The Resilient Founder

8Ego – The Emperor and the Slave

Your thoughts, and your identification with your thoughts is your ego. You start to believe in every thought that arises, and you derive your sense of who you are from these thoughts. Thoughts can get stuck in our heads, become deeply lodged in our minds and we start to believe in them. Then this becomes your ego – it is an entity, not apart from your thoughts.

– Eckhart Tolle

What is this thing called the ego? Is it an artifact, a glorified self-portrait that we draw and redraw for the rest of our life? Where does it come from? An infant or a child does not have an ego. Nor does a sick, dying person. Appearing mysteriously as we start adulting and abandoning us silently toward the end of our lives, our egos build their identity and foundation and whip its appetite for distinction for much of our lives. Building on the functioning of our minds, our thoughts, and the social order, our egos can be both our best ally and our worst enemy. Freud defined ego as follows:

“The ego functions to categorize things and persons in the outside world (those with whom I identify versus those with whom I conflict), but even more importantly the ego discriminates between contending forces of my own desire (impulses on which I will act versus those I will refuse and repress).”¹ Author Adam Phillips writes, “We are, at some basic level of ourselves, a chaos of conflicting urges. Ego refers to the restricted economy of impulse that grounds my feeling of having ...