Ego

Ego, in psychoanalysis, term denoting the central part of the personality structure that deals with reality and is influenced by social forces.

According to the psychoanalytic theories developed by Sigmund Freud, the ego constitutes one of the three basic provinces of the mind, the other two being the id and the superego. Formation of the ego begins at birth in the first encounters with the external world of people and things. The ego learns to modify behaviour by controlling those impulses that are socially unacceptable. Its role is that of mediator between unconscious impulses and acquired social and personal standards.

In philosophy, ego means the conscious self or “I”. It was viewed by some philosophers, notably the 17th-century Frenchman René Descartes and the 18th-century German Johann Gottlieb Fichte, as the sole basis of reality; they saw the universe as existing only in the individual's knowledge and experience of it. Other philosophers, such as the 18th-century German Immanuel Kant, proposed two forms of ego, one perceiving and the other thinking.