Ego consciousness, poised between the outer and inner world of objects and driven to unceasing acts of introjection, is by virtue of its registering and balancing functions ever compelled to keep its distance, until it finally reaches a point where it becomes detached even from itself. This produces a kind of self-relativization which, as skepticism, humor, irony, and a sense of one's own relativity, promotes a higher form of psychic objectivity.
During this process ego consciousness proves its difference from all other partial psychic systems - of which it is only one - by throwing off that fanatical obsession with itself which is symptomatic of every system's primary will to self-preservation. It is precisely this growing reflectiveness, self-criticism, and desire for truth and objectivity that enable consciousness to give better and more adequate representation even to the positions it opposes. This facilitates self-objectification and finally, at the climax of its development, it learns to give up its ego-centeredness and allows itself to be integrated by the totality of the psyche, the self.