The Ego, Just What Is It?

In my last blog, I ruminated around the effort to turn women into men, in this blog I want to try to untangle the problem of the Ego, something you don't hear much about anymore.

As indicated in my last blog, it has been a long-standing idea that men and women are the same, except they have different bodies; embedded in that idea is that both men and women have egos.

It seems that all is still in confusion regarding the Ego.  (Sigmund Freud, the founder of Psychoanalysis, was the individual who introduced, in the early part of the 20th Century, the idea of a human psyche made up of three aspects, the id, ego and superego, which he believed developed at different points in a person's life.  One writer pictured the three as a (large) ego, a head, with the id, represented by the devil on one shoulder, and the superego, by an angel on the other--talking about mixing metaphors!)

Perhaps Freud's single most enduring and important idea was that the human psyche (personality) has more than one aspect; Freud saw the human psyche structured into three parts--the id, ego and superego--developing at different stages in our lives.  For this article see here.

One doesn't hear much about Freudian theory these days, but it was the dominant theory for a long time.  As far as I am concerned his idea of the Ego, has never received the attention it deserved, as it's existence is a major difference as to the psychological make-up of men and women.  For many men, their identity is very much tied into their ego; for many women a good deal of their energy is spent protecting the ego of their significant other.

For those women who have adopted the idea that they are the same as men, except in a different body, a number seem to have also invested a good deal of energy in developing a strongly-invested-in image of the self. (Margaret Thatcher comes to mind.)

Having studied a large number of the various psychiatric/psychological systems over the years, in my opinion, Freud's theories, and psychiatry itself, have the most problems, however, he did manage to draw attention to, and get us to begin to examine a new field, called: "human psychology."

It amuses me to say that the, "psyche" of psychology, a non-physical something, is denied existence by that study.  (That is because the sciences deny that there is anything non-physical about the  physical human.) 

Freud's Ego, Id and Superego were/are also non-physical, but examining whether an Ego is an aspect of one's self image is worthwhile, and whether it manifests itself in interactions with other humans is also worthwhile.  To summarize, it is my view that a major difference between men and women is that many males create problems for themselves by investing a great deal of energy in maintaining the Ego, or self-image, while women find themselves, all-to-often, tiptoeing around a male's Ego defenses.

Unfortunately, until we humans recognize that there is much more to us than a physical body, and physical brain, we will not begin to understand human behaviors.

I leave this blog with that observation.

Shirley Gallup