The Ego And The Self

14 Pages 3556 Words

rigins of the self all the way outside the body and into the source of the original sensation. The sound or feeling that exists inside the mind is directly connected to an event or force that is not inside the self; is this "world around us" part of the ego? On the other hand, if we think of the ego as an artificial concept that is used to explain the processes that are taking place in our own minds, we can quickly see that all sensations and thought exist only in the mind-- there is no such thing as a sound or a feeling or a smell outside of the person who experiences it, only the movement of different kinds of atoms in different places around us. This explains why the philosophical problem, "Does a tree falling in a forest with nobody there to hear it really make a sound?" seems very easy to answer on one level, but more difficult to answer on another.
In psychology and psychoanalysis, there is more of a tendency to take the concept of the "ego" for granted. The term was used by Sigmund Freud to describe the self-image of the individual, which he saw as a living identity that emerges and grows throughout the course of life. Below the ego was the id, the bodily forces and drives that have many psychological effects in the unconscious, but which are usually kept out of the conscious mind while it is thinking. Above the ego is something Freud called the superego, which he described as a kind of conscience; the superego is defined by what we feel and think of as God's authority, social morality, or anything else that we sense has a greater power and authority than we do.
Not all psychologists follow Freud's model of three parts of the psyche, but almost all of them have a concept of the ego which is basically similar to this: a self-concept which is based on a sense of identity that develops throughout life. When a human being is born, it does not really have an ego yet, because it can't yet understand the difference between its...