Ego State Explained

What is an Ego State

(I do not claim that the contents are consistent with popular TA Literature)

Eric Berne writes in an unpublished article titled 'the Ego' that when the (freudian) ego is affected the mind is affected. When the brain is affected the body is affected. Freud writes in an essay titled the 'the ego and the id' that the ego is a bodily ego. Berne writes to say that the earliest experience of a person is in infancy. The infant takes one of two positions. They are that of an 'anvil' or a 'hammer'. The experiential position taken by the infant decides the existential life position.  

What then is an ego state? Ego state is the memory of an impacting, lingering (over a few days), difficult to forget experience. These memories can be experienced by a person with meaning, understanding and experience as establised in the research of Wilder Penfield > Findings of Wilder Penfield. They structure one's view of self, other / s and of the quality of life and endowments one is entitled to enjoy. They are not accessible by revisiting. Why? Because they are stored in the deep unconscious. As yet they structure our perception, evaluation and assessment of reality in a way unique to us when we get taken over by script. They structure the attitude (pravrutti) toward ourselves - toward significant others* - toward our quality of life entitlements (core concept) and as a consequence our stubbornly protected view of ourselves, of others and about reality generally. They manifest as patterns of thinking and feeling relevant to a presenting reality situation and the role actors who are involved in the situation.

~~~~~

This is for those interested in reading Freud's article Ego and the Id (courtesy Wikipedia) 

Mapping the new framework: "The Ego and the Id"[edit]

Before defining the ego explicitly, Freud argues for a manner in which unconscious thoughts can be made conscious. He believes the answer lies in the difference between unconscious thoughts and preconscious thoughts: The unconscious are "worked out upon some sort of material that remains unrecognized" (21), while the preconscious are connected to perceptions, especially "verbal images". The difference, then, is a connection to words (more specifically, to the "memory residue" of words.) The goal of psychoanalysis, then, is to connect the freely floating unconscious material to words via psychoanalytic dialogue.

He goes on to note that the ego is essentially a system of perception, so it must be closely related to the preconscious (27). Thus, two primary components of ego are a system of perception and a set of unconscious (specifically, preconscious) ideas. Its relationship to the unconscious id (German: Es),^[1] therefore, is a close one. The ego merges into the id (28). He compares the dynamic to that of a rider and a horse. The ego must control the id, like the rider, but at times, the rider is obliged to guide the horse where it wants to go. Likewise, the ego must, at times, conform to the desires of the id. Finally, the ego is a "modified portion" of the id that can perceive the empirical world (29). It is this idea of perception that leads Freud to call the ego a "body-ego" (31)—a mental projection of the surface of one's physical body.

The blogger, Ajit Karve can be reached at:

+91 9822024037 on WhatsApp - Please identify yourself. or by email at taforyouandme@gmail.com

Ajit Karve works out of Pune

He is a Psychotherapy Practitioner

a BTA in TA from ICTA Kochi