What is Ego?

“If you get your ego in your way, you will only look to other people and circumstances to blame.”

Jocko Willink

What is ego? I’m certain it’s a word you’ve heard before. Oxford Languages defines ego as “a person’s sense of self-esteem or self-importance.” Simply put, ego is the mediator between a person’s psyche and reality. It is one of three parts of our psyche. These were defined by Freud as the Id, Ego, and Super-ego (not really named like that, but none of us speak German, do we?). I will say this, Freud was a drug addict who had some really terrible ideas about familial relationships, but some of the concepts he came up with are still applicable and relevant.
Now to figure out what Ego is, we must touch on the other two parts of our psyche, the Id and the Super-Ego.

Id:

The Id is described as the unconscious source of our emotional impulses, bodily needs, desires and wants. The Id is governed by something called the pleasure principle. Basically, Freud’s way of describing our innate desire to go towards things that feel good, rather than painful things. The Id knows no good or bad, reason, logic, or conscious thought. The Id cares only about sating its impulses and desires. Id is comprised of all instinctual impulses that begin at birth. When we are born, our psyche is mainly comprised of id, but as we grow and learn, part of the id develops into the Ego. The Id can only be described in relation to the Ego, because our understanding of Id is limited only to our dreams and various neuroses. The Id has no organization, or unified will, so multiple conflicting desires or instincts can exist within the Id at the same time without cancelling out. Pretty much, you can love and hate someone at the same time where the Id is concerned.

Ego:

Moving on to the Ego. The Ego realizes that we cannot mindlessly sate our desires as the Id wishes. Rather, we must act according to societal expectations and morals. The Ego has something the Id doesn’t. Control. Now Freud originally only described the Ego as the self, but later expanded it to include our judgement, reasoning and logic, planning, memory, and processing information. Ego is what mainly constitutes our general, day-to-day thought processes. The Ego’s job is to balance the uninhibited desires of the Id, the reality of the outside world, and the limitations imposed on it by the Super-Ego, all at the same time. For example, where the Id would desire a soda, and the Super-Ego refuses it because of the high sugar content, the Ego’s purpose is to find a workaround that minimizes conflict by pleasing both parties, in this instance by getting a sugar-free or diet soda. The ego must constantly balance all of these, always. The Ego is concerned with self-preservation, wishing to please the Id and act according to reality, all while staying within the confines of the parameters strictly enforced by the Super-Ego. The Ego is constantly plagued by anxiety regarding the outside world, moral anxiety or guilt caused by the Super-Ego, all while wrestling with the intense desires and passions of the Id. The Ego wants to serve the Id, ignoring the finer details of life to keep the Id complacent, while pretending to be concerned with reality, all the while being constantly scrutinized by the Super-Ego, which punishes it with anxiety, guilt, and feelings of inferiority. To process all these conflicting feelings, the ego employs coping mechanisms. Now, there is a laundry list of coping mechanisms I could share, but my head hurts, so I won’t be doing that. Some of the main ones are repression, denial, projection, and suppression. The difference between repression and suppression is that with repression, anxiety-inducing thoughts or memories are simply prevented from entering the mind, while suppression is the conscious act of forgetting or removing something from your head. Suppression can also be associated by obsessive compulsive disorder.

Super-Ego:

The Super-Ego is not the Ego dressed up in tights with a catchy theme song. The Super-Ego is a complete introjection of cultural standards, mainly taught by parents and other authority figures. Super-Ego is perfectionism personified. It wrote the book on nagging. Think of it like that one authority figure who thinks that you’re never good enough just constantly in your head. It’s mainly, but not entirely unconscious, and serves only to criticize and prohibit the expression of desires, feelings, fantasies, and actions. The Super-Ego and the Id cannot exist alone together. It’s like putting an aggressive cat and a reactive dog in a room together without a human to separate them. And this is the purpose of the Ego. To mediate and placate both the Id and the Super-Ego, while also processing reality. Now Freud goes on to talk about the Oedipus complex but that has been proven to be inaccurate and perverted so I will not be talking about it. The Super-Ego is a manifestation of all the beliefs and behaviors your parents and other authority figures instilled in you. Freud describes a child’s Super-Ego as not a model of its parents, but of its parents’ Super-Ego. This is how traditional values are passed down. Parents instill in their children what they wish they had been instilled with as children, and the children begin structuring themselves with that.