Another Level of Complexity

Unconscious compensation, which is characteristic of the transcendent function, most often appears in moments of disorientation, emptiness, and solitude. The opposing viewpoint it offers provides the conscious ego with elements it hitherto lacked in order to confront a more complex reality. Two types of unconscious compensation are analyzed: that of the ego by the Self and that of the Self by the ego (more common in borderline states). In the second case, the ego tends to gradually diminish the riches it intuits from the Self to give them a communicable dimension.