Forget the Western propaganda; your ego is a necessity.
Freud is responsible for making the term popular in psychology, but his theories were crap, built entirely on his work with wacko patients. You can’t build a normative psychology that way. You have to start with revelation because the true moral nature of the universe is invisible to mere human perception and reason. Freud was hostile to faith.
In human development we rightly talk about the development of the ego, the sense of who you are as separate from your environment. Without that distinction, the whole universe in hungry when you are hungry. You cry and scream and rage at anything that makes you uncomfortable until you realize the world is not an extension of your appetites. You have to understand when others tell you “no.” You cannot truly love and care for others if you don’t think of them as others. You cannot be human without an ego.
Your ego is your sense of self. It encompasses all the things you control, not in the sense of totality, but in the sense that you know how to handle it. The more realistic your assumptions about what does and does not work for you, the more substantial your ego. Having a large ego is no problem; it is necessary to do good for others. What causes problems is when your ego is fragile against reality. A sturdy ego has been tested and knows the limits so far. An inflated ego is not from thinking too highly of yourself, but it comes from not doing the work you know you were called to do. A large ego arises from your inner nature. The need is getting off your butt and accomplishing enough to make that ego solid. You know you were meant to do it.
The compulsion to destroy or diminish the ego of another is not justice. It comes from hatred, most often a reflection of your own failures. “I can’t do that, so he shouldn’t be allowed to claim he can.” The impulse comes from your own inflated false ego. The impulse to help someone else realize what their ego should be is called empathy. You want to recover something broken because you sense it should not be this way, that they should be able to show themselves and the world they can do something worthy of a sense of pride and self control. You recognize the need of another large and sturdy ego to work alongside you in this ugly world.
The current popular notion that ego is somehow evil is a feminist lie. In our Western world it’s your smother slapping you down once again, in that backhanded way of, “Oh, you poor baby.” Or it’s your brutish immature father laughing at your pain because it inflates his own ego. Those images are peculiar to the West, not at all a part of the Biblical culture. God’s Word promotes a sense of necessity in doing things because it’s what your ego demands, not because you are so wonderful and mighty. Your sense of calling is the source of your ego; it comes from God.
We get a false sense of euphoria from the collapse of the ego boundaries. It’s called “cathexis” — the sense of owning or conquering something that isn’t essential to your ego. You feel rather like the boundaries have collapsed and your ego has swallowed the whole universe. You are ready to crow about something you really didn’t do. That’s a false, inflated ego. The real thing recognizes it’s good to grab just a little bit more turf in your world, something you understand on your own terms. It has nothing to do with whether you have impressed anyone else. However, others can offer gifts of support in helping you recognize an accomplishment, a justified enlargement of the ego.
Build a big ego, but make it sturdy.
