Well Action Psychotherapy

This word, from the latin meaning “I”, was introduced into modern English by the Father of Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Freud’s use of the term certainly caught people’s imagination, and it is now common to hear “He has an inflated ego”, “She suffers from a weak ego”, “What we all need to do is dissolve our egos”, “They are all egocentric buffoons”, etc.

But hang on a minute – that third one, dissolving the ego, that’s not Freud! That comes from Eastern mysticism, a rather poor translation of the Sanskrit word “ahamkara”. However, Westernised Eastern mystics are not the only ones to add ideas into the mix: psychoanalysts who have followed Freud have all stuck their oars in, changing or expanding the definition of ‘ego’, and humanist psychotherapists have rehabilitated the word as a metaphor for our daily experience.

But what is the ego? It’s so widely used in so many psychotherapy theories, even those which are diametrically opposed to Freud’s view of the psyche such as psychodrama. Everybody talks as if they know what it means, but everybody has a different idea … or as we shall see, multiple different and contradictory ideas.

Freud originally used the term to denote “The Conscious I”, which was highly controversial initially because nearly everybody agreed that there was no “Unconscious I”. Our self-understanding has progressed a lot in the last 150 years, and now the existence of an unconscious mind is much less debated.

But he soon expanded the term from meaning “the little pool of awareness in which we perceive our own existence” to include more ideas: It includes the part of ourselves that actively, and unconsciously, keeps our nightmares out of waking reality … thus the term ‘ego’ has grown beyond “consciousness” into an unconscious gate-keeping process.

The ego, it turns out, has a specific function, to mediate between the “Id” – our basic instinctive desires – and our “superego” – our sense of right and wrong – in order to decide a course of action; For Freud, the ego is part of our basic, inherited, instinctive equipment, and so must be part of the Id, but for others, not necessarily; However, everyone’s agreed that the ego can become “inflated”, “distorted”, “strengthened”, “weakened”, “attacking” (even self-attacking) and most psychotherapists now agree that it can undergo the internal rupture of “splitting”. Some of these ideas caught on in English through happy accidents of translation. For instance, the term “inflated ego” is an approximate translation from “Aufgeblähtes Ich”, a philosophical term in German. However, in English it happens to map nicely onto the 400 year old colloquial term “big headed”, so was immediately accepted into the English language.

But what do these extensions of the “ego” concept have to do with the original ‘Conscious I’ or even the ‘decision-making I’ concept? Very little in my opinion. My own view is that the term “ego” now denotes a conflation of several different ideas which really should be kept separate. Also, in my opinion, this conflation leads to much of the muddled thinking that exists in psychoanalysis in particular, and psychotherapy in general.

So what are we actually looking at? What are the ideas that have been conflated into “ego”?

• Well, first and most obvious, “the little pool of awareness in which we perceive our own existence”.
• Next, the part of our psyche that keeps out unwanted, repressed, material. This is one aspect of a “strong” ego, meaning the ability, as we develop, to keep out unwanted memories, something that is apparently absent in very young babies.
• Another sense in which the term “strong ego” is used by Freud and others is the ability to “withstand” perceptions and memories that can overwhelm our decision-making apparatus. As an example, a child confronted by a visceral blood-and-guts scene is likely to go into shock and become unable to think or make decisions. But by the time they have become an adult and completed their training as a surgeon, their “ego” has “strengthened” to the extent that they can view the same scene and make a calm and collected plan of action as to what to remove and how to stitch the patient back together. In my opinion, this is a second and separate sense of the term “ego strength”.
  • These two aspects of “ego” lie at the root of “Repression”, the consigning of overwhelming perceptions and memories permanently into the unconscious. Why do we do this? For many psychotherapists it’s about survival: we all know that shocking, frightening, upsetting, even awe-inspiring, events disrupt our ability to think. For instance, who can think straight in the seconds and minutes after receiving the news of a parent’s, or a child’s, death? If we’re in a safe place with loved ones, we can let ourselves go – dissolve into tears, or rage, or whatever, knowing we’ll be OK. But what if we’re on our own or in a hostile environment? What if we’re on the front line being shot at and our friend next to us is killed? We have to shut out the emotional reality and carry on, but that emotional reality might never become conscious again. We survived in the moment, but as Freud realised, these shut-out emotions can come back to haunt us in later life.
• This brings us to the “decision-making ego”. Freud’s view was that we think verbally, and that verbal thinking happens in the conscious awareness that is our “ego”, and that our “ego” is what makes decisions. However, both experimental psychology (in the form of brain scans) and mystical philosophy agree that decisions are made outside of conscious awareness. We become aware of a decision after it has been made, even if it’s something we’ve been consciously thinking about. So this needs to be separated out from “ego” as a separate idea too.
• There’s another idea that has got conflated into the “ego” concept, related to the ‘decision-making ego’, which is the idea that the ego functions to mediate between the Id and the Superego – passion vs reason, instinct vs conscience. In my opinion this lies more in the domain of Bowlby’s “goal-corrected behaviour systems”, a process whereby we learn gradually through trial-and-error and imitation to modify our basic responses. For instance, our basic response to being alone, which is completely clear in young children, is to seek company. Whereas as adults we have learned that in some situations we’re better off alone. Through trial-and-error and imitation of others, we learn to goal-correct, and this learning process is mostly unconscious.
• What about an inflated ego? This is a slightly complicated *process*, based on the self-perception of poor performance at something, what we might call low self-esteem. In response, to keep out the painful truth of our incompetence, we pretend to be unusually good at whatever-it-is. This idea in itself can be seen as the conflation of two ideas:
  • The ego as being the location of “self-knowledge”
  • The ego as being the part of the mind that ‘tricks’ ourselves into believing a more palatable version of reality than the underlying truth, what in psychotherapy we might call the part that manages defence strategies.
• The ego as being the location of self-knowledge is at the root of another conflation: ego-splitting, a process explored a little by Freud, but taken to the extreme by Klein and subsequent object-relations theorists. It’s pretty well established through observation that we can have multiple and contradictory ideas about the same thing depending on situation. For babies their Mothers are all-loving in the situation that breast-milk is flowing freely, but all-hating when it isn’t. Adults have more subtle “object splits” or “situation-specific objects”: it’s not unusual to hear adults express ambivalence, in one sentence saying “I hate my computer”, and in another, after a piece of good news has been delivered by email, saying “I love my computer”.
  What Klein hypothesised was that self-perception splits also. When we’ve just succeeded at a difficult task we perceive ourselves as competent, successful, better than others, and we like ourself. When we’ve just failed we may sink into a depression of self-loathing. *Because* the psychoanalysts are adamant that self-knowledge is an integral and inseparable aspect of “ego” this leads them to insist that “the ego itself splits” in a kind of catastrophic rupture … that is, all the above conflated ideas of consciousness, keeping out unwanted memories and perceptions, resilience in the face of adversity, decision-making, mediation between Id and Superego, goal-corrected behaviour, defence strategies AND self-knowledge … the whole caboodle “Splits in two” as though we become two people.
  • There is a problem with this view, in that such a complete and rigorous split of knowledge and processes is computationally impossible. Although I don’t like to think of the mind as a computer, there is no getting away from the fact that human minds have never shown themselves capable of solving problems that computers are provably incapable of solving.
  • Regarding the question of human creativity and whether computers can be creative, this is not something that enters into computational theory, there is no proof that computers could, or could not, behave creatively, so I have no problem in admitting the creativity of the human mind.
  • If we finally admit that “self-knowledge” or “self-perception” is just situation-specific knowledge, like any other knowledge, and is not intimately and inextricably bound up with all these other processes and properties, then the problem of “splitting” goes away – it becomes simply multiple ideas of the self, which can be brought to mind (or kept out of mind) in different situations as required.
• The final question I want to look at is the mystical one: “Should we dissolve our egos, or strengthen them? Or both or neither?”. We know from studies on trance states and psychedelically induced states, that our sense of “I-ness”, of being separate from the world, can be massively reduced. However, this doesn’t mean that we lose consciousness (we say our consciousness has been ‘altered’ but not ‘lost’), nor that we lose the ability to repress (in a mystical state we don’t find the ghastly content of the unconscious pouring into consciousness in any kind of overwhelming way), nor that we lose our learned ability to face shocking or overwhelming situations, nor that we lose our ability to make decisions (actually, in some trance states, our decision-making is improved), nor that we lose our ability to defend against unacceptable reality, nor that we lose our learned goal-corrected behaviours, nor that we lose our multiple versions of self-knowledge. So this is one final idea that I would de-conflate: Our fundamental sense of “I-ness” is not an essential property of the original sense of ego “the little pool of awareness in which we perceive our own existence”.
  • In answer to the question, perhaps we should aim at both strengthening our egos and dissolving them, for these are, in my view, two different processes impacting on different parts of the psyche.

Having so thoroughly de-constructed the ego, can we re-construct all these ideas in some useful and coherent model of the mind that is more functional?

I guess I was led to this critique through thinking about psychodramatic role-theory, so it’s no surprise that, in my opinion, role theory is an alternative view of some of these processes that makes much more sense. And *that* is a whole other can of worms, which I’m going to leave for another essay.

However, I just want to point out that role-theory provides a possible starting point for an alternative to object-splitting and ego-splitting: the idea that a particular role happens in a particular context, and involves particular beliefs maps neatly onto the experimental psychology results around situation-specific memory … and situation-specific memory doesn’t suffer from the “computational-theory” problems that ego-splitting runs up against.

And on that note of attempting to start a reconciliation of some of the split-objects of psychological, psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytical theory, a move from paranoid/schizoid to the early stages of depressive position, I shall leave you to respond with your own attachment style: will you be anxiously clinging to the old Grandfather, or bravely setting out from your secure base to explore the world of theoretical and experimental possibilities? Or will you avoidantly decide not to get involved with controversial debates, challenges and ideas and move on to the next thing as quick as you can?