A Toddler’s Ego?
Image by Arhagus Budy from Pixabay
Someone asked me a great question just now: Does a toddler have an ego?
It’s a potentially very useful question. Let’s start by noticing that our usual conception of the ego is as something that we have. In the popular culture, it’s traditionally been spoken of as an impediment to getting along with others, an aspect of ourselves that gets in the way of authentic conversation and behavior.
Technically of course, the ego is part of Sigmund Freud’s model of psychic structure, consisting of the id, the ego, and the super-ego. According to Freud, the ego “attempts to exact a balance between the impractical hedonism of the id and the equally impractical moralism of the super-ego.”
Both of these uses of the word ego imply an object, albeit an entirely conceptual one, and thus consistent with the idea that the ego is something that you and I have.
In that context, it is admittedly difficult to see the ego as something that a toddler would have acquired or created at such an early stage of life.
Throughout this website and blog, I have proposed that the Ego is not an object at all but is rather an environment or ocean into which one is born. It is created and maintained by all living persons as a function of our collective belief systems. It is held in place and spread far and wide by what I call languaging, the way we think and speak about the world and our selves.
When a child is born, and even before birth, its parents begin to talk to it, describing the world into which it has emerged, telling it of their feelings and intentions for it, and so on. These descriptions constitute aspects of the parents’ worldview and are always consistent with that view. Over time, the child absorbs this view as it attempts to learn the language or languages its parents use. This is the acculturation process, and for most of us it is required for successful participation in our own particular culture.
As someone who has studied and thought about physics for most of my life, I have come to think of this cultural environment, which permeates the world of our experience, as a “field.” We can think of fields as dynamic fluid-like substances that fill all of space, quivering and vibrating in ways that can be mathematically described.
Unlike other fields with which we are familiar, such as the electromagnetic and gravitational fields, this one, which I like to call the Egoic field, exhibits several characteristics that we ordinarily ascribe to individuals. It exhibits agency, the state of being in action or of exerting power. It seems to have, as it were, a mind of its own. It also displays its own survival mechanism, which shows up as mimicking the human’s voice in internal conversation. It pretends to be the voice of the human whose head it seems to inhabit, and it denies its own separate existence when that existence is noticed. All of these characteristics can be observed within one’s awareness if we pay attention to its behavior.
It is rarely noticed that in addition to promising the child a successful lifetime of participation in our culture, the acculturation process serves to ensure the perpetuation of the culture itself. And if the culture’s world view contains misunderstandings, confusion, and even superstitions, those will be perpetuated as well.
In my recent book, Hoodwinked, I wrote about a definitive experience many years ago during which I was suddenly aware of the Ego as it operated within me. It was clear to me on that occasion that It was attempting to hide, to deny Its own existence and Its own agency. That moment was as a one-way door, impossible to forget or deny, and it has shaped my life experience ever since.
It is because I recognize agency in the Egoic field that I tend to capitalize both the word Ego and the pronoun, It, which refers to it.
Recently, I had the opportunity to be with a toddler, to observe him as he reacted to his parents’ requests. It was abundantly clear to me that something was driving him to deliberately behave in certain ways so as to establish his own agency, his own power to either do what his parents asked or, in several cases, the exact opposite. I could see the Ego enticing him to apply his will to its suggestions.
In that sense, this toddler doesn’t have an ego; It has him. Said differently, the Ego acts as if it coopts us, coaxing us to further Its own aims and intentions instead of ours, whatever those might be. I say that because I have observed within myself that until we make that distinction between the Ego’s being and our own, we don’t actually know what our intentions are! We are accustomed to the assumption that Its intentions are our own. After all, Its voice sounds exactly like ours, and we are used to hearing Its voice as expressing our own thoughts and feelings about our being in the world.
I invite you to consider this idea of the relationship between a person and the Ego. I believe it eliminates the need to try to get rid of one’s ego or to fix or improve it in some way. We need only recognize that the voice in our heads is other than ourselves, a foreign entity, to strip It of Its apparent power. This is the real meaning of taking back one’s power, not from someone else but from a misunderstanding of what that voice really is.
The toddler doesn’t have an ego. The Ego is the environment in which he or she learns to operate in the world. It has us all, It uses all of us, and in that way It’s the same for all of us. It’s just that the toddler hasn’t yet learned that some of the Ego’s aims and methods aren’t acceptable to some around him and so should be either hidden from others or apologized for. And he hasn’t yet felt the shame and guilt he will likely feel later on for acting as It dictates. And maybe, down the line, he will also discover that the Ego is not himself, and that its urgings can be safely ignored. In that discovery, he will create for himself the possibility of living a truly authentic life.
