Jung regarded the ego as the ‘centre of consciousness’, but he also absorbed Nietzsche’s ideas on the unconscious as the central source for the psyche as a whole, thus utterly relativising the centrality of ego-consciousness. Nietzsche’s emphasis on the fact that ‘I’ do not think thoughts, but ‘thoughts think me’ and how ‘dreaming is a recreation for the brain, which by day has to satisfy the stern demands of thought imposed by a higher culture’ (Nietzsche 1878: 24–27) are both picked up in Jung’s psychology and his ideas of the personal and collective unconscious.
