Of all psychology concepts, perhaps none has a more lengthy history or engendered more controversy and ambiguity than that of the ego. The ego has come to mean so many things that it hardly means anything at all. Yet, it still appears in the literature as a viable therapeutic outcome as can be seen in the goal of creating a strong ego. On the other hand, a seemingly oppositional objective also appears in therapeutic treatment plans: transcend the ego. Currently no single theory integrating all the various meanings of the ego concept exists. Consequently, the primary purpose of this dissertation is to develop an overarching metapsychology by which all aspects of the ego can be understood.

To accomplish this purpose, I engage in this dissertation a hermeneutic analysis of the ego as it appears in the psychodynamic theories of Freud and Jung and the nondual spiritual revelation of Adi Da. These three accounts correlate with the three broad categories within which all possible orientations toward the ego reside. Starting with data provided by the works of Freud, Jung, and Adi Da on the ego as the whole of my hermeneutic circle, I relate the various parts revealed in each text to this whole and evaluate each of the parts according to this whole. In so doing, it is possible to identify general categories by which the various parts could be compared and classified: mind, self, and God.

These categories were forced to adjust and adapt to account for further refinements in the development of the theory as each part jostled for its place during the integration. This requires considerable reformulation of the concepts in order to account for bias and differences found in the frames of reference of the various works. As a result of this process, the nondualism of Adi Da emerges as the overriding context within which the psychic structure of Freud and Jung could be most clearly understood. A theory is developed in which these accounts of the ego could be integrated within a larger theoretical framework subsuming them all.