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Jung's psychology differentiates between ego and self.

A person's ego and self can sometimes be in conflict with each other.

Individuation involves reconciliation between ego and self, with the self becoming the personality's center.

In my most recent post on Why Myths Still Matter (here), I was referring to the pivotal point and, for me, most moving scene in Christopher Nolan’s newest film The Odyssey (2026) in which the lost, disoriented, discouraged, delirious, dispirited, defeated, and exhausted hero Odysseus, guided by the goddess Athena (in Jungian terms, representing his own anima or inner feminine), builds a makeshift raft of the remaining broken timbers of his totally wrecked ship, places it in the ocean water, lies down upon it, and surrenders to the natural tides, winds, and currents to take him to his destination. He is a broken, beaten man but finds the inner courage (or desperation) to relinquish control and trust the mysterious power and wisdom of the sea and the gods (the unconscious) rather than continuing to rely on his heroic masculine ego to forcefully and willfully solve the challenge of getting back home to Ithaca.

The great Swiss psychotherapist Carl Gustav Jung (1955/1963) once pithily commented that “the experience of the Self is always a defeat for the ego.” What he meant is that in order for us to mature and become more whole, balanced, conscious, and authentic (i.e., to individuate), the ego must eventually relinquish its inflated superiority,........

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