Where does ego collide?

The reality-oriented agency in Freud's model of the mind that mediates among the instinctual drives (the id), the internalized moral demands (the superego), and the outside world. In his 1923 The Ego and the Id, Freud described the ego (das Ich, "the I") as the part organized around perception and reason that tries to satisfy the drives in safe, workable ways. The referent is a theorized part of a person's mental apparatus, defined by its job of balancing competing pressures, and not the philosopher's experiencing "I", a measured stage of maturity, or the everyday idea of a swollen head.[1]

Unit

A structural part of the mind, defined by its mediating function

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Inferred clinically from defenses, conflicts, and behavior in psychoanalytic treatment rather than scored on a scale

The "I" understood as the subject that has experiences: the self as the standpoint to which all seeing, thinking, and feeling belong. In his 1931 Cartesian Meditations, Husserl called this the transcendental ego, the pure experiencing self that remains when one sets aside assumptions about the world, extending Descartes's thinking "I". The referent is the bearer of a point of view examined by philosophers, and not a working part of the mind in Freud's model, a graded level of maturity, or a byword for conceit.[2]

Unit

The experiencing subject, the "I" to which experiences belong

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Not measured but described through disciplined reflection on the structure of first-person experience

A measured dimension of personality describing how complex and self-aware a person's overall frame for making meaning has become, laid out as an ordered series of stages from impulsive toward more autonomous and integrated. Loevinger's 1966 The meaning and measurement of ego development defined this master trait and tied it to a sentence-completion test that scores a person's stage. The referent is an empirically scored level of maturity, deliberately kept apart from Freud's ego as a part of the mind, from the philosopher's experiencing "I", and from everyday talk of a large ego.[3]

Unit

A person's stage on an ordered scale of meaning-making maturity

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Scored from written responses to the Washington University Sentence Completion Test

The self viewed as an executive resource for self-control: the capacity that lets a person override impulses, make choices, and regulate behavior, treated as a limited fuel that can be used up. Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven, and Tice's 1998 Ego depletion: Is the active self a limited resource? reported that exerting self-control on one task left people worse at a later unrelated one, a pattern they named ego depletion. Although the name echoes Freud's energy metaphor, the referent is a measured drop in self-control performance, and not a part of the mind, a philosopher's "I", or a stage of maturity.[4]

Unit

The active self's self-control capacity, treated as a depletable resource

Recovery means

Rest and positive mood have been reported to restore self-control performance

Measured by

Operationalized as reduced performance on a self-control task after a prior act of self-control