Eros is not pride. Ego is not vanity. Ego is not hotness. Ego is not arrogance.

Do not listen to self-styled online gurus who have no idea what they are talking about. Ego is a construct postulated by Sigmund Freud as part of his model of the psyche.

The main role of the ego is to interface with reality and prevent us from doing crazy, id-driven things.

But the ego has many other functions, among them impulse control, regulation and many others.

Today’s compilation, starting with this new video, will review all the functions of the ego.

I’m going to start with the most important function by far, reality testing.

My name is Sam Vaknin. I’m the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited. I’m a former visiting professor of psychology, currently on the faculty of CIAPS, Commonwealth for International Advanced Professional Studies, Cambridge United Kingdom, Toronto Canada and what else, Lagos, Nigeria.

Okay, egos and ego-ets. We are going to discuss today the minefield of the ego. It is a minefield for a variety of reasons that I’m going to review.

I’m also going to point out serious mistakes in the literature, including scholarly literature, or maybe especially scholarly literature, starting with the earliest writings.

I’m going to try to put the very concept of ego and the functions of the ego on more firm footing, at least when it comes to rigor and philosophical internal and external consistency.

Before we go there, I owe some of your response.

In several of my videos, I mentioned that the impact of incest on children is mediated via society. In other words, the child is also affected by society’s reaction to the incest.

Part of the trauma of the incest is actually socially induced in the child.

People ask me, “What do you base yourself on, Mr. Vaknin?”

Well, I’m referring to work by Boris Sirolnik, CYRULNIK. He did some work on resilience in children and he based a lot of his writing on much earlier work by Donald Winnicott, a pediatrician turned psychoanalyst.

Donald Winnicott wrote a very famous paper on hate and countertransference.

Within this paper, he made some very controversial statements about abused children.

Actually, I have a video here dedicated to this paper and it’s about how abused children love and like to be hated.

But apart from that, there was a lot of discussion about incest in Sirolnik’s work and so on and so forth and I refer you to these studies.

Okay, that’s not the topic of today’s video.

There are two ways that the ego can malfunction and when the ego malfunctions, you lose all sense of reality. You live inside your head. You revert from externality or externalizing to internality or internalizing.

This is a subversion, a malignancy of a healthy process known as internalization identification, introjection and incorporation.

The process first described by Melanie Klein, later expounded upon by many others, Anna Freud and many others.

So when the ego goes awry, something happens in the human mind, which I’m going to discuss at length in today’s lecture.

But why would the ego malfunction? What is the source of this breakdown, meltdown of the ego?

Well, there are two.

Number one, when there is a disruption in the formation of the ego or much later, the integration of the ego or the constellation of the ego, depending which school of psychology you belong to.

When there is a disruption, in short, in the normal process of becoming a person, of developing a self, if you want to use this metaphor, self states, if you want to use Bromberg’s and my metaphor, doesn’t matter. The metaphor doesn’t matter.

And the process of becoming you.

When there is a disruption in this process, the ego malfunctions.

This is one type of malfunction.

The other type of malfunction is when there is a misallocation of energy.

Freud postulated the existence of emotional energy, later named kafexis, a term that Freud detested and heated, by the way.

So Freud said that all of us have libido. It’s a life force. Part of it is Eros, which is the sex drive.

But libido is not limited to sex at all. When it is sublimated, it leads to many other activities.

Generally, it’s a life force.

So Freud said that we invest libido. We invest libido in objects. We invest libido in people. We invest libido in activities.

And this is called libidinal investment or kafexis.

Now, we can invest our libido, our elanvital, our life force. We can invest it in external objects. And we can invest it in internal objects, something known as narcissistic kafexis.

But what happens when we are unable to tell the difference between external and internal objects for some reason?

Then the whole libidinal investment economy goes crazy, goes haywire.

And the libido, this energy, is misallocated. It’s very important to understand any libidinal investment, any kafexis, even in external objects, leads to divorce from reality.

The minute your emotions get involved, coupled with your cognitions, of course, but mainly your emotions, that minute you’re no longer in reality.

Freud himself suggested that when we libidinally kafex, when we emotionally invest in an external object, something also known as love, we lose sight of the true traits, qualities and features of that external object.

We love blinds us. Love blinds us literally. We no longer see the object, the external object, as she is. We see only positive elements.

We idealize the object.

This leads to object perfection.

And of course, when you love someone and they become totally idealized, then you would have only positive effects.

Freud himself, therefore, suggested, was the first to suggest, that love or any emotional investment in an external object, recognizing, even recognizing the externality and separateness of the external object, even then, leads to a partial divorce from reality, partial detachment from the object as it is.

Let alone, when the emotional investment is directed inwards, not at external objects, but at internal objects, something known, for example, as megalomania, the precursor to narcissism, paranoia, schizophrenia, much later in the 70s, borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder.

In all these cases, the emotional investment is directed inwards, not at an external object, but at internal objects, different types of internal objects in each case.

When our libidinal investment, when our energy is directed at an object, external or internal, we no longer perceive reality as it is. It impairs our reality testing. We regress. It involves regression because the perception of the world is made of discrete objects, is an adult realistic perception, reality principle, reality-based, evidence-based perception.

But the perception of the world is objects with which we are fused and merged and enmeshed. That’s an infantile perception. That is how a newborn would perceive reality. That’s how a toddler would perceive reality prior to age 36 months, according to Mahler, Margaret Mahler.

So, whenever we direct our emotional investment, our libido, whenever we affect an object, we idealize that object, we become, in effect, one with that object.

This is love. This is love in the case of an external object. It’s narcissistic investment in the case of an internal object.

This leads to infantile regression founded on magical thinking, the omnipotence of thoughts and the magical power of words.

We become infants.

This is the impossible task of the ego.

If I had to summarize the ego’s functions, all of them, in one phrase, it is to fight off regression, to avoid regression.

Regression is very easy. It’s very soothing. It’s very comforting.

We all want to be babies again, to be taken care of, to be held, to be contained, to be loved unconditionally. This is the narcissist power.

He offers this to you as his intimate partner or friend. So, we all want this.

And it is the role of the ego to serve as a gatekeeper, to stand in the way of such regression.

One could therefore say something very surprising. The main role of the ego is to prevent emotional cathexes.

Now, I know this is, especially to those of you who are initiated in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic schools and so on, I know this is mind spinning. It’s difficult to wrap your mind around, but just bear with me for a minute because everything I’m saying is based on the writings of the giants in the field, as I’m going to delve into a bit later.

Every emotional investment in an external object or in an internal object leads to divorce from reality. That’s not Vaknin. That’s Freud.

The ego’s role is to provide you with reality testing, with a realistic assessment of the environment.

But how can the ego do this if you’re emotionally invested in the environment?

Your emotions distort your thinking. Your emotions affect your judgment. Your emotions lead you astray. Your emotions falsify or reframe the very least reality and your emotions lead ultimately to fantasy.

So the ego fights off your libido, fights off your cathexes, fights off, opposes, rejects vehemently, assiguously, powerfully, aggressively, fights off aggressively your cathexes.

You can therefore say that the main function of the ego is to de-cathect. Not cathexes, but de-cathexes.

The ego wants you to withdraw from the environment, to stand back, to put some distance between you and the reality that you have to appraise and assess and evaluate and assimilate.

You need to see reality as it is, objectively, without prejudice, without bias, without idealization, without devaluation, without any emotional reaction.

The ego forces you to de-cathect. This creates a God Almighty internal dissonance and clash because you want to cathect. You want to fall in love, for example. Or you want to think that you’re the greatest of the more brilliant and perfect, if you’re a narcissist. You want to cathect. You want to invest your emotions somewhat.

The ego stands in the way. So the ego, to some extent, could become your enemy. If you’re inclined to cathect and the ego prevents you from doing this, the ego is a source of frustration.

A narcissist, for example, they don’t tolerate frustration. So this is another reason that the narcissist does not have an ego. Whatever ego elements or ego nuclei, to use the language of Gantri, Fairburn and others, whatever ego nuclear exists, the narcissist represses them. He doesn’t want them to manifest. He doesn’t want an ego.

A narcissist doesn’t want reality. An ego is founded on the reality principle.

The ego is another part and it’s a part of the ego, the superego, which the narcissist regards as even more of an enemy.

Narcissism is a rejection of the ego and of the super ego. It’s a defense against the ego and against the superego.

And luckily for the narcissist, he doesn’t have a fully formed, full fledged, fully functioning ego.

So the battle, the dissonance is not as devastating as it could have been, which would have led to psychosis.

Because the narcissist’s ego is fragile and fragmented and weak, the internal conflict or dissonance within the narcissist is moderate, mild, manageable.

Had the narcissist’s ego been very strong, fully formed, fully functional, the internal battle between the narcissist’s megalomania, the narcissist’s narcissistic catharsis in himself and the ego, this battle would have led to psychosis.

Could be an excellent explanation of psychosis.

The narcissist invests emotional energy in himself. He idealizes himself. This is the essence of grandiosity.

He doesn’t want to see reality. He doesn’t want to know the truth about himself. He doesn’t want input from the environment, which is objective and calibrating. He doesn’t want any of this, the narcissist.

And here’s the ego and the ego is doing exactly this, bringing him news from reality, which he hates and detests. So he hates the ego. He detests the ego and he wants to suppress and repress the ego. He doesn’t want to have an ego. The ego is reality, a narcissist, the narcissist is fantasy.

And when the battle is extreme, the narcissist, the person, not the narcissist, when the battle is extreme between ego and narcissistically bidonal investment, then we have psychosis because the rejection is total. Something known as a mentia. I’ll discuss it a bit later.

Okay. I hope you got this part.

Narcissists are engaged in narcissistic or egoistic, egocentric self absorption. This is known as autistic thinking. And they are also engaged in fantasy infused cognitions. This is known as the race, the thinking. I have a video dedicated to that. And in this compilation, I included it in this compilation, narcissism is reality alienation. It’s an estrangement from reality.

And the only nagging construct within the narcissist, the thing that keeps reminding the narcissist that reality is out there, that there are external objects, that there are consequences, real life consequences to his actions. That’s the ego.

Narcissist hates his ego.

And again, luckily the narcissist’s ego is fragmented, infantile, not fully formed.

So the narcissist prevails and the battle is not as ruinous and self destructive as it could have been.

Reality alienation is not limited to narcissism, of course, in hypnoic states, in what is known as twilight states. In all these conditions, mental conditions, we are a bit removed from reality. We are half within our internal world and half in reality or even 90% in our internal world and 10% in reality.

There’s a kind of, it’s a kind of transitional twilight zone. That’s why it’s called twilight states.

So twilight zone between reality and external reality and internal reality.

And in all these conditions, the ego is disabled, deactivated, or at the very least dysfunctional. In very extreme states we have amantia. Amantia is de-cathexis, removal of emotional energy from both the internal world and the external world.

You see in narcissism, there is emotional investment. It’s inwardly directed. It is narcissistically veto, but at least there is some emotional investment.

But there are conditions where all emotional investment ceases, stops. There’s no more emotional investment, not in the outside, not in the inside.

And then what happens?

A new universe, internal universe emerges. It’s a universe that reflects wish fulfillment. It has no leg in reality and no leg in the internal world.

It’s like saying, I’m rejecting reality and I’m rejecting myself. And now I’m going to reinvent another person, another world, and I’m going to be there. I’m emigrating to another planet. This is known as amantia.

Now, the ego is founded on the reality principle. The ego is an evaluator of reality. The ego ventures out to reality, surveys the scene, collects data and information, amalgamates them within cognitive models, cognitive maps, and brings the results to the host of the ego, to the person.

So the ego goes out and comes back and says, listen, don’t do this. Don’t act this way, because if you do, consequences are going to be dire.

Or the ego goes out and say, you can do this. You can. Maybe you feel inferior and inadequate, but you actually can do it.

Or the ego goes out there and says, you know, that’s a good person, someone you can trust.

So the ego is the bridge, the interface between the person and reality. Gauging reality is the main function of the ego.

And that is what is known as reality testing.

But the reality principle upon which the ego is founded is predicated, premised on postponement of pleasure.

Freud said that the reality principle is the antithesis of the pleasure principle.

Like the pleasure principle is for kids, for dysregulated people, for crazies, for the pleasure principle is instinctive, reflexive, instinctual, I’m sorry, reflexive.

It’s a drive, it’s a series of drives, and it’s inexorable and irresistible, the pleasure principle, animalistic, in a way.

Here comes the ego, which is a mature development, which leads us to adulthood. And the ego, the ego teaches us to postpone gratification, to avoid pleasure.

This creates, of course, tension between the wish to please oneself and the realization that one would better not.

So the conflict between the reality principle and the pleasure principle, which takes place within the ego, creates anxiety, creates tension.