How “ego” became one of the most misused phrases in the English language.
Returning some books to the library, I noticed flyers posted all over the outside windows. “Learn to live the millionaire lifestyle… without being a millionaire!”
I immediately discounted them. What a poor pitch. Like everyone, I want to be a millionaire and live the millionaire lifestyle. Was this a class on how to be fake? I don’t think anyone in LA needs a workshop for that.
The woman dutifully checking in my tomes had a streak of purple dye in her hair. She seemed cheerful.
“Why aren’t you at the seminar upstairs, are you already a millionaire?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said, mechanically creasing the due date printouts into each book. “Right.”
“It’s a poor pitch, isn’t it? I want to be a millionaire and live the lifestyle.”
She looked up with a dewy decimating gaze, and then slowly smiled, “You don’t need to be a millionaire to be happy.” Ah, an idealist.
“Well, yeah,” I responded, “I’m not talking about being happy. The science is pretty clear on how much I need for that.” According to a widely reported study co-authored by Princeton Economist and Nobel Prize Winner Angus Deaton, increases in emotional well-being are only directly correlated with earnings up to $75,000. This makes perfect sense, as when we have the income for basic needs, the additional burden of deciding where to Summer, which private school Baron should attend, and which doctor has the best Botox/HGH cocktail tend to weigh heavily on the psyche. That wasn’t my point. “What I mean is that if I wanted to buy a closet in this neighborhood I’d need to be a millionaire.”
It was her next response that gave me pause. “That’s just your ego talking.”
Now normally I would brush this off as typical misguided white girl yoga philosophy, but it got me thinking. Is it really just my ego that wants to be rich?
I decided to check out some books written by the person responsible for term. Other than Rene Descartes, that could only be Dr. Sigmund Freud. Freud popularized the term ‘ich’ (German for I) in his early 19th Century writings. We translate this using a word borrowed from Latin, “ego,” which can also mean “I am.” Other than pioneering the use of cocaine in the early 1880s, the Freud is known for The Ego and the Id, published in 1923.
Freud was considered a negatively-inclined scientist, as he focused on sexual development and repression (which represented his primary disagreement with the Swiss-scientist-turned-mystic Carl Jung). Freud, along with his inner circle of other largely Jewish doctors and scientists, established the idea of the psychic apparatus, which is where his concept of ego comes from. When we hear the term ego, we think of a person’s sense of self-importance or self-esteem, but the ego in Freud’s model is really just the filter over the subconscious desires of our id. The id is our emotional skeleton, it represents our basic instincts, libido, aggression, and impulses. Our id is seeking instant gratification, it precedes the ego and is only concerned with avoiding pain and seeking pleasure. The ego it is the rational actor in the ongoing dialogue between the superego, your inner moralizing critic, and the id. The ego is our skin, muscle, and flesh. The ego keeps a lid on the id, it is our personality developed as a reaction to the realities we are born into.
It has become popular in modern culture to attack the ego as the source of all earthly dilemma. Don’t be so egotistical, we are told, or he’s got such a huge ego! But, according to Freud, the ego is not the enemy. In fact we need it desperately. It keeps us from falling into pure id or pure superego, either of which would mean insanity.
Now normally I would brush this off as typical misguided white girl yoga philosophy, but it got me thinking. Is it really just my ego that wants to be rich?
In Freud’s model (borrowed in many ways from Georg Groddeck), the so-called psychic apparatus is not composed of distinct parts, but is an abstraction of our constantly developing mentalities. He described the id as the only part of the apparatus that is present from birth. It is our true self, but it cannot interact with reality. Therefore, the ego is the lens that we utilize to interact with reality; we’ve armed it with defense mechanisms and memories of who we believe we are supposed to be. We’ve been crafting it from the very beginning, and our parents provide examples that we copy, which we call building character. Our ego is the sum of our individual rationalizations about the subconscious (or unconscious) urges and desires we feel, but can only express through its aperture.
It’s not hard to see, therefore, why people mistake it for something closer to selfishness, as rationalizations can occasionally take the form of narcissism. But in reality the modern-day interpretation of ego is much more Jung than Freud. Jung portrayed the id as “the shadow,” a deep unconscious link to primitive animal instincts, as well as the wellspring of all creativity. The shadow makes its appearances in visions, dreams, and hallucinations, it’s multiple layers reaching deeper into a shared “collective unconscious.” Jung also felt that our ego had masculine and feminine aspects, our animus and anima respectively.
Though I loved this ideology in all the Tool songs, it seems Freud was far more correct in that we are basically sexual creatures who copy our parents, not mystical beings psychically linked to the moment of creation. It seems that Freud’s model is more harmonious with modern day genetics than Jung’s ideas. Jung’s obsession with the occult and inclusion of mythology don’t wholly invalidate his concepts (such as Synchronicity, Introversion, and Extraversion), but his beliefs that life has a spiritual purpose, spirituality’s ability to cure alcoholism, and his avocation of spiritual alchemy are simply unscientific.
From what we now know about our biology (what Freud could only surmise) is that our evolution is gene-centered, and gene driven. There are millions of processes in our body continually ongoing which we cannot control, and in effect are directing us, even though we feel we have control.
The idea that we are driving the bus is an illusion, we are driven by the aims of our selfish genes to copy themselves. Our genome is our id, and it needs an ego to interact with the 21th Century so it can evolve through continuous mutation and adaptation.
So why is it so in vogue to attack the ego, calling it names like inflated, or huge? Particularly when the truth is that, at least according to Freud, you are your ego.
The last part of the psychic apparatus that Freud describes is the superego. It’s the guardian angel, the so-called voice in your head criticizing the actions of the ego. The superego represents the conscience, the idealized version of your ego which you can never quite achieve. The superego develops in the first few years of life via your parents’ punishments and approvals. It is like a digital assistant running alongside your ego software, constantly pointing out glitches and bugs.
Your parents install it by setting an example, and you run the program, adding guilt, anxiety, and regrets. You upgrade your base version until you reach adolescence and you decide you want to sleep with your mother and kill your father (what Freud called the Oedipus Complex and Jim Morrison weaved into a song). This idea is certainly a stretch, and Carl Jung vehemently disagreed with it.
In any case, the superego is analogous to your morality, and the ego argues with it constantly on behalf of the id. No, you don’t need In-and-Out, it’s totally unhealthy to eat burgers late night and the fries have neither seasoning nor flavor and the burgers are vastly overrated, says your super-ego. Yet, you did just hit the vape pen and you’ve got the munchies, so the ego wins.
It seems that powerful male figures are increasingly behaviorally “exposed” — the destruction of their egos is brought on by ignoring the checks and balances of the superego, but it is not the ego that caused the ignorance. They give in to the impulses of the id. A Jungian archetype that comes to mind is Icarus. Bill Cosby must have amputated his superego when his stand-up career took off.
One my favorite people on the internet, Ryan Holiday, writes that the ego is “an unhealthy belief in your own importance.” He elaborates: “It’s that petulant child inside every person, the one that chooses getting his or her way over anything or anyone else. The need to be better than, more than, recognized for, far past any reasonable utility — that’s ego.” I would have to push back on the characterization based upon the writings of Dr. Freud.
Could we one day we genetically engineer our genome and thereby our id to neuter the unconscious urges and create egos who’s only available choices are inoffensive and innocuous? Surprisingly we’ve known how to do this for some time, castration and/or the procedure which received the Nobel prize for medicine in 1949: the lobotomy. Neuter the ego’s ability to choose id, and you’ve created a race of vegetables.
I want to go back to the library and let that woman know she was right, but not in the way that Heather, who teaches kundalini yoga (and mispronounces Sanskrit) told her in breathwork class. It is the ego that wants riches, because it rationalizes that all the needs and desires of the id are met if given unlimited resources. Indeed, the id and the ego are sometimes in cahoots. But, the closest thing to you is your ego, the great balancer and decider between the instincts of the ego and id. So stop blaming the ego for selfishness, narcissism, and materialism. Start blaming the id.
By Michael Nemcik
