Carl Jung did not use the term “superego” in his theories. The superego is a concept developed by Sigmund Freud, not Jung. While Jung acknowledged the unconscious mind and its influence on behavior, his model of the psyche differed from Freud’s, particularly concerning the nature and function of the unconscious.
Here’s a more detailed explanation:
Freud’s superego represents the internalized moral standards and ideals of society, often stemming from parental figures. It functions as a conscience, guiding behavior and suppressing impulses.
Jung’s model divides the psyche into the ego, personal unconscious, and collective unconscious. The ego is the conscious mind, the center of awareness, while the personal unconscious holds individual experiences and repressed material. The collective unconscious is a universal, inherited reservoir of psychic energy and archetypes.
Jung’s theory emphasizes the importance of psychic energy, which he believed drives human behavior, not just sex and sexuality. He also explored the concept of individuation, the process of integrating the conscious and unconscious aspects of personality, culminating in a sense of wholeness.
Jung disagreed with Freud’s emphasis on sexuality and childhood experiences as the primary drivers of behavior, and his model did not include the superego concept.
Jung’s theory of personality focused on the integration of conscious and unconscious aspects of the psyche, with a focus on psychic energy and the pursuit of individuation, whereas Freud’s theory included the superego as a key component of the psyche, emphasizing the influence of internalized moral standards.
I do find the concept of the superego, useful as a way of understanding the conscience. Jung himself recognized that there was a personal unconscious as well as a collective one. The super ego would’ve been an expression of the former.
Anyway, I’ve been using the Google search engine to survey the different meanings of ego and and its relation to other psychological concepts and phenonmena, music being the last phenomena under consideration. The value of this exercise is, of course, questionable. So, what does mysterium tremendum have to do with any of the above? It happens to be a term I am familiar with, having read Rudolf Otto’s book “The Idea of the Holy” where he coins the term years ago. That book influenced Jung’s thinking. I probably found out about Otto reading Jung, I don’t remember. Otto explores the realm of religious experience phenomenologically and speculates about the origins of the God concept in human experience.
Now immediately above I was actually exploring via Google what the relation might be between the ego and music. I didn’t find the search particularly helpful. Otto himself does explore the relation of music to the mysterium tremndum though. He says:
“…the music, purely as music… releases a blissful rejoicing in us, and we are conscious of a glimmering, billowy agitation occupying our minds, without being able to express or explain in concepts what it really is that moves us so deeply.”
and
“Music, in short, arouses in us an experience and vibrations of mood that are quite specific in kind and must simply be called ‘musical’; but the rise and fall and manifold variations of this experience exhibit—though again only in part—definite, if fugitive, analogies and correspondences with our ordinary non-musical emotional states, and so can call these into consciousness and blend with them. If this happens, the specific ‘music-consciousness’ is thereby ‘schematized’ and rationalized, and the resultant complex mood is, as it were, a fabric, in which the general human feelings and emotional states constitute the warp, and the non-rational music-feelings the woof. The song in its entirety is therefore music ‘rationalized’. Now here is illustrated the contrast between the legitimate and the illegitimate processes of ‘rationalization’. For, if the song may be called music ‘rationalized’ in the legitimate sense, in programme-music we have a musical ‘rationalism’ in the bad sense. Programme-music, that is to say, misinterprets and perverts the idea of music by its implication that the inner content of music is not—as in fact it is—something unique and mysterious, but just the incidental experiences—joy and grief, expansion and repression—familiar to the human heart. And in its attempt to make of musical tones a language to recount the fortunes of men programme-music abolishes the autonomy of music, and is deceived by a mere resemblance into employing as a means what is an end and substantive content in its own right. It is just the same mistake as when the ‘august’ aspect of the numinous is allowed to evaporate into the ‘morally good instead of merely being ‘schematized’ by it, or as when we let ‘the holy’ be identified with ‘the perfectly good’ will. And not only programme-music is at fault here. The ‘music-drama’ of Wagner, by attempting a thoroughgoing unification of the musical and the dramatic, commits the same offence against both the non-rational spirit of the former and the autonomy of either. We can only succeed in very partial and fragmentary fashion in’ schematizing’ the non-rational factor in music by means of the familiar incidents of human experience. And the reason is just this, that the real content of music is not drawn from the ordinary human emotions at all, and that it is in no way merely a second language, alongside the usual one, by which these emotions find expression. Musical feeling is rather (like numinous feeling) something ‘wholly other’, which, while it affords analogies and here and there will run parallel to the ordinary emotions of life, cannot be made to coincide with them by a detailed point-to-point correspondence. It is, of course, from those places where the correspondence holds that the spell of a composed song arises by a blending of verbal and musical expression. But the very fact that we attribute to it a spell, an enchantment, points in itself to that ‘woof’ in the fabric of music of which we spoke, the woof of the unconceived and non-rational. But we must beware of confounding in any way the non-rational of music and the non-rational of the numinous itself, as Schopenhauer, for example, does. Each is something in its own right, independently of the other. We shall discuss later whether, and how far, the former may become a means of expression for the latter.“
Otto’s analysis is spot on according to my experience. Music is an everyday experience which, despite its commonness, defies rational reduction in ordinary language. His opinion regarding Schopenhauer, who held music in esteem as the highest form of art, could also be explored here, in a subsequent post.
Rudolf Otto’s concept of Mysterium Tremendum (the terrifying, awe-inspiring mystery) is related to Edmund Burke’s analysis of the sublime, but Otto distinguishes his concept from Burke’s aesthetic of the sublime. Otto sees Mysterium Tremendum as a core aspect of the religious experience, specifically the encounter with the “holy” or “numinous,” while Burke focuses on the aesthetic experience of the sublime in nature or art.
Here’s a more detailed explanation:
Otto’s primary contribution was his concept of the numinous, which he described as a non-rational, non-sensory experience of something “entirely other”. He argued that the numinous experience, characterized by the feeling of Mysterium Tremendum et fascinans (the terrifying and fascinating mystery), is a fundamental aspect of religious experience.
Burke, in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, explored the aesthetic experience of the sublime, which evokes feelings of awe and fear, often associated with vastness, power, and danger in nature.
- Distinction between Otto and Burke:
While both Otto and Burke deal with experiences of awe and fear, Otto’s concept is specifically rooted in religious experience, while Burke’s is within the realm of aesthetic experience. Otto emphasizes the encounter with the “Holy” as the source of these feelings, while Burke’s sublime can be evoked by natural phenomena, art, or even political power.
Despite the differences, there is a degree of overlap. Both Otto and Burke explore the power of certain experiences to evoke strong emotions of awe and fear. Otto, however, makes a clear distinction between the religious experience of the numinous and the aesthetic experience of the sublime, arguing that the numinous is a unique and foundational experience for religion.
I would also like to clarify, that Otto while insists on the difference between the numinous and the sublime, he consistently opposes the kind of supernaturalism that insists that religious experience is outside of the sphere natural law.
..but not always 
..so watch it. 