully reached consciousness, such as early childhood engrams and what is perceived subliminally . The persona is the representative, outward-looking aspect of self-awareness and corresponds to the external personality. The persona serves to adapt ( adaptability ) to the outside world in the sense of normative , socially acceptable behavior or action . The shadow , on the other hand, is the - metaphorically described - dark, shadowy side of the personality. The shadow is part of the personal unconscious that is close to the self and is made up of all those impulses, aspects, inclinations and characteristics of a person that are incompatible with the conscious identifications of the self. As long as the ego has not consciously confronted this unconscious shadow, it can only be perceived outside of the ego and is therefore often projected onto other people .

Self-awareness, self-concept and spirituality

In this way 'self-awareness' is integrated into the concept of analytical psychology of the 'self', which occupies a central position. The self is viewed as a totality and at the same time the center of the human psyche, which includes the human ego-consciousness and the unconscious, in contrast to the ego-consciousness. In the self the antagonistic strivings of the personality are, so to speak, summarized and united. From the Jungian point of view, the 'self' is the “psychological totality of the human being”, in this wholeness the personal and the collective unconscious is grasped.

Schematic representation of the persona and the self-awareness as well as the shadow parts of the person according to CG Jung in their relationship to one another.

According to Jung, there is a strong tendency in the self to realize itself in people, which Jung also calls “ entelechy in the individuation process”: also “beyond the desires and fears of consciousness” and with great assertiveness, which consciousness makes the greatest effort demanding, including moral conflicts. In human individuation , the symbols of the self often coincide with a “transpersonal center of the psyche” and to that extent with an image of God: “... what on the one hand means psychological wholeness as a psychological experience, on the other hand expresses the idea of ​​deity”; but this equality of symbols does not make any statement as to whether a metaphysical identity also exists.

Definition and demarcation

The Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung defined the ego as the "center of the field of consciousness, ... the subject of all personal acts of consciousness." The ego is based on the one hand "on the entire field of consciousness , on the other hand on the totality of unconscious content ", whereby the unconscious bases include: that only Occasionally unconscious memory accessible to the ego , “secondly, not arbitrarily reproducible, unconscious, and thirdly, contents not at all capable of consciousness” of the unconscious psyche . “Despite the incalculable range of its basis, the ego is never more and never less than consciousness in general.” In this sense, Jung understood the ego as a part of the total personality, the self: “I therefore differentiate between the ego and the self insofar as the ego is only the subject of consciousness, but the self is the subject of my entire psyche, including the unconscious psyche. ”The“ energy or intensity of the ego complex that manifests itself through willpower ”becomes weaker the closer one gets to the border area to the unconscious his affects and ideas breaking into consciousness. - Also delineated against the ego Jung, the persona ( 'Theater Mask'), "than what one himself and the environment appear ," and the shadows which the ego ideal precludes a person and this tends sometimes rough balance.

Formation of self-consciousness from the unconscious

Jung said: “The unconscious is the mother of consciousness.” For the formation of an ego consciousness in human development as well as that of the individual human being, “multiple [r] luminosities” (from Latin lumen = light), ie germs of approaching consciousness or flickering Sparkles of consciousness, “which shine out of the darkness of the unconscious”, gradually come together to form a “firmly established complex of the ego”. "The light of consciousness has ... many degrees of brightness, and the ego complex has many degrees of emphasis."

Endangerment of the self-consciousness by the unconscious

The ego-consciousness could also fall into a state of disintegration: Dissociation into a "dark state of disorientation" or even dissolution as schizophrenia : a latent psychosis could be triggered by confrontation with the non-ego, the unconscious. - A (temporary) dissolution of ego-consciousness, which may be desirable, can happen in religious experience: Because the ego-consciousness was also constituted by acts of more conscious "differentiation from the unconscious dynamis", it can "through an identification of the ego with the driving dynamis of the unconscious repealed "and z. B. how in the religious experience of Meister Eckhart in a kind of mystical all-relatedness (temporarily). For the neurotic endangerment of the self-consciousness through autonomous complexes see also complex (psychology) .

literature

  • Hermann Düringer, Hubert Meisinger & Wolf-Rüdiger Schmidt (eds.): The enigmatic self. Neuroscience and evolutionary biology before the question of how an ego-consciousness could emerge from the body organ “brain” (= Arnoldshainer Texts. Volume 144). Haag + Herchen, Hanau 2010, ISBN 978-3-89846-603-5 .
  • Carl Gustav Jung: Collected Works , special edition 1995, Walter Verlag Düsseldorf, ISBN 3-530-40081-5 .
  • Moritz Löwi : On the self and self-consciousness. A contribution to basic research in thought psychology. In: Die Arbeitsgemeinschaft (11) 1930, pp. 19–26.
  • Thomas Metzinger: The EGO Tunnel (A New Philosophy of the Self: From Brain Research to the Ethics of Consciousness), BvT Berliner Taschenbuch Verlags GmbH, Berlin, 3rd edition March 2011, ISBN 978-3-8333-0719-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Uwe Henrik Peters : Lexicon of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, Medical Psychology . Urban & Fischer, Munich 6 2007; ISBN 978-3-437-15061-6 ; Page 256 (online)
  2. ↑ a b c d e Jaspers, Karl : Allgemeine Psychopathologie . Springer, Berlin 9 1973, ISBN 3-540-03340-8 , on Stw. Ego-consciousness : Part 1: The individual facts of mental life, Chapter 1: The subjective manifestations of sick mental life (phenomenology), § 7 Ego-consciousness, page 101 ff.
  3. ↑ Gruhle, Hans Walter : Understanding Psychology . (Experiential theory). Georg Thieme, Stuttgart 2 1956; Cape. VI Psychology and individual sciences. Section Religious Studies - Question of the Specific Religious Experience, page 169.
  4. ↑ Janet, Pierre : Les obsessions et la psychasthénie . Paris 1 1900, 2 1908; 2nd edition 1908, pages 319-322.
  5. ↑ Ideler, Karl Wilhelm : attempt a theory of religious madness. A contribution to the criticism of the religious turmoil of the present. Vol. I. Page 392 ff. (PaterATING).
  6. ↑ Baudelaire, Charles : Les fleurs du mal / The flowers of evil . Fischer Bücherei, Exempla Classica  63, 1963, p. 116; La pipe : “Je suis la pipe d'un auteur…” (I am an author's pipe).
  7. ^ Edward Edinger : Anatomy of the Psyche. Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy. Chicago 1985 (Open Court), p. 81
  8. ^ CG Jung, GW 6: § 814; GW 9/1: § 248, § 633; GW 12: Section 309
  9. ^ CG Jung, GW 9/1: § 278; see. GW 11: § 755
  10. ^ CG Jung, GW 11: § 745; see. ibid. § 960
  11. ↑ CG Jung, GW 12: § 248
  12. ↑ CG Jung, GW 14/2: § 433
  13. ^ Edward Edinger: The Creation of Consciousness. Jung's Myth for Modern Man. Inner City Books, Toronto 1984, ISBN 978-0-9191-2313-7 , p. 85.
  14. ^ Edward Edinger: The Creation of Consciousness. Jung's Myth for Modern Man. Inner City Books, Toronto 1984, p. 53.
  15. ^ CG Jung, GW 10: § 644; see. GW 18/2: § 1630, GW 5: § 612
  16. ↑ CG Jung, GW 9/2: §1
  17. ^ CG Jung, GW 9/2: §4
  18. ↑ CG Jung, GW 9/2: §7
  19. ↑ CG Jung, GW 9/2: §18 f.
  20. ↑ CG Jung, GW 6: §730.
  21. ↑ CG Jung, GW 18/1: §91 and Fig. 4
  22. ↑ CG Jung, GW 6: §370
  23. ↑ CG Jung, GW 9/1: § 501
  24. ^ CG Jung, GW 8: § 388
  25. ^ CG Jung, GW 8: § 389
  26. ↑ CG Jung, GW 8: § 387
  27. ↑ CG Jung, GW 8: § 387
  28. ↑ CG Jung, GW 16: §476
  29. ↑ CG Jung, GW 6: § 430