in the modern person, the ego is radically inflated and assumes a secret God-Almighty position.
The ego, rather than Laws or Teachings, is now the
recipient of projections, good and bad.
The ego becomes the sole arbiter of right and wrong, true and false, beautiful and ugly.
There is no authority
outside of the ego.
Meaning must be created by the ego; it cannot be discovered elsewhere. God is not “out there” any more, it’s me!
🔽🔽🔽
But this is hidden, a sort of secret kept even from oneself.
this fourth stage is an extremely dangerous state of affairs
an inflated ego is unable to adapt very well to the environment and
is liable to make catastrophic errors in judgment.
Anything goes! If I want to do it and figure I can get away with it, it must be okay.
Not immune to the seductive persuasions of the shadow, the ego is led to
indulge in the shadow’s lust for power and its wishes to gain total control of the world.
further development in the
second half of life
a fifth stage,
which has to do with approaching the re-unification of conscious and unconscious.
In this stage, there is conscious recognition of ego limitation and
awareness of the powers of the unconscious,
and a form of union becomes
possible between conscious and unconscious through what Jung
called the
transcendent function and the unifying symbol.
The psyche becomes unified.
but, unlike Stage 1, the parts remain differentiated and contained within
consciousness.
And unlike Stage 4, the ego is not identified with the archetypes:
the archetypal images remain “other,” they are not hidden in the
ego’s shadow.
They are now seen as “in there,” and they are not
projected onto anything external.
no longer controlled by
societal conventions related either to people or values.
Consequently the ego
can consider unlimited possibilities of action.
This does not mean that all
modern people are sociopathic,
but the doors for such a development are wide
open.
And the worst cases might be those that look most reasonable
—the “best and the brightest” who think they can calculate an answer to all
questions of policy and morality.