Post by Admin on Oct 14, 2021 17:53:21 GMT
“The ego itself is pathological. The ego in its blindness is incapable of seeing the suffering it inflicts on itself and on others. Recognize the ego for what it is: a collective dysfunction, the insanity of the human mind” - Eckhart Tolle
As psychoanlyst Erich Fromm similarly observed: “Well-being means, finally, to drop one’s Ego. To give up greed. To cease chasing after the preservation and the aggrandisement of the ego. To be, and to experience oneself, in the act of being - not in having, preserving, coveting, using."
The pathological nature of the ego seems to be rooted in the structure of the left hemisphere, as McGilchrist suggests: “The left hemisphere is much more about grabbing and getting, and about the Ego - whereas the right hemisphere has a much better sense of the Self, which is not the same thing. The Ego is the sort of very much ‘Me against the rest of the world, establishing myself as a power, as a child.’ But when you become a fully mature adult you should have more of a sense of your Self - which is not disjunct from society at large but emerges from society, gets its meaning from society, and gives back to society.
There’s some very interesting work being done by David Hecht at UCL, in which he has illuminated quite how much anti-social, psychopathic behaviour tends to be more driven by the left hemisphere, and more communitarian thinking if you like - more selfless thinking - by the right."
Hecht: "A callous disregard for the rights of others and a propensity for predatory and violent behaviors characterize psychopathy. Without empathy, a sense of responsibility or remorse, psychopaths manipulate, lie and exploit others for their own gain, with no consideration for other people's feelings. Neuroanatomical and functional studies on psychopaths' brains suggest a hypofunctioning RH, and a dominant LH."
Freud: "The intention of psychoanalysis is to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the super-ego, to widen its field of perception and enlarge its organization, so that it can appropriate fresh portions of the id. Where id was, there ego shall be. It is a work of culture – not unlike the draining of the Zuider Zee" (Freud, 1933a).
This project of cultural “conquest” and “appropriation” clearly has problematic aspects, as Adam Phillips points out: "Conquest, of course, has troubling associations with both sexuality and empire, as though psychoanalysis had become imperialism by other means. As though Freud was proposing, as a man of his times, the colonisation of the self or the id – as though 'Where Id was, There Ego shall be' could be an epigraph for Conrad’s Heart of Darkness" (Phillips, 2018).
Marcuse reveals the essentially pathological nature of this entity, rooted in how it sees itself in relation to the world: “It was subject against an object” (i.e., this is how the ego sees and defines itself). “Nature (its own as well as the external world) were ‘given’ to the ego as something that had to be fought, conquered, and even violated – such was the precondition for self-preservation and self-development”.
That is, the idea of “conquering” is built into the ego’s central program, its self-definition. It is perhaps no surprise, therefore, that the ego tends to see the “id” as a similar thing to be colonised and converted, and Marcuse expertly relates this rather “aggressive” character or default attitude of the ego to its view of the “Id”, and its desire to dominate, demonise, and conquer it as well: “The struggle begins with the perpetual internal conquest of the ‘lower’ faculties of the individual: his sensory and appetitive faculties.” Of 'Eros', in fact, in Marcuse’s terms. The conquest of these is, he suggests, the essence and mission of civilised “rationality”: “Their subjugation is, at least since Plato, regarded as a constitutive element of human reason, which is thus in its very function repressive.”
The posh term for this subjugation, he remarks, is “Logos”. Marcus neatly thereby links the colonial project of the rationalising ego not only to the subjugation of external “Nature”, and to the mastering of external populations and colonies, but also to the subjugation and repression of the internal world itself, as something to be equally “fought, conquered, and even violated” – converted into itself.
The problematic nature of the ego was identified by Lacan. In many of its operations, he observed, there is a compulsion for the ego to make “false connections”, such as in the confabulations or “false reasonings” which we have already seen constitute a large part of its method of operating. Indeed, Lacan argues, “the central function of the ego is to misunderstand” (méconnaissance or “misrecognition”).
As McGilchrist similarly notes: “the left hemisphere exhibits a strong tendency to confabulate: it thinks it knows something, recognises something, which it doesn’t”. In this sense “the left hemisphere is the equivalent of the sort of person who, when asked for directions, prefers to make something up rather than admit to not knowing”. As the supposed agent of Freud’s “reality principle”, therefore, the ego is singularly ill-equipped to understand or even to recognise what is real, let alone guide the individual in engaging with reality. “The fact is that this habit is far from harmless: it leads the left hemisphere to make poor inferences and some mistaken choices”.
Indeed, contrary to the inferences that many psychoanalysts drew from Freud’s theory, Lacan maintained that the ego cannot be organised by the reality system “precisely because all its structures are characterised by the effect of misrecognition. In Lacan’s view the ego cannot judge reality, or mediate between reality and desire because it is always marked by error, misrecognition or lack” (Sarup).
As Tolle notes, “the ego itself is pathological” and is based on a profound absence, as well as a profound fear, both of which lie behind its overcompensating drive for power which McGilchrist defines as the basic “will” and character of the left hemisphere. In fact there are not two “identities” within the human individual. There is only self-awareness (delivered by the right hemisphere) and a program or “State” (“Selfhood”) that the individual passes through, and can turn on or off. This left-brain egoic state consists of identifying one’s mind completely with the discursive thought programs themselves. There is no “ego” apart from the thoughts; the thoughts, the identification with thoughts, 'is' ego.
These thoughts, and thought programs, can be immensely useful to the individual, and involve such processes as the ability to focus on specific things, the ability to measure and evaluate its own objects of thoughts, and so on. The mistake is to identify with these programs (thereby endowing them was a false or fake sense of “self”), rather than to use them simply as tools, as programs, to be directed and harnessed by the more imaginative and empathic, as well as more sophisticated and aware, right hemisphere. Reason cannot see that it is only one way of interpreting reality: that it is only one of the tools in the toolbox. (Tweedy, The God of the Left Hemisphere).
It is the right hemisphere, McGilchrist observes, “which is responsible for ‘maintaining a coherent, continuous and unified sense of self”. Self-awareness is not a product of the rationalising left brain, whose motto tends to be that it doesn’t know what it doesn’t know.
“Suffering has a noble purpose,” Tolle observes: “the evolution of consciousness and the burning up of the ego” (Tolle, 2005). It is a pity that humans have to suffer so much at the hands of the ego, but this suffering contains something truly extraordinary: the opening up of the universe itself, within each individual. “If the egoic drama has any purpose at all, it is an indirect one: It creates more and more suffering on the planet, and suffering, although largely ego-created, is in the end also ego-destructive. It is the fire in which the ego burns itself up”.
It is striking in this respect that the “conscious” ego for Freud is the “unconscious” ego in Tolle. McGilchrist also characterises the rational, “conscious” left hemisphere as an insouciant sleepwalker, walking towards the abyss. Only by making the unconscious and compulsive nature of the divided or fallen rational mind truly “conscious” (or perhaps more accurately, by becoming aware of these false and destructive drives of the "conscious ego"), can the individual truly awake.
What is stopping this process, as always, is the “ego”. Freud himself, in his clinical work - if not in his politicised interpretation of it - recognised this. The mechanisms of “repression” and “resistance”, he noted, emanate from the “conscious” mind, not from the "unconscious". Freud’s comments clearly place the mechanism of repression not in the “unconscious” but in the selective, analytic, judgmental “conscious” and egoic part of the mind: “what is being mobilized for fighting against the alterations we are striving for are character-traits, attitudes of the ego” (Freud, 1916–1917). It is the ego, and the conscious mind, that is preventing the treatment, the therapy from happening – the ego that mobilises against both the patient and the analyst in order to protect the patient from self-knowledge.
Yet in his abstract formulations, Freud catastrophically represents the ego as an heroic defender of both "reason" and the "reality principle" (and as he got older and more reactionary, as psychoanalyst Don Carveth notes, this tendency only grew more pronounced in his writings).
“The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions” (Freud, 1923b). The ego might indeed represent “reason” but not quite in the way that Freud imagined. Freud’s analysis of the ego was continued by his daughter Anna Freud (The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, 1936) and by Heinz Hartmann (Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation, 1939), amongst others. Hartmann’s ideas were to form the basis of what became known as “Ego Psychology”, one of the major currents of psychoanalytic thought in North America.
For Hartmann, “the stronger the ego is, the more capable it becomes of ‘neutralizing’ libinal energy”: “on the technical level, the Ego Psychology approach focuses above all on the analysis of the patient’s resistances and defences and on reinforcing the conscious ego” (Quinidoz, 2004).
The purpose of all this psychoanalysis was therefore to actually strengthen the Ego. The apparently positive role of the “ego” here proved useful in adapting the individual to existing social conditions or “realities”—to the “reality principle” so beloved of Freud. Of course, if these social conditions and realities are themselves pathological, “successful” adaption to them will be an immensely destructive process. It is notable that Hartmann himself, like Freud, decided to flee Nazi Germany rather than successfully adapt his own ego to the existing social conditions.
Psychoanalysis's radical misunderstanding of, and indeed project of strengthening, of the ego (done, at least in the case of Freud and Hartmann, for largely unconscious political rather than clinical justifications) must surely be considered one of the twentieth century's worst intellectual and therapeutic failings.
As psychoanlyst Erich Fromm similarly observed: “Well-being means, finally, to drop one’s Ego. To give up greed. To cease chasing after the preservation and the aggrandisement of the ego. To be, and to experience oneself, in the act of being - not in having, preserving, coveting, using."
The pathological nature of the ego seems to be rooted in the structure of the left hemisphere, as McGilchrist suggests: “The left hemisphere is much more about grabbing and getting, and about the Ego - whereas the right hemisphere has a much better sense of the Self, which is not the same thing. The Ego is the sort of very much ‘Me against the rest of the world, establishing myself as a power, as a child.’ But when you become a fully mature adult you should have more of a sense of your Self - which is not disjunct from society at large but emerges from society, gets its meaning from society, and gives back to society.
There’s some very interesting work being done by David Hecht at UCL, in which he has illuminated quite how much anti-social, psychopathic behaviour tends to be more driven by the left hemisphere, and more communitarian thinking if you like - more selfless thinking - by the right."
Hecht: "A callous disregard for the rights of others and a propensity for predatory and violent behaviors characterize psychopathy. Without empathy, a sense of responsibility or remorse, psychopaths manipulate, lie and exploit others for their own gain, with no consideration for other people's feelings. Neuroanatomical and functional studies on psychopaths' brains suggest a hypofunctioning RH, and a dominant LH."
Freud: "The intention of psychoanalysis is to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the super-ego, to widen its field of perception and enlarge its organization, so that it can appropriate fresh portions of the id. Where id was, there ego shall be. It is a work of culture – not unlike the draining of the Zuider Zee" (Freud, 1933a).
This project of cultural “conquest” and “appropriation” clearly has problematic aspects, as Adam Phillips points out: "Conquest, of course, has troubling associations with both sexuality and empire, as though psychoanalysis had become imperialism by other means. As though Freud was proposing, as a man of his times, the colonisation of the self or the id – as though 'Where Id was, There Ego shall be' could be an epigraph for Conrad’s Heart of Darkness" (Phillips, 2018).
Marcuse reveals the essentially pathological nature of this entity, rooted in how it sees itself in relation to the world: “It was subject against an object” (i.e., this is how the ego sees and defines itself). “Nature (its own as well as the external world) were ‘given’ to the ego as something that had to be fought, conquered, and even violated – such was the precondition for self-preservation and self-development”.
That is, the idea of “conquering” is built into the ego’s central program, its self-definition. It is perhaps no surprise, therefore, that the ego tends to see the “id” as a similar thing to be colonised and converted, and Marcuse expertly relates this rather “aggressive” character or default attitude of the ego to its view of the “Id”, and its desire to dominate, demonise, and conquer it as well: “The struggle begins with the perpetual internal conquest of the ‘lower’ faculties of the individual: his sensory and appetitive faculties.” Of 'Eros', in fact, in Marcuse’s terms. The conquest of these is, he suggests, the essence and mission of civilised “rationality”: “Their subjugation is, at least since Plato, regarded as a constitutive element of human reason, which is thus in its very function repressive.”
The posh term for this subjugation, he remarks, is “Logos”. Marcus neatly thereby links the colonial project of the rationalising ego not only to the subjugation of external “Nature”, and to the mastering of external populations and colonies, but also to the subjugation and repression of the internal world itself, as something to be equally “fought, conquered, and even violated” – converted into itself.
The problematic nature of the ego was identified by Lacan. In many of its operations, he observed, there is a compulsion for the ego to make “false connections”, such as in the confabulations or “false reasonings” which we have already seen constitute a large part of its method of operating. Indeed, Lacan argues, “the central function of the ego is to misunderstand” (méconnaissance or “misrecognition”).
As McGilchrist similarly notes: “the left hemisphere exhibits a strong tendency to confabulate: it thinks it knows something, recognises something, which it doesn’t”. In this sense “the left hemisphere is the equivalent of the sort of person who, when asked for directions, prefers to make something up rather than admit to not knowing”. As the supposed agent of Freud’s “reality principle”, therefore, the ego is singularly ill-equipped to understand or even to recognise what is real, let alone guide the individual in engaging with reality. “The fact is that this habit is far from harmless: it leads the left hemisphere to make poor inferences and some mistaken choices”.
Indeed, contrary to the inferences that many psychoanalysts drew from Freud’s theory, Lacan maintained that the ego cannot be organised by the reality system “precisely because all its structures are characterised by the effect of misrecognition. In Lacan’s view the ego cannot judge reality, or mediate between reality and desire because it is always marked by error, misrecognition or lack” (Sarup).
As Tolle notes, “the ego itself is pathological” and is based on a profound absence, as well as a profound fear, both of which lie behind its overcompensating drive for power which McGilchrist defines as the basic “will” and character of the left hemisphere. In fact there are not two “identities” within the human individual. There is only self-awareness (delivered by the right hemisphere) and a program or “State” (“Selfhood”) that the individual passes through, and can turn on or off. This left-brain egoic state consists of identifying one’s mind completely with the discursive thought programs themselves. There is no “ego” apart from the thoughts; the thoughts, the identification with thoughts, 'is' ego.
These thoughts, and thought programs, can be immensely useful to the individual, and involve such processes as the ability to focus on specific things, the ability to measure and evaluate its own objects of thoughts, and so on. The mistake is to identify with these programs (thereby endowing them was a false or fake sense of “self”), rather than to use them simply as tools, as programs, to be directed and harnessed by the more imaginative and empathic, as well as more sophisticated and aware, right hemisphere. Reason cannot see that it is only one way of interpreting reality: that it is only one of the tools in the toolbox. (Tweedy, The God of the Left Hemisphere).
It is the right hemisphere, McGilchrist observes, “which is responsible for ‘maintaining a coherent, continuous and unified sense of self”. Self-awareness is not a product of the rationalising left brain, whose motto tends to be that it doesn’t know what it doesn’t know.
“Suffering has a noble purpose,” Tolle observes: “the evolution of consciousness and the burning up of the ego” (Tolle, 2005). It is a pity that humans have to suffer so much at the hands of the ego, but this suffering contains something truly extraordinary: the opening up of the universe itself, within each individual. “If the egoic drama has any purpose at all, it is an indirect one: It creates more and more suffering on the planet, and suffering, although largely ego-created, is in the end also ego-destructive. It is the fire in which the ego burns itself up”.
It is striking in this respect that the “conscious” ego for Freud is the “unconscious” ego in Tolle. McGilchrist also characterises the rational, “conscious” left hemisphere as an insouciant sleepwalker, walking towards the abyss. Only by making the unconscious and compulsive nature of the divided or fallen rational mind truly “conscious” (or perhaps more accurately, by becoming aware of these false and destructive drives of the "conscious ego"), can the individual truly awake.
What is stopping this process, as always, is the “ego”. Freud himself, in his clinical work - if not in his politicised interpretation of it - recognised this. The mechanisms of “repression” and “resistance”, he noted, emanate from the “conscious” mind, not from the "unconscious". Freud’s comments clearly place the mechanism of repression not in the “unconscious” but in the selective, analytic, judgmental “conscious” and egoic part of the mind: “what is being mobilized for fighting against the alterations we are striving for are character-traits, attitudes of the ego” (Freud, 1916–1917). It is the ego, and the conscious mind, that is preventing the treatment, the therapy from happening – the ego that mobilises against both the patient and the analyst in order to protect the patient from self-knowledge.
Yet in his abstract formulations, Freud catastrophically represents the ego as an heroic defender of both "reason" and the "reality principle" (and as he got older and more reactionary, as psychoanalyst Don Carveth notes, this tendency only grew more pronounced in his writings).
“The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions” (Freud, 1923b). The ego might indeed represent “reason” but not quite in the way that Freud imagined. Freud’s analysis of the ego was continued by his daughter Anna Freud (The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, 1936) and by Heinz Hartmann (Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation, 1939), amongst others. Hartmann’s ideas were to form the basis of what became known as “Ego Psychology”, one of the major currents of psychoanalytic thought in North America.
For Hartmann, “the stronger the ego is, the more capable it becomes of ‘neutralizing’ libinal energy”: “on the technical level, the Ego Psychology approach focuses above all on the analysis of the patient’s resistances and defences and on reinforcing the conscious ego” (Quinidoz, 2004).
The purpose of all this psychoanalysis was therefore to actually strengthen the Ego. The apparently positive role of the “ego” here proved useful in adapting the individual to existing social conditions or “realities”—to the “reality principle” so beloved of Freud. Of course, if these social conditions and realities are themselves pathological, “successful” adaption to them will be an immensely destructive process. It is notable that Hartmann himself, like Freud, decided to flee Nazi Germany rather than successfully adapt his own ego to the existing social conditions.
Psychoanalysis's radical misunderstanding of, and indeed project of strengthening, of the ego (done, at least in the case of Freud and Hartmann, for largely unconscious political rather than clinical justifications) must surely be considered one of the twentieth century's worst intellectual and therapeutic failings.