Ego
Category: Psychology
The Mediator Caught Between the Id and the Superego
The ego is, in Freud's structural model of the mind, the function that stands between the id (instinctual desires) and the superego (moral norms) and works out an arrangement with the outside world. While the id shouts "I want it now" and the superego says "that isn't allowed," the ego decides how both can realistically be satisfied to some degree. You feel hunger (the id's demand), you don't start eating in the middle of a meeting (the superego's restraint), and you wait for the break (the ego's mediation). Freud described the ego as something that isn't there from the start: it takes shape as part of the id is modified through contact with the external world. In everyday speech, having a strong ego means being self-centered, but as a psychoanalytic term ego strength means close to the opposite, the capacity to face reality without being swept along by impulse. Mixing the two senses makes everything below read backwards.
How Much of the Ego Is Still Working Inside a Dream
While you're awake the ego works as the command center of the mind, but during sleep its control drops sharply. Psychoanalytic writers explain the illogic and strangeness of dreams by this loosening of control: you fly through the air and nothing about it strikes you as odd, time runs out of order and it doesn't bother you, because the function that tests things against reality is off duty. That isn't the only settled account of why dreams turn strange, but as a frame for reading them it works well. The control doesn't vanish completely either. A lucid dream, where you notice inside the dream that it is a dream, is described as a state in which part of that function switched back on while you slept. When you read a dream, it's worth noticing how much of it you decided yourself. Whether you moved as you were told to or chose your own moves is a clue you can set beside how your waking days have been going.
Jung's Ego and Freud's Ego - the Same Word in Different Places
What deserves attention is that Freud and Jung place the ego differently. For Freud the ego is the center of the mind and the agent of final integration. Jung, by contrast, treated it as no more than the center of consciousness and posited above it the Self, a center of the psyche as a whole. In Jungian psychology, a state in which the ego is identified with the Self is considered immature, and recognizing that the ego is one part of the Self (relativizing the ego) is treated as a key step in individuation. An experience of being guided in a dream by something larger than yourself is read, within that frame, as the Self acting on the ego. The same word covers a different range depending on which frame the discussion belongs to. When two psychology books seem not to be talking about the same thing, checking which usage each one follows removes most of the confusion.
Cautions When Trying to Read Ego Strength Off Your Dreams
Out of the psychoanalytic tradition came the phrase "ego strength," used as a rough measure of the capacity to meet reality without being carried off by impulse. What counts as strong is being able to handle stress flexibly, hold back an impulse, and take in reality accurately. Carried over to dreams, the idea suggests that how much you were able to act for yourself inside the dream gives you a rough sense of where you stand. When you're carrying extreme stress, when your mood has dropped, in the stretch right after something painful, dreams keep returning in which you stand frozen and can do nothing. When things are settled, scenes appear in which you take hold of the problem or get away from it cleanly. This is a prompt for looking back at yourself, though, not a test that measures mental health. Noting "could I act for myself this time?" in a dream journal will show you changes across periods, but no diagnosis or severity can be read out of it. If nightmares keep coming until you dread going to bed, or your daytime life is suffering for it, and that continues for weeks, set dream interpretation aside and talk to a clinic that handles sleep or mental health.
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