ego

ego In the history of philosophy and pre-Freudian psychology, the word ‘ego’ (Latin for ‘I’) has usually meant the ‘self’: the rational, autonomous subject of consciousness, which, at the same time, is the object of the individual's self-consciousness. At least since the end of the Renaissance, the notion of the self has been fundamental to human identity. Whereas Man had previously been represented as an entity connected with and dependent upon a divinely ordered cosmos, the meaning of humanity came, by the Enlightenment, to be located increasingly in the interior of individual human beings, characterized by reason and by autonomy from the outer cosmos.

Immanuel Kant emphasized that morality was inseparable from true autonomy: the autonomous human agent chose to submit himself to the moral law. This law was not imposed by external authorities but by what Kant called the noumenal ego, a part of one's own self that could be shown by philosophical argument to exist beyond doubt but was wholly imperceptible and inaccessible to empirical investigation. Unlike the phenomenal ego, which was perceptible to self as well as others, and roughly synonymous with the personality, the noumenal ego was the inviolate and inviolable source of human reason and morality — and, therefore, of human autonomy.

The Kantian concept of the ego contrasted sharply with that of David Hume, who believed, scandalously, that there was nothing called the self — human beings were mere bundles of sensations. In the late nineteenth century, a similar idea was argued with great force by the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach. A thoroughgoing phenomenalist — Mach also rejected the concept of the atom — he argued that human individuality was simply due to different ways in which the Humean bundles of sensations were configured in different individuals. ‘The ego’, Mach proclaimed in 1886, ‘is beyond salvage’ (Das Ich ist unrettbar). As it happened, the ego was salvaged over the next few decades by one of Mach's own compatriots, Sigmund Freud — but the Freudian ego was a puny caricature of the heroic Enlightenment conception that Mach was attacking.

His early experience with hysterics had shown Freud that the self was not necessarily unitary: one part of the self could remain rational, intelligent, and moral, while another went completely crazy. His study of dreams had convinced him that there were regions of the mind seething with activity but inaccessible to the waking consciousness. Freud's first model of the mind was laid out topographically like a feuding empire (rather like the tottering Habsburg Empire at the turn of the century, of which Freud was a citizen) in which individual regions battled for supremacy with each other. Soon, Freud replaced this scheme with the more sophisticated structural model, using a new vocabulary of different psychic agencies, not of different regions. The mind, he now felt, was a system but not a closed system. The agency of the mind that was directly open to the external world, Freud called simply the ‘I’ (das Ich) but his English translators turned it into the ‘ego’. The Freudian ego represented rationality and common sense, ensured safety and self-preservation, translated thoughts into action, and repressed unacceptable impulses. Consciousness was attached to the ego but not all of the ego was conscious: whatever consciousness it possessed was largely due to its links with the perceptual system, with the body. The ego was intimately related to another agency of the psyche, the id, which was fully unconscious, completely irrational, understood only immediate satisfaction, and was the ultimate source of the passions driving human beings. The ‘power of the id’, Freud asserted, ‘expresses the true purpose of the individual organism's life. This consists in the satisfaction of its innate needs.’ Instead of being a totally rational being, the individual human was merely ‘a psychical id, unknown and unconscious, upon whose surface rests the ego’.

What, however, of morality? It had no necessary link with consciousness, Freud argued — locating it almost casually in a third agency of the mind: the super-ego, which developed out of the ego and was an unconscious mental representative of one's parents and parent-surrogates such as teachers. The major reason for its development was the fear of castration: consequently, Freud asserted, the female super-ego never attained the strength and implacability of the male. The super-ego was punitive, of course, and often irrationally so, but it was not merely the conscience. It was also the vehicle of the ego-ideal, the standard by which the self judged itself, the ideal it tried to emulate, and whose demands for ever greater perfection it strove to fulfil.

The Freudian self as a whole, then, was, at best, a consortium of potentially conflicting members. The conscious ego maintained psychic unity by mediating between external reality, the demands of the id, and the strictures of the super-ego. ‘We are warned by a proverb against serving two masters at the same time,’ Freud wrote. ‘The poor ego has things even worse: it serves three severe masters and does what it can to bring their claims and demands into harmony with one another … No wonder that the ego so often fails in its task.’ In such a messy situation, psychological problems were to be expected, and the task of the psychoanalyst was to strengthen the ego: to make it as independent of the super-ego as possible, to widen its field of perception, and to enlarge it so that it could take over fresh portions of the id. ‘Where id was, there ego shall be’ was how Freud summed up the therapeutic endeavour of psychoanalysis. The ego, that valiant warrior of the Enlightenment, had been cut down to twentieth-century size: robbed of its sovereignty and unassailable might, it now needed a therapist's help to conquer unreason!

Chandak Sengoopta

Bibliography

Freud, S. (1961). The Ego and the Id (1923). In The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 19, (ed. J. Strachey et al.). Hogarth Press, London.
Porter, R. (ed.) (1997). Rewriting the self: histories from the Renaissance to the present. Routledge, London.
Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the self: the making of the modern identity. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

See also consciousness; personality.