Psychic Inflation

The inflated ego does not merely feel confident. It feels godlike—possessed of knowledge, power, and creative capacity that transcend the ordinary human condition. The experience is exhilarating and pathological in the precise clinical sense: it represents a disturbance in the ego’s relationship to the unconscious that, if not corrected, leads to a compensatory deflation of equal or greater magnitude. Carl Jung identified psychic inflation as the characteristic psychological hazard of any encounter with transpersonal content that lacks adequate conscious preparation. The mystic who encounters the divine and concludes that he is divine rather than that he has been touched by the divine is inflated. The artist who produces a masterwork and concludes that she is a genius rather than that genius has spoken through her is inflated. In each case, transpersonal content—content belonging to the collective rather than the individual—is assimilated by the personal ego, which expands to accommodate what it has claimed. The expansion feels like growth.