Ego, Uh Oh

How often have you witnessed an ego in play?  Statements like, “He or she has a huge ego,” or “I wouldn’t back down, I let my ego get the best me,” are widely used in common human interactions when explaining someone putting the image or idea of who they are ahead of all other concerns.  The ego as a self-concept is associated your self, gender, racial and sexual identity and all that makes up an individual’s personality; and how they perceive themselves.  The ego is associated with love, passion, anger, pride, status, competition, and many other primal/carnal human activities.  Exactly what an ego is — is difficult to pin down.  Firstly, in order to understand the ego, a person must first understand the idea of a ‘complex.’  In psychoanalytic psychology, a complex is a core pattern of thought related to memories, ideas, emotions, perceptions, desires, and wishes that are existing in an individual’s personal unconscious.  The complex is developed and organized around common life, human and archetypal themes like love, power, prestige, status.[i]  The ego is a type of complex, a composition and grouping of the mental ideas you develop about yourself.  The ego is not the hidden perceptions we have about ourselves, but the fully conscious perceptions of who we believe we are — the you that you are aware of, that you experience on an every day basis as you interact with yourself and others.  Your conscious mental thought process.  The other components of the shadow, the persona, the self, and the anima/animus interact, engage, or disagree with the ego (the conscious perception of who you believe yourself to be).  When this occurs, the ego (your idea of who you are) will be challenged and destabilized, and a person will experience a challenge or distortion of their conscious perception of their character, ideas, behaviors and attitudes.  The ego (your idea of who you are) can also be overtaken by the other components — the shadow, the persona, the self, the anima/animus.  An ego complex can develop about those parts of yourself, (physical and mental), where you develop insecurities.  For instance, when you were a child, you grew up with a physical deficit, i.e., a misshapen bone, or a limp.  Let’s say you often felt or believed yourself to be ‘weaker or uglier’ due to this physical deficit.  The physical deficit became a sensitive weak point, where issues of anger, resentment, pity, etc., were often felt or exhibited by you and/or others around this physical deficit.  As an adult, you still carry some of these thoughts and ideas surrounding the physical deficit which may or may not still exist.  This could be considered complex — emotions, thoughts, and preset ideas you have about your physical deficit; and an ego complex if you feel at certain point you have to ‘prove’ to yourself that you are physical strong versus weak or unattractive.

[i] Carl Jung’s complexes.  Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_(psychology)