Each ego, from the wounded to the spiritual, defines our interaction with the world
I subscribe to the view that the ego is the part of our mind that directs our behavior, based on our self-conscious emotions of shame, pride and guilt (Lester, 1997; Bastin et al., 2016). The ego is formed by the internalization of the instruction that we receive from our parents and educators.
In a path of self-discovery and self-transformation, it is crucial to understand the role that our ego plays in our lives. While doing this, I came to realize that there may be different types of egos. This is my attempt to classify them.
Survival ego
In the first years of life, children learn that they are something different from their environment. They realize that they have needs: for drink, for food, for sleep, for warmth, for skin contact, for words of affection. On the negative side, they experience pain, fear and distress. All of these experiences are related to their bodies, to their selves.
This is how the most basic ego is formed, what I call the survival ego. It drives us to meet our basic needs and to self-preservation. It is concerned with keeping us safe, warm and fed. Therefore, it responds to the basic emotions of thirst, hunger, pain, pleasure and fear.
We cannot ignore this basic ego. It drives us to take care of our basic needs and keeps us from reckless behavior.
In some mental diseases, this ego is weakened, causing patients to stop taking care of themselves. They do not wash or groom, eat irregularly and do not sleep well.
However, when this ego gets too strong, our needs get exaggerated. We fall into a scarcity mentality, eating and resting in excess. Our instinct of self-preservation gets exaggerated, our fears overblown. It keeps us from abandoning our comfort zone, which is necessary for learning. Haunted by images of how things can go wrong, we may fall into catastrophizing.
Daring ego
A developing child also needs to explore. Healthy development involves a cycle of seeking adventure and retreating into a safe base. The safe base is a mother figure who provides comfort. The challenges are provided by a father figure.
Daring behavior consists of doing something despite fear. When we do this successfully, we experience the emotion of thrill, which is essential to build anti-fragility. People who fail to build anti-fragility during their childhood and teen years are more prone to anxiety disorders as adults (Haidt, 2024). They have not learned how to process fear, so every challenge in life becomes an unsurmountable barrier.
The daring ego balances the survival ego. In life, they act together to guide us between challenging ourselves and seeking self-preservation. They represent an internalization of the father and the mother, respectively.
The daring ego may become too strong, especially in young men, who may build their self-image around the ideal of being brave. The adrenaline high of experiencing thrill becomes compulsive, leading to increasing risky behavior.
On the positive side, a strong daring ego drives athletes to face fear. On the negative side, it produces criminals who have lost the fear of the punishment of the law.
Caring ego
When they become mothers, women often experience an urge to care for their child so powerful that it becomes the center of their lives. However, love and taking care of others can also happen in fathers or outside parenting.
The caring ego is built around the idea of love and giving. People in a romantic relationship may love each other so much that mutual care becomes paramount. Some professions, like nursing and therapy, greatly benefit from a caring ego. Some religious people focus on selfless giving to people in need.
Obviously, this is one of the healthiest egos to have. However, it is still an ego, so it may lead to delusions and unhealthy states of mind.
One danger in emotional blackmail, in which the giving is not as generous as it seems, but done to create a psychological debt and dependency.
Another danger is overprotection. Just as the survival ego can create an overblown need for self-protection, the caring ego may live in fear of something bad happening to our loved one. When it is a child, this may keep him from engaging in challenges and experiencing thrill, leading to an anxious personality in adulthood.
Self-controlling ego
This ego centers on the idea of success, particularly professional achievement. It is strong in people with careers — a job involving constant self-improvement and competition.
Parents and educators reward us with praise when we succeed and punish us with shame when we fail. This gets internalized in our psyche, becoming an internal drive. The ego becomes our main source of motivation, driving us to make sacrifices to achieve our goals, sometimes to the detriment of our health. The self-controlling ego pushes away the survival ego, depriving us of enough sleep, leisure time, and healthy eating.
The dopamine reward system in the basal striatum of the brain is mistakenly blamed for making us seek pleasure. However, it is not a pleasure center, but what provides the motivation for the self-sacrifices of the ego (Wise and Robble, 2020). That pat in the back that we give ourselves for a job well done is a surge of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens. That’s why it is called the reward system.
The self-controlling ego also plays a role in making us act ethically. It makes us chase our image as good people: hard working, faithful spouse, caring parent, dependable friend, outstanding community member. If we don’t perform to our high standards in these things, the ego punishes us with shame.
Clearly, a strong self-controlling ego is necessary to live a good life. Behind every successful person, there is a strong self-controlling ego.
And yet, the self-controlling ego causes us a lot of suffering. What we call burnout.
The ego is an insatiable master. It doesn’t tolerate the slightest imperfection, making us become perfectionists. No achievement is good enough for the ego. It immediately points to the next goal, a higher peak to climb. Success is expected, so we are not allowed to celebrate it. Failure makes the ego bring out the whip of shame.
At some point in our life, the veil may fall from our eyes. We may realize that all of our struggles were for nothing. We have been running on a treadmill, chasing ghost carrots. Behind the most amazing professional success, there is a basic dissatisfaction. Victory hides an emotional void.
In the worst-case scenario, the clash against this void can make the ego collapse, leading to depression, even to suicide (Lester, 1997).
Possessive ego
Like the self-controlling ego, the possessive ego is obsessed with control but, instead of controlling himself, it wants to control its environment. This ego is what makes us accumulate money and possessions. It also wants to control the people dear to us.
The possessive ego may be a degeneration of the survival ego. Meeting your basic needs is no longer enough; you need to ensure that everything around you is ready to provide for you at an instant notice. Therefore, you accumulate stuff. You surround yourself with people who would satisfy your slightest whim.
The most obvious way to achieve this is to have lots of money, which would allow you to buy things and services. The possessive ego is what makes you greedy.
If money is hard to come by, then you resort to devious ways to manipulate people. You scare them, blackmail them, gaslight them, or make them dependent on you. The possessive ego is at the core of many abusers.
The person with a possessive ego thinks that everything is at their service. If they don’t get the absolute best, they take it as a personal affront. They want to be the first in line, get the best seat in the theater, the best service, the biggest slice of the cake.
Jealousy is a symptom of having a possessive ego — you want to own the person you love, so you are afraid that somebody else would steal her from you. Envy and schadenfreude are other symptoms.
Wounded ego
We associate the idea of the ego with something that drives us to become more powerful. However, some types of egos make people weak.
The wounded ego develops after psychological trauma or repeated experiences of defeat.
Experiments in rodents show that social defeat can lead to great damage to the mind and the body: decreased learning, susceptibility to stress, inhibited behavior and immune suppression (Reyes et al., 2015; Wood et al., 2015). It is a state called learned helplessness (Maier and Seligman, 2016), brought about by experiencing unescapable distress: no matter what we do, we get pain. So we learn to do nothing.
In humans, it can be trauma like abuse during childhood, abandonment, or the dead of a caretaker, but also experiences of social rejection or continued failure at everything we do.
The main concern of the wounded ego is to avoid more suffering. People with a wounded ego it shelter themselves from danger, hiding and withdrawing. They engage in daily routines that they feel are safe. Novelty is bad. They avoid too much social contact, particularly meeting strangers. The wounded ego sees any new social interaction as a threat, so it retreats into itself.
The good news is that having a wounded ego is often a temporary situation. Eventually, these people may find ways to empower themselves and develop other types of ego.
Victim ego
However, wokeness trap people in their wounded egos by encouraging a victim mentality.
The victim ego is based on the belief that the struggle between oppressors and victims is at the core of society. Since being an oppressor is unacceptable for our self-image, we need to find a way to be considered a victim.
Unless you are a super-rich man, there is always a way to cast yourself as a victim.
It may be race. Are you Black, Hispanic, Arabic or Asian?
Or it could be gender. If you belong to the female half of humanity, you’ve got it. Are you trans? Non-binary? Even better!
If you are a man, perhaps you are gay, or at least bisexual? No? Were you abused as a child?
Not even that? Then go for identifying as poor or exploited. That should do it.
Once you have determined that you are a victim, you are entitled to ask for redress. The world owes you. They should make things easy for you, since you have suffered so much. And, if that doesn’t happen, well, that makes you even more a victim!
The problem with having a victim ego is that you give up agency. Bad things have been done to you. Something external needs to happen to make it right. This takes away your motivation to take charge of your own life.
I won’t deny that many people (most people, in fact) have been victimized. However, when we construct our core identity around that victimization, we surrender our power. Because then our identity is defined by what happened to us. Even worse, we seek the remedy for our suffering in the external world, instead of inside ourselves.
Grandiose ego
The grandiose ego is built around the belief that you are destined to do some great thing in life. You will be rich, famous, a powerful politician, a great artist, a genial scientist.
The grandiose ego could develop from the self-controlling ego after continuous success makes us overestimate our abilities. It is common in narcissists, but you don’t need to be one to have a grandiose ego.
Of course, grandiose egos are often in a collision course with reality. Only a few can become truly successful. When that happens, the grandiose ego undergoes a curious transformation. You are really as great as you thought; the problem is that nobody understands you. You are the politician who refused to sell out. Your art is too pure for the masses. Your scientific ideas are too advanced to be understood at this time.
Spiritual ego
The spiritual ego is a type of grandiose ego that we often find in religious or spiritual people.
It develops when we come to believe that our goal in life is to be saints. Or, if we gravitate to Hinduism or Buddhism instead of Christianity, the goal may be to become enlightened.
Even atheists can fall into this trap by wanting to become virtuous, as preached by Stoicism or another ancient philosophy.
In my own spiritual search, I met one Catholic saint, a Hindu guru, and several Zen teachers. I was disappointed when I caught a glimpse of their oversized egos.
Spiritual gurus feel the need to cultivate a public image of being better than anybody else. They need it to manipulate people, using their money and their effort to build their temples, ashrams or communities. They are not free from the ego. They only have a more devious one.
You don’t need to be a guru to have a spiritual ego. It is a common mistake when striving for self-realization.
For me, a spiritual path should lead to inner freedom and finding meaning. An ego of any kind traps us in a meaningless struggle, chasing goals that are defined externally instead of responding to our profound aspirations.
A spiritual ego wants us to be morally superior. It drives us to be generous and helpful… as long as everybody is looking. We flaunt our spiritual practice or our religiosity.
However, there is an unresolved internal conflict between our spiritual goals and our ‘base passions’, like food, drink and sex. When we fall into temptation, we hide it carefully, lest it tarnish our image of pure beings. Inevitably, this leads to hypocrisy.
Some spiritual experiences erase the ego. However, this is just temporary. The ego comes back when we feel proud of having that experience. Some religious beliefs hide the ego by calling it consciousness. In my experience, transformative experiences integrate the mind by merging the conscious and the unconscious. Because we perceive our unconscious as the other, this diminishes the ego.
Living with our ego
This classification of the ego was done on the spur of the moment, so it may be flawed. Perhaps I missed some important type of ego, I don’t know.
It seems likely that a person would have an ego combining some of these different types. Everybody has a survival ego. The self-controlling, grandiose and spiritual egos seem apt to combine. So are the wounded and victim egos.
I don’t think that our goal should be to get rid of the ego. We need it to live our lives, particularly the survival ego. Other types of ego have many beneficial aspects, too.
The key may be to accept the ego as one more part of our mind instead of letting it take control. In other articles, I will share my thoughts and experiences in bringing the ego to its appropriate place in our lives.
References
Bastin C, Harrison BJ, Davey CG, Moll J, Whittle S (2016) Feelings of shame, embarrassment and guilt and their neural correlates: A systematic review. Neurosci Biobehav Rev 71:455-471.
Haidt J (2024) The anxious generation : how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. In, p 1 online resource. New York: Penguin Press,.
Lester D (1997) The role of shame in suicide. Suicide Life Threat Behav 27:352-361.
Maier SF, Seligman ME (2016) Learned helplessness at fifty: Insights from neuroscience. Psychol Rev 123:349-367.
Reyes BA, Zitnik G, Foster C, Van Bockstaele EJ, Valentino RJ (2015) Social Stress Engages Neurochemically-Distinct Afferents to the Rat Locus Coeruleus Depending on Coping Strategy. eNeuro 2.
Wise RA, Robble MA (2020) Dopamine and Addiction. Annu Rev Psychol 71:79-106.
Wood SK, Wood CS, Lombard CM, Lee CS, Zhang XY, Finnell JE, Valentino RJ (2015) Inflammatory Factors Mediate Vulnerability to a Social Stress-Induced Depressive-like Phenotype in Passive Coping Rats. Biological psychiatry 78:38-48.
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