If the ego is a relationship

Don't try to abolish the ego // Eat biscuits // Work out your kinks // Know your history.
(I warn you, it's long, and it gets a bit weird).

Here's how I find it useful to imagine the Ego. Think of the ego as a relationship, or a method of negotiation, between two concepts:

1. What is sometimes called the 'id', which I think of as my spontaneous desires, my needs. Say, a desire for biscuits, or sex.

2. What is sometimes called the 'superego', which I think of as a mapping of the rules of the outside world. Everyone else's expressed desires, my society's rules and how it seems to behave. We learn about the world through living. Sometimes the world helps me meet my needs, and sometimes it hinders me. I've learned, through all these experiences, that there are certain rules I need to follow for the world to give me what I want. In other words I've made a model or image or psychic understanding of my parents, my peer group, my community, the media, the law etc.

So then I understand 'Ego' as the relationship or discussion between these two concepts. I have a desire, and I imagine what the super ego model thinks of the desire. Then I try and test various methods to convince the 'world' as I map it to let me have what I want. That creates the stream of arguments that I hear in my head discussing a subject: the turning things over through the lens of the principles I've discovered existing in the wider world.
I've probably also learned that those rules are different at different times, in front of different authority figures and in different situations. Sometimes I can break the rule, if I can give the right argument to the right authority figure for why the rule doesn't apply to me.

Say a desire comes up in me, for chocolate, or sex. I might know that society disapproves of my biscuit eating habit. I might know that the person I want to have sex with is in a monogamous relationship with someone else. My 'egoic' mind will rationalise the situation in order that I can get what I want. I think about a time that Dominic Cummings ate lots of biscuits and I try to argue that I also should get to. I convince myself that if Dominic Cumming's partner doesn't know that we're shagging, then I am not hurting anyone. This is the ego. The rationalisation that you present to your Superego in order that the Id is 'justified' in getting what it wants.

But wait, there's more.

What do you desire and how do you know? It's easy to fetishise - to project the meeting of one need into a different (indirect) solution. Often in my life I have gone looking for chocolate, or sex, when the thing I was really looking for was intimacy, connection, touch, companionship, or something else. It's hard to know what you want sometimes, and life has taught me that going straight for the thing I want often doesn't work, and plenty of things I have to get them indirectly. Eating a biscuit makes me feel less lonely. Having sex with people makes me feel less lonely. Shouting at Dominic Cummings on the TV makes me feel less lonely.

Until the biscuits are gone. Until my bed's empty. Until Dominic Cummings sets a press release and says he never said he loves me.

And in the same vain - how do I know that my superego maps onto reality? How do I know what others think? And do I agree? Maybe I can convince my superegoic constructs that I should be allowed to lick melted chocolate off of Dominic Cummings' nipple during lockdown, but what if I feel guilt that it's actually not the right thing to do? Maybe I do think it's the right thing to do, but I know that others will disapprove, and then I'll feel shame. Do I really want my face on the front of the tabloids, with my chocolate-Tory-nipple-licking kink exposed for the world to see? Do I want that embarassment? Why am I going on about all this?

Above the Temple to Apollo in Delphi it says "Know thyself". I think it's important advice, because the only way you can be in control of your life, and harness your desires and live in the world, and change society, is to know yourself. It's much better and more effective than any attempts to "abolish the ego". You can't abolish the ego because it's constantly produced, because it's a relationship. And why would you want to anyway?

Usually people talk about the ego as a metaphor for putting your needs in front of everyone else's. But first of all, everyone does this to some extent or other, and it's necessary for survival. And second of all, we don't like it when people are self-sacrificing either. We call them holier-than-thou, goody-two-shoes, a people pleaser, a martyr. We don't like their motives because they don't seem real, and so we don't know if they're lying. We don't trust these people because we don't know if they're saying something because it's true for them or if they're telling us what they think we want to hear - like Dominic Cummings. We don't want a mirror, we want genuine human connection. We don't want heroes on pedestals, like Dominic Cummings, we want humans that we can relate to. So never pretend to abolish your ego. You'll fail, and you'll look a Dominic Cummings while doing it.

None the less, let's say you do want to abolish your ego. You can, sort of, do it. The way to do it is to get to know yourself. Here's why.

If your ego is a rationalising agent, an expression of the devil's advocate in all of us, pleading with our superegoic god/parents that we should be allowed one more nibble of Dominic Cummings sweet sweet chocolate love, then the only way to understand what the ego is up to is to clearly understand the following:

What do we want?
Do we want it?
Why do we want it?
What do we think others think of this?
Do we care what others think? etc.

Knowing ourselves means knowing our personal and social history. If we know the context we grew up in, the way we were raised, our life experiences, then our desires and fetishes make more sense.

I desire chocolate because in the second millenium AD the church and aristocracy and some enterprising psychopathic merchants of Europe realised that the peasant and working classes could be prevented from rebelling by using divide-and-rule to break up communities and a constant supply of sugar and religious mind control to distract them from this fact. All it would cost would be the genocide and enslavement of three continents, ripping people from the land and the destruction of communal society, the total subjugation of women, and a thousand years of totalitarian religious hypnosis in order that you might believe that there is such a thing as sin, and it's the only thing that still feels good after you realise how much slaughter was necessary for you to have an eclair.

And so, when my caregivers and teachers were too stressed to give me love as a child because they still had to partake in the bloodsoaked treadmill of wage slavery under late capitalism, they fed me sugar to soothe me and got me hooked. Additionally, I crave sex as an answer to my alienation because our moral mores both prohibit and hold it up as the ultimate act of love. I feel guilty and lonely and sinful, so of course then I need redemption, so now I project a superior who is able to absolve me from my sins. And I shall know them by their higher status in society and the fact that the rules don't apply to them. Hence, why I want to suck melted chocolate from Cummings' nipples. And so does everyone else.*

If I learn my history, I learn why I desire the things I do. If I learn my social history I understand why I map society as I do, I understand my fetishes now, so I understand why I make the decisions I make in my life, This explains my id and my superego conception, and their relationship. Now here comes the magic.

Once I have it clearly laid out in front of me I can now, for the first time, make a choice. Once I know what need and what solution have gone together, I can think: is chocolate giving me what I need? Is sex actually the answer to my loneliness? Do I agree with the construct of this authority figure? Do I, in short, believe in the society which so conditioned me? Is his grace, the Chocolate Second Cumming, really going to save me from myself?

If the answer to any of these is no, then I can decide to change, and I can work out how I need to change.** Now knowing my own history, I can say: It is the inherent nature of this competitive market society, with all its monstrous history, which both alienates me and makes me crave false solutions to this alienation. It creates the fear of snakes and then sells me the snake oil.

I can now consciously reject this society and its superego. I can choose to begin to build my superego on a different model. In a cooperative society, I have company, I don't terrorise the world to bring me chocolate, and Cummings is not my superior.*** I neither have need for, crave the solution of, nor gain satisfaction from his sugar-sweetened erogenous zones.
In short, by learning my history, I resolve the conflict between my id and superego, and they can start to work together.**

Know thyself. Do so by realising your position in history and society. Do so by being kind to yourself so that you can lay your own motivations bare to yourself. Then, realise that your fetishes come from the fucked up society you were raised in and the compromises you had to make to navigate the false situations you were born into which this society created.
Know thyself, so you can free yourself from guilt and sin.

Know thyself, become a revolutionary, be kind to yourself, execute the ruling classes.
Then we can build a society where we will live cooperatively and not competitively, have real human connection and sparingly eat occasional biscuits on the rubble of Capitalism and Dominic Cummings' career.

*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2W7P3wGBI8
**actually knowing yourself and then integrating the changes you wish to make may be more difficult than presented in this essay.
***His position as superior is why everyone is getting so worked up about Cummings' hypocrisy. As a leader he's meant to be absolving our sins, and yet here he is, found in the metaphorical hotel room of cocaine and nazi dominatrixes. It's a fun 'gotcha!' but it's meaningless if you don't actually consider him a superior. I care about his systemic murder, not his joyriding.

In the Garden of Eden (Part 2: Post hoc)

Later that same Summer, at a different festival in England, I'm sober and talking to a woman. She's a psychotherapist, dancer, joyful, and hella cool. She's been working with eXtinction Rebellion and we're discussing grief and hope in the context of climate apocalypse. I start telling her about how my summer has been pretty heavy, about my psychotic encounter with God, of having to choose between heaven and hell - you know, just pleasant get-to-know-you chit chat - and she meets my gaze and smiles in sympathy. I feel this incredible compassion from her. I feel her total, undivided attention like I can't remember knowing in my life.

Suddenly I feel that she is the most incredible soul I've ever met. I have this overwhelming sense of knowing her, somehow, intuitively, intimately. I feel that I've known her in a past life, and she me. I feel like she knows me, in and out, naked, unfiltered, raw. I see myself in the moonlit reflection of the heart-shaped wells she probably calls her eyes that I am now floating in, lost, giddy, with a barely liminal awareness of my brain unzipping itself and folding like a tesseract around the knowledge that this creature of light and beauty exists in the universe and I must know her.

Then the sirens erupted.

I'm not talking about a heavenly fanfare. I'm not saying I heard an angelic chorus strumming my soul like a lyre as cupid's arrows pierced my mana. No, I'm saying I heard an alarm, the woooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaauuuuuuuuuu sound of claxons going off, like an air-raid warning. I'm saying I heard the psychic equivalent of "Get to cover!" and thought:

...something's up.

It almost passes me by. I almost ignore it. I mean, here I am, in one of those infinitesimally few love-as-thunderstrike moments and some piece of me, some barely cognicised instinct on the limits of my consciousness has just rung a bell like my soul is an escaped convict and the prison is reality. Reality better wake the fuck up and get its shoes on before I get away from it entirely.

And I still almost ignore it! But...

...but I'd felt this feeling before,
only a few months ago,
in a festival in Northern Europe, beneath the sun, languid and glorious, when someone had slipped me an energy ball. It was just at the moment when I was waiting for my friend to come back with the Tacos.

In that moment too, I knew something was wrong. But until this later instant I hadn't paid attention to how I had known that something was wrong. It was only the second time, when I had exactly the same experience that I suddenly remembered:

I had been waiting for my friend to come back with the food, and I had looked up at the rigging of a nearby stage, and suddenly seen myself climbing up it in my mind's eye. And a sense of danger, of alarm, had ripped through me, and I had thought I heard sirens go off as the universe tore in half. I said to my friend that I felt out of control, that I felt like I might riot, and asked her to take me back to the tents. And then I started to choke...

Notes on Jung: Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

Very much notes in progress.

Jung differentiates between the personal unconscious and collective unconscious.

The Personal Unconscious: formed of forgotten or repressed memories of experiences the person has had.

The Collective Unconscious: a universal portion of the unconscious that is not derived from personal experiences but "has contents and modes of behaviour that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals" (pp4).

The unconscious can only be studied in as much as it can be brought to consciousness or demonstrated by its (maybe reflexive) effects on the consciousness, just as one can define a hole in the darkness only by feeling around its edges. The contents of the collective unconsciousness which impact the conscious psyche are called Archetypes.

Archetypes appear to be archaic or primordial. Esoteric teachings, folk lore, myth and traditions are typical means of expression of collective archetypes. But having been stamped with cultural meaning, they are no longer the archetypes themselves. When we encounter the archetypes in individual psychic, psychotic and dream experiences their meaning is much less elaborated than in the legend or esoteric tradition. For this reason we should be wary of applying what we have learned from one person's dream symbolism to another, and individual signs and symbols should only be considered in comparison to the individual's idiosyncratic catalogue of signs and symbols. As such, archetypes, when brought into consciousness, are always changed by the individual's consciousness.*

Jung says that "myths are first and foremost psychic phenomena that reveal the nature of the soul"... "all the mythologized processes of nature, such as summer and winter, the phases of the moon, the rainy seasons, and so forth, are in no sense allegories** of these occurences; rather they are symbolic expressions of the inner, unconscious drama of the psyche which becomes accessible to man's consciousness by way of projection - that is, mirrored in the events of nature." pp 6

Jung deviates at this point into a three paragraph smack down on Astrology ending with the quote "The stars of thine own fate lie in thy breast." pp 7. He also unwittingly explains (an aspect of) cultural appropriation. He claims that religious iconography is a highly developed and authoritarian depiction of primitive symbols, which are far more meaningful and comprehensive than personal experiences thereof. They in fact stand in for direct experiences of the divine, and to some degree prevent them. We are too familiar with them, so their symbolism holds no power over us. As such he claims that we look to external symbolism precisely because it is unknown, exotic, and therefore more interpretable, projectable. Dogmatic symbols can have a strong effect on those experiencing direct visions however, and cause the person to interpret them through the lens of dogma, even if initially very counter to the usual dogmatic interpretation. Jung seems to feel that this is a positive aspect of them. "Dogma takes the place of the collective unconscious by formulating its contents on a grand scale... Mankind has never lacked powerful images to lend magical aid against all the uncanny things that live in the depths of the psyche. Always the figures of the unconscious were expressed in protecting and healing images and in this way expelled from the psyche into cosmic space." pp 12. Jung claims that "the alarming poverty of symbols that is now the condition of our life came about" due to the collapse of the Catholic church in the face of Protestant reformations, which then carries on through the splintering of the Protestant church into hundreds of denominations, leading to the then search for cultural symbols of other places. He recommends that instead of looking for foreign symbols we should, as it were, 'own' our spiritual poverty.

Pp16-17 are a two page metaphoric abstract poem that I don't know how to interpret. The soul goes down to the water and the spirit is an angel that is the wind, approximately. It seems that he's saying that having found ourselves at a spiritual nadir, we should not look for a new rising 'up' but continue downwards in our own descent to Hades. Or something.

18. "Water is the commonest symbol for the unconscious.. The lake in the valley is the unconscious, which lies, as it were, underneath consciousness, so that it is often referred to as the "subconscious," usually with the pejorative connotation of an inferior consciousness. Water is the "valley spirit," the water dragon of Tao, whose nature resembles water - a yang embraced in the yin. Psychologically, therefore, water means spirit that has become unconscious... the descent in the depths always seems to precede the ascent."

19. "The unconscious is the psyche that reaches down from the daylight of mentally and morally lucid consciousness into the nervous system that for ages has been known as the "sympathetic". This does not govern perception and muscular activity like the cerebrospinal system, and thus control the environment; but, though functioning without sense-organs, it maintains the balance of life and, through the mysterious paths of sympathetic excitation, not only gives us knowledge of the innermost life of other being but also has an inner effect upon them..."





[Freud called the 'instinctual psyche the "id", and "super-ego" denotes the collective consciousness, of which the individual is partly conscious and partly unconscious (because it is repressed)']

*There is the archetype and the archetypal idea. Archetypes are hypothetical, Jung says "something like the "pattern of behaviour" in biology."

**Allegory = "paraphrase of a conscious content, whereas a symbol is the best possible expression for an unconscious content whose nature can only be guessed, because it is still unknown".