Overview
In philosophical and psychological contexts, “ego” doesn’t have the connotation of a negative byproduct of arrogance or narcissism; instead, it refers to an aspect of our identity that we construct as the “I.” Unconscious or subconscious feelings are generally considered outside of the ego’s scope.
In casual usage, we might say something like “you have such a huge ego, you’re impossible to talk to” when we mean that someone is fixated only on their own goals and desires without compromise or trust in others. We might also say “you have a healthy ego” when we mean that someone has an appropriate amount of self-esteem and self-awareness.
History and Etymology
In Ancient Greek and Latin, “ego” was synonymous with “I”. For instance, “ego cogito, ergo sum” is Latin for “I think, therefore I am,” which was coined by Rene Descartes. Rather than an “ego” located inside one’s self or mind, writers and philosophers discussed concepts like anima as a soul or intellectus as intellectual capacity. As Enlightenment thinkers began to discuss rationality and knowledge within oneself, which led to questions about what the “ego” really referred to. Immanuel Kant split the concept of the ego into the empirical ego, or the observable aspects of our personality and memories, and the transcendental ego, or the underlying consciousness that organizes sensory data into experiences that we observe.
Arthur Schopenhauer was among the first Western philosophers to pioneer a reconciliation between the Upanishads and ideas about the ego through maya, which gets roughly translated as “illusion” in a deceptive sense, though I would argue it’s closer to something like “constructed perception” in the way that a statue is constructed out of a marble slab without the statue being either “true” or “false” in a conventional sense. William James
Sigmund Freud is perhaps associated with the most well-known definition proposed about ego, though Freud himself wrote in German when discussing the id (“das Es”), ego (“dash Ich”), and superego (“das Uber-ich”). In a literal translation, they would mean “the it”, “the I”, and “the Over-I”, which is understandably clunky in English, so James Strachey translated Freud’s terms into id, ego, and superego.
William James, with his strong interest in Buddhist psychology and pluralistic systems, proposed a split in the self between a worldly “me” and an “I” of pure awareness that observes the “me.”
Carl Jung was heavily influenced by Eastern traditions from Tibetan belief systems, Buddhism, and Hinduism.
Post-structuralist philosophers like Michel Foucault argued that the ego is not objective or physiological fact, but a socially-constructed tool that allows institutions to reduce humans to a manageable model.