Sublime

Freud believed the ego had defence mechanisms that were designed to deal with internal conflict. These devices were an outlet for the neuroses born from the constant tussle between the public face – the super-ego – and the id or inner rage. He argued that when id impulses (the desire to have sex or take revenge) come into conflict with the super-eg

Understand your ego barrier.

ego wants us to think, I’m special. I’m better. The rules don’t apply to me. “Man is pushed by drives,” Viktor Frankl observed. “But he is pulled by values.”

He was a despicable human being, an egoist with nothing inside him. But he was a far more capable individual than I was.

Making yourself a corporation (or just thinking of yourself in that way) reinforces the idea of professionalism because it separates the artist-doing-the-work from the will-and- consciousness-running-the-show. No matter how much abuse is heaped on the head of the former, the latter takes it in stride and keeps on trucking. Conversely with success:

Ego is its own worst enemy.

We have seen that our ego is a blind attachment to the image we have of ourselves, the picture of ourselves we carry around in our head. Our entire way of thinking, emoting, and acting is rooted in this self-image.

‘The strangest characteristic of unconscious (repressed) processes,’ Freud writes in ‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Psychic Functioning’, ‘results from their total disregard for reality-testing; thought-reality is equated with external reality, the wish with its fulfilment’; ‘the pleasure-ego,’ he writes, ‘can do nothing but wish … the real