An Entity Named Ego

The latin word ego has been adopted in English psychological terminology to avoid the ambiguity between “I” and “eye”. For the purpose of exposition it may be anticipated here that the word ego is not only a translation of English “I” or German Ich, but is, like the equivalents in many other languages, a variant of one and the same Indo-European expression.

Psychologists of every description often use the term with various ornamental epithets, obviously taking for granted that the meaning of the term is reasonably well delineated.

People are said to have an ego, or no ego, or not much of an ego; an integrated one, or a disorganized one; a primitive one; one with strong or with weak defences, and so on.

It is the aim of this paper to find out what that ego is, about which such statements are made, without aspiring to a comprehensive survey of the questions involved. The present inquiry is confined to a few ideas concerning certain psycho-physical, behavioural, and linguistic phenomena which hint at the entity named ego.

Anybody who deals with man and his social behaviour agrees that language is one of the main instruments in our understanding of the world and our reflections on relationships of any kind. Those adhering to this idea often seem to do no more than pay lip service to it. The heuristic value of the intrinsic meaning of the structure of the words we use becomes obvious if only one's mind's ear will listen to the tale the word itself tells. In 1924 when I found the essentially oral-erotic character of primitive speech by investigating its morphology Stein,(1924, 1949), Sapir (1924) independently concluded that “conceptions and relations which primitive folk are quite unable to master on the conscious plane are being unconsciously expressed in their languages—and frequently with the utmost nicety … and with an absolutely philosophical relentlessness” (pp. 149 ff.). The present inquiry is partly based on the contention that many words still carry the archaic mean