The 'I' you defend all day: what four traditions mean by the ego

Most people who quote Freud's 'ego' have the meaning upside down. In everyday speech it signals pride; in Freud it is closer to a tired middle manager. He laid it out in The Ego and the Id (1923) — in the original German, Das Ich und das Es, 'The I and the It'.

Freud divided the mind into three. The id is the boiling reservoir of drives that wants everything immediately. The superego is the internalised voice of parents and society, handing out guilt. The ego sits between them and reality, brokering deals none of the three fully likes. Far from meaning arrogance, the Freudian ego is the part forever negotiating, keeping a fragile peace.

What matters for our story is that Freud, like the Indian traditions, refused to let the conscious 'I' be the whole story. Most of the mind, he insisted, runs in the dark. The 'I' you experience is a thin managing layer over forces it neither chose nor fully understands. Strip away the metaphysics: the everyday ego is a surface, not the depth — a claim Vedic and Buddhist thinkers had made more than two thousand years earlier.

Modern psychology extended the point: the self is not merely a manager but a narrator. Jerome Bruner and Dan McAdams argued from the 1980s that identity is a story — a life-narrative we author and revise, not a fixed core we discover.

The most concrete modern clue came from a brain scanner. In 2001 Marcus Raichle and colleagues described the default-mode network — a set of brain regions, centred on the medial prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate, that hum when the mind is left to itself: replaying memories, rehearsing the future, narrating 'me'. This network quiets when we are absorbed in an external task, and revives the moment attention turns inward.

Brain scans of experienced meditators show less activity here during meditation, which researchers link to a loosened sense of a fixed, bounded self — exactly where the contemplative traditions had been pointing for centuries. The finding does not prove any tradition right. A quieter network is not atman, and it is not a refutation of it. But it adds a third kind of evidence — neural, alongside the introspective and the textual — to a very old hunch: the solid 'I' is something the brain actively keeps building, not a stone it merely uncovers.

The sharpest split between the traditions remains unresolved. Vedanta keeps a real self — atman — beneath the ego; Buddhism removes it entirely; Freud places seething drives there; modern cognitive science places only more machinery. What lies underneath the story is the question that twenty-five centuries of careful thinking, and now decades of brain imaging, have not closed.

Few phrases get more distorted than 'kill the ego'. Hold the slogan against the actual texts and it falls apart almost immediately.

Many people assume that Buddhist no-self means you don't really exist — a kind of blanket nihilism. This is wrong. Anatta denies a fixed, unchanging owner behind experience, not the person. You still feel, act and bear responsibility. What falls away is the illusion of an unchanging 'I' running the show. The Buddha explicitly rejected the view that nothing matters.

A second misreading takes Freud's word and turns it into a virtue to be dissolved. Big ego bad, dissolved ego good. But in Freud the ego is the reality-managing function — the part that plans, delays gratification and copes with life. A person with a non-functioning ego is not enlightened; they are overwhelmed. Freud wanted the ego strengthened, not abolished.

The deepest confusion is the idea that all four traditions are pointing the same direction: destroy the 'I'. They are not. Vedanta wants you to see through the ego to the real self beneath. Buddhism dismantles the illusion of a self. Freud wants a stronger, more flexible ego. Modern psychology wants a healthier, less rigid self-story. 'Dissolve the ego' flattens four distinct aims into one feel-good slogan, and loses the most useful thing each tradition has to offer.

Strip away the metaphysics and one practical lesson is left standing — and that is why this argument still matters far outside any temple, clinic or lab. The lesson is not that the ego is your enemy. It is that the ego is a construction, and what the mind builds, it can hold more lightly.

The traditions disagree about what lies beneath. Does a real witnessing self live under the story, as Vedanta says? Is there only process, as Buddhism says? None of the four frameworks has closed these questions. But they agree on the surface: the everyday sense of being a solid, permanent 'I' is at least partly assembled — which means it is at least partly flexible.

You do not need to destroy your ego. Freud and Vedanta both warn against that impulse. What you can do is stop mistaking the story for the storyteller. In arguments, in comparison, in the ache to be seen: the fierceness of your defence often has less to do with what is actually at stake and more to do with the story insisting on its own importance.

That four traditions, separated by thousands of miles and thousands of years, kept arriving at the same suspicion — and that brain scans now echo them — suggests they were touching something real about what it means to be a person. The most familiar thing we own, the sense of 'I', may be the least understood.