Ego

The word ego , from the Latin word for I , has several meanings and uses. We are going to use the word with a very specific meaning in mind.

That meaning is not Freuds. He said ego was the conscious self, the part that interacts with the world and manages other impulses. Nor is it what others refer to as the ˜˜false self. The idea here is that when we were kids , sometimes our normal needs for attention and affection coincided with times when our parents were preoccupied with their own struggles and anxieties. As British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott says, at these times we ˜˜impose a coherence on ourselves a false self. This false self survives the anxious times by complying with parental direction while masking a healthy unfolding of individuality . Nor are we using the word ego as people commonly do when referring to an exaggerated sense of self-importance, as in ˜˜Ruperts ego is as big as all outdoors, or ˜˜His ego came into it, and he lost his temper.

Following the Transcendence Model discussed in the previous chapter, we will refer to ego instead as the part of the personality that seeks security and responds to threats against security. Lets look at this in the light of the six types:

• When you are worried, you are afraid for your security. Your ego is active.

• When youre angry because youre not in control, you perceive a threat to what you think will make you secure. Your ego is engaged.

• When you are faking it, you are hiding some truth about yourself out of a feeling of insecurity. This is an ego-managed phenomenon .

• When you seek attention, you seek the feeling of security that gaining it offers. Attention-seeking is ego.

• When you are behaving like a victim, you reveal an insecurity about taking responsibility. The ego deflects responsibility, if thats the name of its game.

• When you feel like a prisoner of your emotions, you feel insecure and you want to get to the bottom of it. Ego drives the inquiry.

The six types discussed in this book all reflect ego. The ego is busy trying to find and sustain optimal security.

Ego and self-esteem are two poles of the self dimension. When theres lots of self-esteem, there is low ego, and vice versa. When I feel able and worthy, my ego is not as likely to become engaged. After all, it already feels secure in itself. When I have low self-esteem, my ego has a full-time job ahead of it.

By now a pattern may be emerging for you:

• Your meta-level thoughts generate opinions about your object-level world.

• You are born with the tendency to have these meta-level thoughts because they allow you to survive in the world. They are busy judging what you see. They lead to your emotional responses.

• Your sense of self also comes from these meta-level thoughts insofar as your ability to reach these conclusions happens to give you the ability to create a singularity about yourself.

• When you judge, you become your judgments . When you judge that you are insecure, your sense of self, in the form of ego, acts to defend in some way.

It is interesting that when you judge others, you end up strengthening your sense of self. When you can say, ˜˜Ferdinand is a bad man, you are essentially stroking your own ego in the process. You are basically saying, ˜˜I am able to judge Ferdinand, and I judge him to be bad. Being capable of making this judgment means that I at least know what bad is. The judgment has strengthened you. Your sense of self is now somehow bigger and stronger.

In this sense, the answer to the question, ˜˜Who am I? is, ˜˜I am the judge. The irony is that to become less of one of the six types described in this book, you must reduce the frequency of your judgments of others and of yourself. The more you judge, the further you get from taking yourself less seriously. The more you judge, the more your emotions become engaged. You are the judge. You are the problem. We need less of you. To make the changes you seek, you need more object-level participation in your world and less judgment.