Mapping the territory of the ego

"Mapping" is another of my big topics. There is a strong explorer/cartographer spirit inside me, and I especially delight in examining philosophical and psychological maps and systems. Economist E.F. Schumacher has much to say about this in his Guide for the Perplexed (here is an excerpt), and Ken Wilber has dedicated much of his intellectual work to creating some of the best theoretical maps I have come across.

I'd like to talk about maps in the context of "psychological space"--namely, the ego. As psychologists since Freud have determined, the formation of the ego in childhood and adolescence rests upon the formation of an accurate self-image. Its accuracy, as elsewhere in life, lies in its adherence to the data; the data in this case is the behavior, emotions, desires, thoughts, etc. of the self, of the ego. The self-image is formed to match what is experienced by the self, whether this experiential data comes from the opinions of a parent ("You are a good boy"), a peer ("You are fun to be around"), society (e.g. taboos), etc. The individual's emotions and actions contribute to the self-image as well--if I experience myself feeling the safe in the arms of this person, part of my self-image becomes a particular emotional attachment to my mother.

This is a process of mapping the territory--the map is the self-image and the territory is the experience (which is largely comprised of the individual's relationship with its environment) of the self. Again, accuracy is important; from the basic level of being able to perceive that this painful sensation of touching the stove is painful because my body is sensing it (the image of the body becomes part of the self-image) to the more complex level of sensing a desire to be around other people and interpreting that as my wanting to make friends (my sociability also becomes part of my self-image). Sensations and desires, along with more complex forms of behavior, are the territory, and they have to be represented and acknowledged on the map in order to create an accurate, healthy self-image.

Now the second part of this story is that the map, the self-image, must be acceptable to the self. This is the source of much pathology and neurosis, and it is something I am working with intensively right now. Snell and Gail Putney, in their Adjusted American: Normal Neuroses in the Individual and Society (1964) comment:

As he [the developing individual] internalizes the norms he learns from others, he applies them to himself and wonders if he is acceptable. As he acquires models to pattern his developing self, he accepts standards against which he measures his self-image. It is not so much that he learns to appraise an existing self-image; it would be more accurate to say that his self-image and his evaluation of that image are acquired together [the creation of the map occurs simultaneously with the evaluation and judgment of the map]. The very idea of being merges with the appraisal of modes of being; the process of self-evaluation is simultaneous with the process of self-discovery. Man needs not only an accurate self-image, but also one that he can accept.

 Because the territory we are speaking of is one's own self, not an "objective" space like a forest or a set of philosophical ideas, the map is wrapped up the self's sense of self-esteem and dignity, which provides much of the criteria for the acceptability of the self-image. The difficulties that arise between the dual desires of accuracy, which seems simple enough, and acceptability, which is more complex, account for many common neuroses, fixations, etc. And one common manifestation of this is the sacrificing of accuracy for the sake of acceptability:

. . . he may fall into the ineffectual but common attempt to make the self-image acceptable by rendering it inaccurate. This is a basic misdirection, involved in a fundamental--but normal--neurotic pattern. Through a process of self-deceit, the individual may pretend that those aspects of the self of which he disapproves do not exist. The difficulty is that such a deception, precisely because it is self-deception, inevitably fails. It is because he does perceive in himself elements of which he profoundly disapproves that he seeks to hide these things. . . . Fulfillment does not result if he attempts to sacrifice accuracy for acceptability.

In other words, pretending that there is not a dangerous cliff a couple of miles away, and neglecting to represent this cliff on the map one is drawing, does not remove the cliff from the landscape. It is an inaccuracy that is more harmful than helpful. And, again, when the territory becomes one's own self, this inaccuracy, this self-deception, is harmful. There is a dissonance between the territory and the map: I register a desire to kill someone who has enraged me (territory), but I (or my superego, if we want to divide things like that) disapprove of this desire, so I refuse to acknowledge it on my map--I refuse to integrate this impulse into my self-image, into my ego. But it is there, just like the cliff was there, and I am only deceiving myself by pretending that it's not.

I'm not going to discuss projection here, but that is usually the next step in this kind of process: I refuse to acknowledge and accept the desire in myself, so I project it and perceive it as outside of me, in my environment. I perceive others as being hostile towards me, instead of accepting that the hostility is my own.

Putney and Putney provide a good example of a healthy way of creating an accurate and acceptable self-image: "He can deal with this conflict [between accuracy and acceptability] by attempting to make his conception of acceptability one which stresses choice between elements in the self (e.g., "I am capable of being a bully, but I choose not to be"), then acting so as to minimize aspects of the self of which he disapproves."

There is a fascinating relationship between thought/desire and action at work here. Freud realized that the id, the source of much of what becomes unacceptable in the later formation of the self-image/ego, cannot differentiate between image and action. The id uses images as representations of its particular desires or impulses--when the id registers hunger, it conjures the image of food. This is the source of processes like wish-fulfillment, where the id's desire is frustrated (there is no food available) and tries to satisfy its desire simply by conjuring the image (of food). Freud linked this process to the dreams and daydreams, where one's thoughts/images and actions are the same (i.e. I can conjure an image of food in a dream, and it magically appears).

The ego, on the other hand, develops by recognizing that the image and the real thing are not the same, and that it needs to go and find food instead of just thinking of food in order to satisfy its hunger. There is a distinction created between image (which does not need to take into account the outside environment) and action (which needs to negotiate with the environment). And this is just what Putney and Putney refer to above: in creating an accurate and acceptable self-image, the ego acknowledges that although it feels something that it (or the superego) disapproves of, it chooses not to act upon that feeling. Instead of assuming, as the id does, that the feeling and the action are the same (incidentally, the superego also assumes they are the same, which is why one can feel guilty for just thinking something morally reprehensible), the ego separates the two, and is thus able to acknowledge both the disapproved feeling and the approved choice to not act on it.