Who am I? The i and the not i

Once upon a time, I floated weightlessly in the waters. I was the water, and water was me. As an infant-child, I was mother and mother was me, then I became the world and the world was me. What I did, and what I did not do, what I believed and did not believe, what I had and did not have, defined who I am. My attitudes, my opinions, my career, my house, my success were synonymous with the conscious “I am” (von Franz, p. 165, 1964). Reality moved as I moved, and I moved my reality as one. I lived in an undifferentiated state of “I am.”

Opposition to the "I am” is experienced as an opposition to me. Therefore, opposites to me become a threat to personal annihilation, resulting in great distress. Naturally, to maintain a cohesive self-concept, my world of inner and outer realities is split into what Esther Harding (1965) refers to as the “I and the not I.” All that is conscious becomes the “I” and all that “I am not” becomes unconscious to assuage neurosis from erupting as a consequence. Thus, the assemblage, a menagerie of symbolic animals, fills my unconscious zoo yard, savagely roaming about my inside world, only to be seen in the wild as others or enemies in the outside world. 

To individuate, that is, to become an actual individual as opposed to a synthetic caricature, I must allow space for these zoo-like symbols to arise. “The answer obviously consists in getting rid of the separation between conscious and unconscious” (Jung, p. 73). When the tension of these opposites is held rather than split and not acted out, I am locked into two new potentials, which are “two factors that together make up the transcendent function” (Jung, p. 73), a reconciliatory energy where these neurotic conflicts dissolve, thus resolved, liberating the life force of a unique soul. A journey to becoming who we truly are (Jung, 1969). 

References 
Harding, M. E. (1965). The “I” and the “not-I”: A Study in the Development of Consciousness. Princeton University Press.

Jung, C. G. (1969). The Collected Works of C. G. Jung (2nd ed., Vol. 8, Bollingen Series XX). Princeton University Press.

von Franz, M.-L. (1964). The Process of Individuation. In C. G. Jung (Ed.), Man and his symbols (pp. 157–254). Doubleday.