All 4 Uses of
ego
in
Girl Interrupted
- See, the station wagon is the ego, sturdy and reliable, and the sedan is the superego, because it's how you want to present yourself, powerful and impressive, and the sports car is the id—it's the id because it's irrepressible and fast and dangerous and maybe a little forbidden.†
- Earlier in the day, the doctor had a map divided into superego, ego, and id, with all kinds of squiggly, perhaps broken, lines running among those three areas.†
- If the biochemists were able to demonstrate the physical workings of neuroses (phobias, or difficulties getting pleasure from life), if they could pinpoint the chemicals and impulses and interbrain conversations and information exchanges that constitute these feelings, would the psychoanalysts pack up their ids and egos and retire from the field?†
- The degree of personality integration and ego function which may be achieved for the long term is hard to predict.†
*
Definition:
-
(ego Freud's definition) psychoanalysis: the personality structure that mediates between the primitive, instinctual desires of the id and the moral conscience of the superego
more rarely, ego can refer to the conscious mind (since in Freud's theory, a person is partially aware of the mental activity of the ego, but not of the id and superego)