Ego is a bad word in our society. Unmoored from its clinical origins in the work of Sigmund Freud, the term has taken on a life of its own as Western culture’s part-time boogeyman and full-time pinata.

In the past century the ego has transformed from an obscure Latin word for self into a shadowy demon that must be hunted down and exterminated without mercy.

But in this instalment I want to restore to ego some of its lost dignity. We’ll look at the evolution of ego’s infamy from its more positive roots in Freud and Jung to its evil reputation in New Age writings and in popular culture. Beyond this history of ego we are going to look at its connection to the myth of Icarus and what ego’s bad reputation says about our Nihilistic cultural moment.

The Origins of Ego

Take a trip to your local bookshop’s Spirituality section and flick through some of the books there and without fail you’ll come across sentences like this line from Terence McKenna:

Chaos is what we’ve lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.

Or this one from Eckhart Tolle:

A genuine relationship is one that is not dominated by the ego with its image-making and self-seeking.

These ego-bashing spiritual quotes could be multiplied endlessly, but that’s just the beginning. This phenomenon goes far deeper than the Spirituality section. Take a stroll to the self-help and business sections and you will find plenty more evidence such as:

• Ryan Holiday’s bestseller Ego is the Enemy,
• Cy Wakeman’s No Ego: How Leaders Can Cut the Cost of Workplace Drama, End Entitlement, and Drive Big Results
• Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher’s Trump Revealed: An American Journey of Ambition, Ego, Money, and Power and
• Barry Zito’s Curveball: My Story of Overcoming Ego, Finding My Purpose, and Achieving True Success

This term has penetrated the popular imagination as something nefarious — holding us back and undermining society — something demonic which must be exterminated.

To understand the demonisation of the ego we first have to look at how it burst onto the English-speaking scene. While the word was floating about for some years in the philosophical realm as a term for self it is with Freud’s English-language translator Ernest Jones that ego in its modern sense enters the arena.

In the original German text, Freud used the term “das Ich” which simply means “the I”. This was a term that German hear every single day of their lives. It’s an everyday part of language — as far from technical terminology as you can get.

But when it was translated into English Ernest Jones chose to translate it with the Latin term ego. It seems like a reasonable choice given that “the I” sounds a bit clunky in English. But the fact that ego was not an everyday term to English speakers — the fact that it was an abstract term — allowed it to take on a life of its own. Ego doesn’t bring to mind our everyday I but has its own linguistic territory separate from the personal pronoun.

But what would happen if we took that little word back to its concrete roots? Would the above quotes have the same allure if the enigmatic ego became the everyday ‘I’? When Terence McKenna says that the ‘I’ is the dominant archetype of our world, what does he mean? And what about Tolle’s ‘I’ with its image-making and self-seeking? Or Ryan Holiday’s ‘I’ is the Enemy?

Making this switch we can see that the kneejerk negative association with ego might not be so justified and it is at this point that we can begin our revaluation of the term ego.

The Freudian Ego

The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains the passions. — Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923)

If we look at the role of the ego in the Freudian system it far from the demon it has become in the mainstream. In its original Freudian context, it is actually quite heroic.

The ego in this sense is nothing more or less than the ‘I’ of the individual. It is your conscious thinking mind that you identify with. And it has a tough job.

The ego has to serve three masters. It has the shoulds of the superego breathing down its neck telling it how it ought to behave and what it ought to be doing at any particular time. Then there are the impulses of the id — which is the instinctual animal in us that like a child has its own desires for how it wants things to go down. And as if holding its ground between this rock and that hard place wasn’t complicated enough, the ego also has to serve reality — the hard wall of the world which puts serious constraints on what we can do totally apart from what we should or what we want to do.

The ego is the balancer of these three titanic forces. Ideally, it is the judging faculty evaluating which course to take. Sometimes it’s just the slave to the loudest voice⁠ whether that’s the id or the superego.

Seen through this Freudian lens, the ego is, at least to my mind, quite heroic. It’s got this Herculean task of balancing these divine forces — the underworld of the Id, the Olympus of the superego and the vicissitudes of reality. That’s no easy task but all of this the humble “I” is tasked with. And instead of being idealised it is society’s number 1 villain.

The Jungian Ego

Another way of looking at ego comes from the Jungian camp of the psychoanalytical tradition. The Jungian psychoanalytical tradition centres around the idea of individuation which can be summarised as Nietzsche’s dictum to “become who you are”. It is a psychological journey through our underworld and all the Hells that await us there but beyond this Hell there is the Heaven of a connection with the ordering principle of our psyche that Jung calls “the Self”. Individuation is ultimately a Copernican revolution in the psyche where instead of having our conscious ego at the centre we realise we are part of a richer psychological solar system with the Self at the centre.

Jung sees this transformation as being the journey of the second half of life with the years 38–42 being particularly significant. He calls this time the midlife transition; it’s the healthy psychoanalytical analogue to the popular trope of the midlife crisis where instead of entering into the underworld men use sports cars and mistresses to numb the depths.

In this psychological system Jung has a particular role for ego. The work of the first half of life according to Jung is to develop a strong ego. Alchemy was a major symbolical system in Jung’s psychology and for him the ego was the alchemical crucible — it’s the container that the transformation takes place in. If the container is too weak then it will not be able to contain the metamorphosis.

The work of the first half of life is to make a strong container. It’s a time for worldliness and sorting out Maslow’s lower bases. We learn our craft we lay our foundations in the world with family friends love and career. All of this provides the foundation for the great Work.

And so in the Jungian system of thinking, the ego is essential. Those with weak egos will succumb to possession, inflation or crumble under neurosis or psychosis. The dangers of the underworld are all too real. The ego is the connection to the external world and to everydayness that keeps us from disintegrating in the inner work.

This is obviously a very different perspective to the everyday understanding of ego and it is especially contradictory to the spiritual understanding of ego which argues that we need to abolish the ego.

Destroying the ego is dangerous from the Jungian perspective. It is not a progression but a regression. We can think of Nietzsche’s distinction between the Dionysian festivals of the ancient world where we see “that horrible mixture of sensuality and cruelty” in comparison with the expression of the Dionysian in the container of Apollonian theatre. In the former case you’ve got an animalistic chaos; in the latter you have the deepest expression of spiritual catharsis.

We see plenty of the former in spiritual cults and communes that are working off the idea of simple ego dissolution. It’s a return to Eden but it’s more of a Piagetian Eden of the infant than the Dantean or Tragic Eden of the individuated individual. In a system that abolishes ego, the whims of the Id are allowed free reign and the tyranny and manipulation of the superego have no counterbalance. We are victims to the inhumane gods of the psyche and we have no defence mechanisms against the evils of our fellow man.

The demonising of ego has overlooked this distinction between transcendence and regression and has resulted in far more misery than was necessary.

The New Age Ego

Buddha and the gospel of Buddhism (image via Wikimedia: Public Domain)

All of which brings us to the source of the ego’s bad reputation. While the term ego’s popularity emerged from the Freudian tradition, the taint on the ego seems to have come from another direction.

The Freudian ego seems to have gotten mixed up with the Theosophist New Age’s importing of Eastern religions into the West. The sense of ego in this tradition can be connected more with the Buddhist attitudes towards self.

In Buddhism the nature of this reality is suffering. This suffering comes from attachment which is caused by craving. This craving is all built around the structure of the self, the ego, the sense of I. Our identification with this sense of self is the root of all our woes.

The goal of Buddhism then is to achieve liberation from misery and the way to do this is to dissolve the ego which is to say: dissolve our identification with things. To the liberated being it’s all the same whether it’s my child or a woman in Vladivostok that dies of cancer. They will feel compassion in both cases but the level of attachment or rather non-attachment is the same.

There is a sense to which this sounds inhuman to us. It is one thing not to breakdown when your phone gets smashed, it is another to not break down when your child dies. But that is the final goal of Buddhism. And if you want to be free from misery then truly this is the only way: you must remove attachment to all things.

In this Buddhist reading, ego really is the enemy. The I is the enemy. That is the only occasion where the term ego is accurately maligned. It is a very specific context that does not apply to what most of us are aspiring to do with our lives. I suspect that despite the lip service to enlightenment among those in the spirituality subculture there are very few that have a genuine appetite for this way of life.

For the rest of us, I think we would like to be less affected by a smashed phone screen and more able to manage grief but we are not quite at the point of wanting to be unmoved by the death of our loved one.

Even here then ego is not the universal enemy we might expect. I think we can accept that our ego/I might be the root of all our sufferings without considering it evil — or at least when we think about our love for our family and friends as part of this ego structure then it is harder to see it as unequivocally evil.

Nevertheless this spiritual animosity towards ego seems to have infused the Freudian term ego with a strong dose of negativity. But since what we usually mean by ego isn’t the Freudian or Jungian definitions and it isn’t entirely to do with the Buddhist diagnosis then we are still left questioning what exactly we are talking about when we are talking about ego.

The Mainstream Ego

And that brings us to the final definition of ego: the mainstream ego. This conception is a hodgepodge of different traditions and evolutions but it has a meaning quite separate to the Freudian, Jungian or spiritual senses of the term.

I imagine that depending on the subculture of the person you ask the origin of their understanding of ego will come from Buddhism or from Freud. But the mainstream ego seems to be getting at its own unique target and I think this target is best understood through the myth of Icarus and Nietzsche’s idea of Decadence.

It seems to me that what we are talking about when we talk about ego is not the Eastern atman or the Freudian heroic balancer but what the psychoanalysts call ego inflation.

This is what Ryan Holiday is calling the enemy; it’s what Cy Wakeman is trying to get rid of in the workplace and what Kranish and Fisherman find so appalling in Trump. It’s not ego itself but the ego-centrism, egotism and ego mania — it’s ego that has gone beyond its bounds.

In the Jungian lens we looked at ego as a container for transformation. The ego is supposed to be a container that is strong enough to contain the transformation without shattering. But what if the ego becomes strong enough not just to contain transformation but to suppress it?

In this sense we get an ego that is strong enough to ignore the voice of the superego; it is strong enough to ignore the call of meaning inviting us to the Second Half of Life. Or if not strong enough by itself we might see it rely on some external aids. Thus instead of the midlife transition being associated with transformation, in our modern age it is the midlife crisis and is instead associated with the buying of sports cars and the courting of mistresses. Tapping into these more raw Dionysian forces, the call of the soul can be suppressed. The ego has become the indomitable tyrant of the psyche just at the point where it should have been undergoing the process of decentring.

The first half of life can be seen as a time when we are still subject to the reality principle. The ego is growing strong enough to deal with the external forces. But now it is using this power not to release the internal forces but to do whatever it, the ego, wants. This is what we call ego inflation. Rather than relating to the Self or to the community it acts according to its own power drives.

Through a Nietzschean lens

We can relate this to Nietzsche’s idea of Decadence. Nietzsche holds Greek tragedy up as being the glorious pinnacle of art and humanity. It attained a controlled synthesis of consciousness and the instincts. But with Socrates this balance is shattered. Socratic rationality is able to suppress the chaos of the instincts. It puts a stopper in the bottle of the instincts instead of forming a relationship with them. Nietzsche sees morality and reason as being the two mechanisms of Decadence and they are fused in Socrates with his idea of virtue being sufficient for happiness. If we stay true to our idea of virtue then the chaos of the external and internal world need not bother us. This idea reaches its tragic climax in the Roman Senator and Stoic philosopher Cato.

Coming out of the ancient world we have two traditions each emphasising their own preferred form of Decadence. Athens skews more towards Reason as a mechanism of Decadence; Jerusalem skews more towards Morality.

Morality was the mechanism of Decadence throughout the Middle Ages but since the Enlightenment in the 18th century the far more common mechanism is Athenian Reason. We reduce everything to mere matter and with the death of God we claim that all is permitted.

Without the buttress of Christian morality these rationalisations have been hard to substantiate. And this is where ego comes in.

Icarus

The denunciation of ego is a secular morality. Without a metaphysical morality we have returned to a mythic ethic. And the archetypal story of our mainstream ego is the Ancient Greek myth of Icarus.

After the Athenian hero Theseus escaped from the labyrinth in the basement of the palace on the island of Crete, the king Minos suspected the architect of the labyrinth — the great Athenian Dedalus of treachery — and so he threw Daedalus and his son Icarus in prison.

Daedalus, being a great inventor, created two pairs of wings that would allow him and his sign to escape Crete and fly back to mainland Greece. He cautioned his son not to fly too close to the sun however as the wings were made of wax and they would melt.

But Icarus got a bit carried away with the buzz of flying and feeling invincible he soared high in the sky. In an ancient commentary it was written that Icarus believed himself to be superior to the sun god Helios and so Helios punished him by melting the wings.

As the wax melted the feathers fell like snowflakes until Icarus was left flapping his arms and proceeded to fall from the sky into the ocean where he drowned.

Daedalus who flew neither too close to the sun nor the sea kept to the middle way and stopped at the next island to mourn his son. The island is still called Icaria today and the nearby sea in which he is said to have drowned is called the Icarian sea.

The mapover with the Decadence of ego inflation is simple. As we gain some mastery in the world we begin to feel a sense of power and agency. A taste of success is a dangerous intoxicant. Accompanying this sense of agency is a temptation to arrogance.

If we are cursed with too much success then we may begin to believe that we are special — that we are destined for greatness and that the usual rules don’t apply. These are the hallmarks of an inflated ego.

I also want to be careful about falling into the trap of demonising ego inflation here. There’s much more that we could explore here in looking at the myths of Prometheus and of the Serpent in Eden but we’ll save the revaluation of ego inflation for another instalment.

For now let’s just say that ego inflation is more often than not the recipe for a bad ending as the stories of Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried testify strongly to.

As the first half of life progresses we develop more agency in the world and the ego grows more powerful. This is an appropriate time for the path of individuation to begin and for the ego to find a new master in the Self.

But that is not what happens with Decadence. With the internal world steamrolled as a ghost in the machine, materialist modernity is left only with the external world. Without any vertical orientation the ego merely inflates and Icarus begins to rise. All that remains to us is what Rene Girard calls mimetic desire.

We end up in cycles of desire that have no internal soul connection but are mere imitations of other people’s desires. We want more money, power and possessions not for their own sake but because that is what the Jones or the Rockefellers have. And so Icarus begins to rise.

This seems to be the real meaning of the attack on ego. As Kierkegaard and Nietzsche have noted, modernity has flattened the human condition. The “Order of Rank” as Nietzsche puts it has disintegrated.

Nihilism and modernity have steamrolled human development so that we can only be divided by camp, class and tribe. And so the only model of ego we have remaining is Icarus. Icarus has become the myth of ego. The ego succeeds in the world, it becomes inflated it rises. Whether we pray that this rise is always accompanied by a fall will depend on the political camp we identify with.

The denigration of ego is inherently tied up with this steamrolling of the human condition. We struggle to imagine a healthy ego — a healthy relationship with power. It has disappeared from the culture and yet this healthy model survives in the myth of Icarus and his name is Daedalus.

Daedalus and Icarus by Gowy (image via Wikimedia: Public Domain)

In Daedalus we see that power does not have to breed inflation. He advises his son to fly neither too close to the sun nor to the sea.

In doing so Daedalus shows an awareness of the vertical dimension of human life. He models what a healthy ego looks like. He has all the genius of consciousness with which he can invent his flying machines but he also shows that this power doesn’t — unlike what many critiques of modernity claim — necessarily lead to corruption.

A healthy ego respects the underworld of the ocean and the Olympus of the superego and the reality principle. Daedalus sees the dangers and he advises his son to stick to the flight path — to stick to the middle way.

But while Daedalus represents this healthy form of ego for us, he also presents us with a mystery. We can see the model but not the mechanism. The wisdom of Daedalus shows us what we should do but it doesn’t reveal the psychology that keeps Daedalus from soaring high. Daedalus’ place in the myth seems like wish-fulfilment.

In our nihilistic age the saying that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” has become an axiomatic truth. We no longer believe in the possibility of a Daedalus — in the possibility of wisely carried power. With my taste for Jungian and Integral thinking I am inclined to attribute this to the loss of the vertical dimension of human experience.

Instead of a constant critique of ego we are offered a hierarchy of health. This is what the Jungian and Freudian views of ego offer us and what Daedalus embodies — an ego which knows its proper bounds. It’s a humble dream. We mustn’t let the cultural carpet bombing of ego steer us away from what a healthy ego represents — a fighting for what we believe in, a sense of who we are and an appreciation of the need to move beyond Decadence and to reintegrate our instinctual inner life.