The Ego Spiral

The Ego Spiral

          Sigmund Freud laid it out for us 120 years ago.  He got his start at the task of educating the public in the popular aspects of psychoanalysis with his The Interpretation of Dreams, followed by The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious and eventually Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and The Ego and the Id.  The jokes that come to mind ranging from the Freudian slip joke to the “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar” comment rush to mind.  The Wes Anderson movie The Squid and the Whale also bounces around in my brain.  The impact this Austrian man of letters had on our understanding of that most delicate instrument, the mind of mankind is nothing short of amazing.

          I am no more or less an armchair psychologist than anyone, but let’s look at the three simple structural elements of Freud’s explanation of the human psyche.  There is the Id, the Ego and the Super-Ego.  The Id is that stuff that emanates from the cerebral cortex.  It’s the instinctual reactions we all have hard-wired in our primordial animalistic brains.  These are the knee-jerk reactions that seem uncoordinated with our cerebral state, but which the body demands for its own reasons, mostly to protect itself or perpetuate itself.  When I discuss some man’s libidinous instincts with my wife, she castigates me and says that they have a cerebral capability to overcome those base instincts.  I always say they are hard-wired.  The truth is that the Id operates out of the cerebellum or cortex, where instinctive stuff happens, not in the cerebrum, where thinking occurs, much less in the frontal lobes, where moral judgements are formed.         

          The Super-Ego is that frontal lobe activity that handles the critical thinking and moralization aspects of our interactions.  This is where guilt and shame and feeling of inadequacy are derived for better or worse.  Generally it gets referenced as part of the parental influence on children.  In fact, much of the literature reflects that the Super-Ego is a product of issues like the Oedipus complex (love of mother and hatred of father by boys) and the Electra complex (love of father and hatred of mother by girls).  At a fairly early age of child development, the Super-Ego is as formed as it gets and it yields to the Ego, which takes us on into normal life.

The Ego is the trickiest of the three.  It seeks to balance the desires of the Id with the morality of the Super-Ego.  It is whence we get the movie mechanism (as in Animal House, one of the guiding moralistic beacons of modern life) of showing a guy with a little angel on one shoulder saying, “be nice to her”, while on the other shoulder sits the little devil saying, “just fuck her.”  Damn, that’s a lot of psychobabble from an unauthorized source, but that is pretty much how I interpret Freud.  I probably should have taken Psychology 101 in Bailey Hall with all the other freshmen, but I was busy taking economics.

Why should we care?  Well, we have a President who is displaying obvious and desperate signs of mental instability that are constantly being questioned as being unbalanced and narcissistic and egotistical.  Doing this quick and dirty review of the Freudian structure helps me to sort it out and that is the beginning of understanding and eventual resolution.  What do I suspect?

• He has no pre-frontal lobe, so no moral compass?
• His brain in mostly cerebellum and cerebral cortex so everything is a knee-jerk?
• His cerebrum is as small as his hands? (if genius and stability are relative terms he could be smart and stable only in a very puny way)
• His Super-Ego may never have been launched as a child because the Oedipal issues never let go of him. Fred basically kicked the shit out of him at such an early age that even mommy couldn’t help and the military school was too late. Thus, there is no guilt or shame anywhere in that brain. In fact, there is no conscience.
• His Ego has formed around his Id since there was no Super-Ego to balance things back. His Ego has continued to grow like the horrible 50-foot woman of Sci-Fi fame. Or maybe, in keeping with this weekend’s movie roster, he is the Godzilla of our age. He says he’s working to save us from Mothra or Rodin (China and Iran), but he is stomping across us while he does it and ultimately will want to snack on us as well.

The most recent incident of having the U.S. destroyer in Tokyo Bay shrouded so that he didn’t have to look at the name U.S.S. John S. McCain on the ship and its sailors with their McCain hats being forbidden to attend the military festivities, is the latest example that Trump’s Ego is spiraling out of control.  Anyone that thinks their fragile mental state (whether he ordered it or his puerile henchmen in the White House ordered it, matters not) is so delicate that they cannot even be in the presence of a nay-sayer is a very troubled soul.

What is the worst thing you can do for a kid that has been beaten by his father?  You give him $400 million with which to beat other people.  What is the worst thing you can do for a man who fails miserably at business despite being given huge advantages?  Give him another chance, so he feels he deserves it.  What is the worst thing you can do for a failed businessman like that?  Make him a reality TV star and let him boast to the world how great he is.  What is the worst thing you can do for that reality star?  Make him President.  What is the worst thing you can do for that President and people he governs?  Let him get away with feeling he can do no wrong and is the smartest person in the world.  What is the worst thing you can do for a failed President?  Not impeach and “25^th Amendment” him.