The ego
The ego complex emerges out of the Self in the course of early childhood development, rather as the moon is thought to have separated from the earth when the latter was in its early molten state. It remains linked to the Self by what Jung’s followers have called the ego-Self axis, and it is on this axis that the stability of the personality depends. The ego is itself the Centre of consciousness and it is what we refer to when we use the terms ‘I’ or ‘me’. It is responsible for our continuing sense of identity so that we still feel ourselves at 8o to be exactly the same person we were at 8. Jung never made a clear distinction between the terms ‘ego’ and ‘consciousness’, using them interchangeably and sometimes together as ‘ego-consciousness’. As a result, he did not examine the more unconscious functions of the ego in defending consciousness against unwanted contents arising from the unconscious – those functions that Anna Freud described in her classic work Mechanisms of Ego-Defence (1946) (e.g. repression, denial, projection, rationalization, reaction-formation, to mention only the most familiar of them).
Although we experience the ego as the continuing centre of our existence it is, in fact, merely the Self’s executive. ‘For indeed our consciousness does not create itself – it wells up from unknown depths. In childhood it awakens gradually, and all through life it wakes each morning out of the depths of sleep from an unconscious condition. It is like a child that is born daily out of the primordial womb of the unconscious’ (Cw’XI, para. 935). Again and again he stresses the dependency of ego-consciousness on the continuing vitality of the Self. ‘The ego stands to the self as the moved to the mover, or as object to subject, because the determining factors which radiate out from the self-surround the ego on all sides and are therefore superordinate to it The self, like the unconscious, is an a priori existent out of which the ego evolves’ (CWXI, para. 391).
The persona
Just as every building has a façade so every personality has a persona rally a mask, as worn by actors in ancient Greece). Through the persona we codify ourselves in a form which we hope will prove acceptable to others. It has sometimes been referred to as the social letype or the conformity archetype, for on it depends the success or ire of one’s adaptation to society. There is always some element of pretence about the persona, for it is a kind of shop window in which we to display our best wares; or one might think of it as a public Lions expert employed by the ego to ensure that people will think of us. ‘One could say, with a little exaggeration, that the persona is which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think is’ (CWIX. i, para. 221).persona begins to form early in childhood out of a need to conform to the wishes and expectations of parents, peers, and teachers. Children quickly learn that certain attitudes and behaviours are acceptable and may be rewarded with approval while others are unacceptable and may result in punishment or the withdrawal of Jove. The tendency is to build acceptable traits into the persona and to keep unacceptable traits hidden or repressed. These socially undesirable aspects of the maturing personality are usually relegated to the personal unconscious, where they coalesce to form another complex, or part personality, that Jung called the shadow.