It occurs to me the ego is the space within the bellows that Lao Tzu talks about; it is the hole in the middle of the spokes of the wheel that makes the whole thing work. It is a space within which and around which externally expressed work happens.
It is a shelf upon which you keep your intentions.
It is an alchemical flask within which transmutations happen, and then disappear.
The feeling came to me last night that I have never had an ego. My mother drowned it every time it tried to emerge. I felt this keenly. It was highly unpleasant, but like most useful insights, in a sense liberating.
To have an ego is to be consistent. I have always been inconsistent. The ego is the place where you decide who you are and what you are going to do; what you will put up with with respect to others and yourself, and what you will not.
An ego is supposed to be a place where actions and reactions, transmutations, happen. They appear, wax, release energy, and then disappear. It is a place regularly filled, and then emptied, in an optimally functioning person. There is an undulation of activity and inactivity, of focused self and work, and then of productive emptiness.
If you look at all the Personality Disorders, they are disorders of this process. Specifically, they are incompleted processes.
With Narcissists, the process of ego creation is never completed, and so the ego continues to try all the time, every day, to complete that process, by making itself the focus.
With Sociopaths, the process of connecting the ego to other egos–to society–is never completed. The pleasures of connection are made invisible, and the gratification of physical desires necessarily becomes the sole focus.
With Borderline people, the ego is unstable. Something keeps interrupting its completion, making them emotionally volatile, which I would suppose is most likely unprocessed trauma. Narcissists and Sociopaths are dealing with traumas of omission, where they did not get some vital ego nutrient–love, broadly speaking, and connected attention–whereas the Borderline folks are dealing with things that happened that disturb them deeply.
It has long been obvious to me that consistency is the hub around which an orderly life flows, but I have not really understood emotionally why it was so hard for me. I have a strong will, but I have had even stronger emotional impulses which always wear me down eventually. They have no limit, since their essence is weight.
This is a useful insight.