International Lifestyle Magazine Issue 51 | Page 38

B

een hearing a lot of people talking about
ego and its evils lately, and how important
it is to vanquish it, and I’d like to take this
opportunity to turn this notion on its head, as
it’s not only misconceived, misinterpreted and
misunderstood, it’s also doing a disservice to
our human family at this crucial juncture in our
history. Ego is a term coined by the godfather
of modern psychology, Sigmund Freud, himself
a much misinterpreted, misunderstood genius
and intellectual giant. The fault on our part lies
in not having studied him, but merely being
swayed by pejorative remarks made by envious intellectual
pygmies into a negative view of his immense contribution to our
understanding of ourselves.

When Freud referred to the
ego, he meant the psychoexistential structure we each
build from birth onwards with
the help of input from parents,
siblings, teachers, books, stories,
movies, the media, social
trends and so on, consisting of
a complex of opinions, beliefs,
prejudices, predilections, fears,
desires, hopes, habits and
fantasies, coalesced into the
appearance or illusion of an
actual entity, we assume is ‘us’,
a structure with a mask on: a
personality – the word deriving
from ancient Greek, persona
meaning
mask,
through
which we’re able to more or
less successfully conduct our
transactions with our fellow
humans, the meta-organization
of whom into the modern
version of clans, tribes and
groups, we call society.Behind
this layer of the constructed self,
or ego, lies the id, the swirl of
primal drives often so powerful
and potentially destructive
if outwardly expressed, no
sensible transactions could

occur and society would fall
apart at the seams, as happens,
for instance when war breaks
out. The ego’s main job is to
present an acceptable face
to the world through which
the drives of the id can be
expressed constructively rather
than destructively.
Above all of this reigns the
super-ego, the conscience
or higher intelligence, that
sits as adjudicator over the
negotiations between the id
and ego, to ensure as much as
it can a sensible attitude and
ethical, decent approach to
all your transactions with others.
When Freud posited this
schema, incidentally, he wasn’t
presuming to suggest it was
absolute truth, merely a way of

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organizing a helpful model to
explain the psychic structure.
It wasn’t meant as a new
religion or dogma, as has been
so wrongly supposed over the
decades, in other words.
In this schema, along with the
ego, the id and the super-ego,
he also placed ego-defenses.
These are the web of lies we
tell ourselves, the conceits
and deceits we subscribe to,
the vanity, the arrogance, the
hubris, the hypocrisy and the
dishonesty, which en mass
has led to this hyper-neurotic,
narcissistic society we now live
in and struggle with.
When new age spiritual, selfhelp, neo-Buddhist, control-