Spot of Wilber, anyone?
Righty, this is a good one and it's going up. I've been reading Ken Wilber's 'Sex, Ecology, Spirituality' and it's making rather more sense than a year or so ago when I first attempted it. He is building a flexible theoretical approach with the intention that it be flexible enough to use in any domain of theory, to find what common ground there might be between any and all attempts to understand everything so far. Discussions, anyone? The passage which got me this morning is:
"Ego is simply Latin for "I". Freud, for example, never used the term ego; he used the German pronoun das Ich, or "the I," which Strachey unfortunately translated as the "ego." And contrasted to "the I" was what Freud called the Es, which is German for "it," and which, also unfortunately, was translated as the "id" (Latin for "it"), a term Freud never used. Thus Freud's great book The Ego and the Id was really called "The I and the It." Freud's point was that people have a sense of I-ness or selfness, but sometimes part of their own self appears foreign, alien, separate from them - appears, that is, as an "it" (we say, "The anxiety, it makes me uncomfortable," or "The desire to eat, it's stronger than me!" and so forth, thus relinquishing responsibility for our own states). When parts of the I are split off or repressed, they appear as symptoms or "its" over which we have no control.
Freud's basic aim in therapy was therefore to reunite the I and the it and thus heal the split between them. His most famous statement of the goal of therapy - "Where id was, there ego shall be" - actually reads, "Where it was, there I shall be." Whether one is Freudian or not, this is still the most accurate and succinct summary of all forms of uncovering psychotherapy, and it simply points to an expansion of ego, an expansion of I-ness, into a higher and wider identity that integrates previously alienated processes."
"Ego is simply Latin for "I". Freud, for example, never used the term ego; he used the German pronoun das Ich, or "the I," which Strachey unfortunately translated as the "ego." And contrasted to "the I" was what Freud called the Es, which is German for "it," and which, also unfortunately, was translated as the "id" (Latin for "it"), a term Freud never used. Thus Freud's great book The Ego and the Id was really called "The I and the It." Freud's point was that people have a sense of I-ness or selfness, but sometimes part of their own self appears foreign, alien, separate from them - appears, that is, as an "it" (we say, "The anxiety, it makes me uncomfortable," or "The desire to eat, it's stronger than me!" and so forth, thus relinquishing responsibility for our own states). When parts of the I are split off or repressed, they appear as symptoms or "its" over which we have no control.
Freud's basic aim in therapy was therefore to reunite the I and the it and thus heal the split between them. His most famous statement of the goal of therapy - "Where id was, there ego shall be" - actually reads, "Where it was, there I shall be." Whether one is Freudian or not, this is still the most accurate and succinct summary of all forms of uncovering psychotherapy, and it simply points to an expansion of ego, an expansion of I-ness, into a higher and wider identity that integrates previously alienated processes."