The Ego, Consciousness, Motor Processes, and Thought

In a previous paper (20) I advocated the linguistic definition of the ego because of its consistency, practicality and freedom from misleading implications. The ego of language is simply the subject I which exists, does, thinks, experiences. This formulation does not commit us to any authoritative idea of exactly what the ego is. But at the same time language defines the ego under innumerable conditions and provides a sensible and workable rule-of-thumb. Thus are abstraction and practicality happily wedded. Whether “I cut off my nose to spite my face,” or “I unconsciously identify my self with my parent,” the linguistic description keeps me straight on where the ego stands with respect to the objects.

If the ego is defined in this way, at least two conditions are necessary to its existence: 1) consciousness, and 2) motor activity. Without consciousness an individual cannot exist as an I, although he may show organized behavior. Psychoanalysis, of course, shattered the conviction that consciousness is the ego, but we are not here going to deny the validity of consciousness as a condition of the ego's existence. Motor processes are likewise essential to the ego, especially if we bear in mind the motor part of thought. The ego is a synthesis of the sensory and motor components of the mind—a proposition which has long been recognized in psychology and neurophysiology. The important ego question is how the synthesis occurs.

A second consideration is that the ego is a subject which relates to objects (5, 20, 22). The tendency to drop this idea has been strong: “For phenomenologists and personalists, of course, the problem of the subject-object relationship remains uppermost. But for the most part, since the time of Brentano and James, psychologists have passed the problem by. For our purposes, we need only record this first usage, and note its relative rarity (5).” Another routine psychological burial? A bad idea may in this instance have spoiled a good one. The