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writer and philosopher Albert Camus. “It is to confirm that there is no sun without shadow, and that it is essential to know the night.” In other words, to know ourselves will include owning up to the dark side of our nature—our mostly unexplored, mostly undesirable qualities of personal greed, jealousy, aggression, our propensity to kill, and our power play.
    To know thyself is an ongoing task. Like the curved thorn of the ziziphus it continually turns us around, bringing us face-to-face with ourselves in the world. To know thyself is to understand our wild nature. The psychological instincts of the predator, the parasite, and the scavenger are in our history and in our blood. They will not go away, which means there is no point in turning a blind eye to them.To know thyself implies a willingness to review our prejudices and our sometimes inappropriate belief systems. It is to discover that one’s identity is not restricted to a personal ego but includes a sense of self that is both ancient and evolutionary. But first, we must understand what we mean by the ego. We must understand its strengths and its limitations.
    A dapted by Sigmund Freud to describe that part of our personality that corresponds most nearly to the perceived self, ego is another name for one’s autobiographical self—our conscious sense of “me.” The big problem with the ego, because it is our most relied upon model of the self, is that it is heavily biased in favor of seeing ourselves as separate and distinct from the rest of the world. In other words, the rest of the world is “out there,” or, as the theologian Alan Watts puts it in his critique of the “skin-encapsulated ego,” what is in here is “me” and what is out there is “not me.” This of course has led to the widespread belief that our ego reality is the only one there is. As we shall find in what follows, this is not the case at all.
    It is important, however, that we do not underestimate the significance of the human ego. It is mostly portrayed in a negative light, but without it we cannot make sense of our world. Like the conductor of an orchestra, it has an orientating function, coordinating skills such as memory, perception, and intellect, as well as acting as a point of reference to who we are and what we might become. Not as strong and as encompassing of the world as we sometimes like to think it is, it is just as well that it has its denial-oriented defenses, which we will consider later. The ego, then, is a fairly recently evolved and tenuous attribute of the human mind and to witness its disintegration—as I have done as a psychiatrist—is to witness the frightening process of psychosis, a condition in which the boundaries between thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and intuitions begin to blur until they become indistinguishable from each other.
    Without an ego, without that sense of “me,” we lose our gifts of insight and reflection. This is why analytical psychotherapy can be so meaningful. Ultimately, it is geared to strengthening the ego, not by bolstering its defenses but by making it less defensive. It is about helping the patient to become less resistant to self-examination. To know thyself, then, is a lifelong process of learning to see ourselves in the other, of seeing the world as a mirror, and of being accountable for our personal contributions toward our own suffering.
    T he second admonition, to do no thing in excess…to keep the balance, is not merely a caution against addictions to foods, beverages, and drugs. It is a caution against being obsessive about any one thing —a dream, a memory, a doctrine, or a cause. It is to remember the other row of thorns on the branch of the ziziphus. Keep the focus but learn to scan as well. Importantly, this does not imply that sometimes boring notion of doing everything in moderation. Apollo did not say “Do nothing in excess.” The first admonition will already have alerted us to the fact that we are