“I” as soul-eater...the plurality of psyche in place of a unitary whole
...the first hurdle to be taken is psychological. We can do little exploration of the imaginal until we have surmounted our own egocentricity, that capital I appearing in the monotheism of consciousness (Jung), in monotheistic science and metaphysics, and in the root of all: the monotheism of Christian humanism with its tolerance for but one historical, unique divine personification.
The egocentric psyche with its one eye fixed on wholes and unities may grudgingly admit personifying as a figure of speech, but never that the imaginal realm and its persons are actual presences and true powers.
We are driven, therefore, to learn something from psychopathology, taking imaginal persons as seriously (if not as literalistically) as does someone with his delusions or hallucination. Then our idea of personifying would include its full “pathological” implications. This means nothing less than dethroning the dominant fantasy ruling our view of the world as ultimately a unity---the real meaning, real beauty and truth require a unified vision. It also means that we would abandon a notion of our personality as ultimately a unity of self. Instead of trying to cure pathological fragmentation wherever it appears, we would let the content of fantasy cure consciousness of its obsession with unity. By absorbing the plural viewpoint of “splinter psyches” into our consciousness, there would be a new connection with multiplicity and we would not longer need to call it disconnected schizoid fragmentation. Consciousness, and our notion of consciousness, would reflect a world that is diverse and unsettled.
Not merely would our psychological ideas about self, consciousness, and even God change shape; not merely would precise differentiation of qualities replace the measurement of quantities as the method of psychological knowing; but we would find ourselves no longer alone in our subjectivity. Our possessive notion of ownness, our private notion of privacy---the private self---indeed the very notion of the unit as basis for the fantasy of ourselves, would no longer provide the model on which our house of splinters is built. All would depart together: unity and uniqueness, identity, integration and integrity as simplicity, and individuality and undividedness. And with the departing dominant unitary fantasy would go as well its dominant emotion: loneliness.
-James Hillman, “Re-Visioning Psychology”