This concept come under number of different guises, guises that don't necessarily seem to overlap. That's a pretext form me to waffle on a bit I'm afraid, but I will come out with some references in a moment. We can relate the mech self with Rumi's dragon, which is 'the lower, appetitive self'. Rumi warns us not to 'wake it up' because it will devour everything in sight if we do - we won't stand a chance against it! This is akin to those stories wherein an unwise apprentice summons a demon that he is unable to banish. The summoning is the easy part, to send the demon back again not so easy!
This is also a way of talking about possession, therefore, Jung explicitly takes about the way in which we can be possessed by 'the persona', and this is not a straightforward thing to understand since when the persona possesses us we think we are it so the proposition that 'we are possessed' doesn't make any sense to us. Gurdjieff states that we are possessed by the psychological ego, of which there are 'many'!' THIS IS the doctrine of 'the plural ego'.
In science fiction terms, what we're talking about is being taken over by the very machines that we have created (e.g, the Terminator and Matrix films!) - in the era of AI this becomes more relevant than ever. The famous story by Mary Shelley (sometimes said to be the first SF novel) illustrates this theme too. Another approach is to say that the construct that possesses us and takes our freedom away is a type of Predator, which is the tack taken by Carlos Castaneda - the Predator farms us and harvests our energy, which is straight out of Matrix 1.
The strategy of the predator is to construct a world for us which isn't real but which we totally believe in and therefore give all our energy to. This prison is 'invisible' to us, therefore and we can think here in terms of the film 'The Truman Show'. The Truman Show is a retelling of the Gnostic Myth in which an agency that is inimical to our being controls us by making a Fake Reality for us to live in. This is the motif of the False Creation which the Demiurge created for us to live in. The Demiurge corresponds to Satan, the so-called 'ape of god', which also corresponds to the thinking mind (which creates the world we live in and tells us that this world is true).
