I Had To Recognize That I

From The Red Book: Liber Novus (p. 234), written during Jung's years of intensive self-exploration from 1913 onwards. The context is a dialogue with a personified inner figure during an active imagination — one of many such encounters recorded in the manuscript. The statement is not an expression of self-deprecation but a recognition that the ego is not the whole of the psyche: the Self, in Jung's terminology, is the larger totality of which the conscious "I" is merely one expression. The sentence captures his decisive break with Sigmund Freud's more ego-centred model of the mind, in which Jung had begun to see something far larger at work.