T18 - Ego - C 5
It's a blessing because it enables us to stride forward in life with an attitude that we can make it, conquer our problems, do whatever it takes. A curse because it can truly get in your way, cause you to miss opportunities and cause lots of frustrations and disappointments. I wish I was a less driven man. Better yet, I wish I could figure out what's driving me. You know? Who's REALLY driving my car?
posted by Russ | 12:50 AM
1 Comments:
Larry Lexicon
Ego: Latin for ‘he goes’ - just kidding! Latin for ‘ I ‘. The self as distinguished from others. One of the three divisions of the psyche in psychoanalytic theory that is the organized conscious mediator between the person and reality. Whoa! I knew there was something of interest here.
Mediator. Between the person and reality. The ‘person’ IS ‘ego.’ So we mediate ourselves? First we’d have to split ourselves into two. Maybe that’s what everybody is complaining about in the west: splitting: alienation. It’s been said many times that the twentieth century was the century of alienation. Maybe it’s no coincidence that alienation of the masses came about just as Freud was wrapping up his career and just after he posited the psychoanalytic concept of ego. He had a huge effect on European and American thought. Everyone who wrote anything adopted his ideas, delved into them as living concepts and decided that most people, therefore, were alienated. The first Psychiatrists in the U.S. in the early twentieth century were called Alienists, not Psychiatrists. The word, ‘Psychiatrist,’ came into use later, in the fifties or maybe the forties. So, if all our writers were telling us we were alienated, we became alienated, because we like to be told what to do and feel. Or at least we incorporated the concept into our considerations and were able to fit many of our feelings and thoughts into the ‘alienated’ conceptual structure for ourselves much the same as when a new grouping of symptoms is created by bunching heretofore unrelated characteristics and labeled first a syndrome and then ‘a disease,’ that we then feel we now have the disease (heretofore undiscovered) and must take medications for it. Could these two similar processes be called manipulation? For profit? Or are they merely the progress of medicine and society?
Abandoning my digression and returning to ego, I question how can we split ourselves into two? We can’t. To do that we have to create the illusion of being separate from ourselves, being able to see ourselves from another vantage point than from within. Self awareness does that and no one doubts that there’s any such thing as self awareness. So what part of us is aware of our self? It seems to me to be a paradoxical conundrum. How am I observing myself? Have to think about this more.....
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