The Concept of Ego: Origins, and Related Constructs (Part 1)
In entry 1 in our series on ego dissolution (pulled from my graduate research on the phenomenon) we explore how the concept of “ego” was used in historic psychology.
The term “ego” has been used to denote a number of related concepts since its emergence in the Latin tongue as the word for “I” (Merriam-Webster, 2020), but we may owe our knowledge of the term to Sigmund Freud, who brought the word into common parlance by using it in his psychoanalytic theory. In conflict with its use in the original Latin, Freud’s theory did not position the ego as the seat of subjectivity or personal consciousness, as is generally implied in the use of “I” (De Sousa, 2011, p. 23). Rather, the ego was conceptualized as collection of coherent mental processes within the individual (Freud, 1923), all of which merely comprised one component of the human psyche. The ego was imagined as the seat of executive function, which managed the conflict between the inner and outer worlds, and between the id (the seat of primitive drives and desires) and the superego (the seat of ethical orientation) (Encyclopedia Britannica, 2005). Freud’s idea of the “ego” includes much more depth and richness than can be unpacked in this literature review, as our purpose here is only to set the historical context for our current use of the term.
Carl Jung’s conception of the ego, though not as popular as Freud’s, is perhaps more relevant to the use of the term in texts or studies concerned with ego death. Like Freud, Jung differentiates the ego from consciousness and the psyche (Stein, 1998, p. 25). He grants the ego some degree of centrality to the felt sense of self, as its movements across the stream of consciousness account for the movement of attention, and thus conscious awareness (Stein, 1998, p. 27). When the ego (and thus attention) temporarily removes its focus from the contents of the task being performed and allows unconscious processing to take over, it is performing a mild, non-pathological form of dissociation from consciousness (Stein, 1998, p. 28), and thus it is somehow separate from the central “I,” or immediate subject of experience. So far, this account of the psyche can still coexist with the Freudian model relatively comfortably, but Jung departs from these roots when he posits the idea of the “self,” which extends beyond the ego in terms of scope (it has roots beyond the individual mind) and ontology (it is transcendent) (Stein, 1998, p. 151). So, while Freud’s ego rests in a closed system, in which an individual life is contained, Jung’s ego floats above a mysterious self which, while tied up in the subjectivity of the individual, extends into the impersonal, collective unconscious (Stein, 1998, p. 151-152).
The psychoanalytic idea of the ego gave rise to the field of ego psychology, founded in 1939 by Heinz Hartmann. His theory leapt off from Freud’s ideas and built the tripartite structural model of the ego (Wallerstein, 2002). The three elements of the ego included in this model were the ego’s mediating role between the conflicting pressures of the id, superego, and external circumstances, the defense functions (or defense mechanisms, as they’re commonly known), and the autonomous functions such as thinking and language (Wallerstein, 2002). American psychologist and psychoanalyst Roy Schafer praised Hartmann’s efforts as the fulfillment of Freud’s vision – the development of psychoanalysis as a complete system of explaining and representing human behavior and pathology through the ego’s functions and mechanisms (Schafer, 1970).
Though Ego Psychology fell out of vogue in the mid-1970s thanks to changes within the field itself and increased attention to object-relations theories of psychology (Wallerstein, 2002), the concept of the ego has persisted, and it remains popular in modern research. Searching for peer-reviewed literature from the last ten years with “ego” in the title on the extensive PsychInfo and PsychArticles databases pulls up 730 results and reveals that the concept of the ego is frequently being infused into operationalized constructs such as ego strength, ego weakness, ego depletion, ego development, ego resiliency, ego dissolution, ego death, ego syntonicity, ego dystonicity, ego noise, ego orientation, ego integrity, ego identity, and ego involvement. These constructs appear in a variety of psychological publications, not just those covering traditional psychoanalysis.
Despite the popularity of the ego as a core component of operationalized constructs, finding a clear phenomenological investigation of the ego is challenging. The absence of mentions of this kind of research implies that the term “ego” does not have a universally agreed-upon definition, even within the field of psychoanalysis itself. This problem is noted by Facco, Al Khafaji, and Tressoldi (2019), whose formal philosophical investigation into the idea of the Self through different cultural lenses shows that the Self is yet another fuzzy concept that has been used in ways that overlap with terms such as “consciousness,” “I,” and “ego.”. Ultimately their review leads them to the hypothesis that the ego exists on a continuum with the Self at one end, while acknowledging that historically, these terms have not been given distinct definitions or used consistently (Facco, Al Khafaji, & Tressoldi, 2019).
The fact that no singular, consistent definition of the ego has been agreed upon in the field of psychology (or beyond) poses no problems to the grounded theory approach, as such a definition would not limit the analysis of the data. Still, this investigation has served to clarify that our research into ego death will entail the general focus of the qualities that are attributed to the ego in its popular and academic usage. These qualities are, roughly: personal identity, subjectivity, will, agency, consciousness, self, the felt sense of self, awareness, choice, behavior management, and a sense of “I” as the subject, recipient, or owner of experience.
In our next entry, we will discuss how the concept of “ego” and “ego dissolution” have been used in contemporary research.
