Ego autonomy, individuation and creativity
We are all born without any Ego strength. For that matter, we are all born without an Ego. Being born without any sense of Ego means that at first there is no 'I,' there is only enmeshment. We come into this world still attached and enmeshed with our mother and without the ability to distinguish ourselves from her. We develop more and more of a sense of self as we face reality. Gradually, as we grow and interact with the world, we work through the stages of Ego development. This is the process by which we become an autonomous, inner-directed human being. We call this process Individuation.

According to Hartmann (1939), the Autonomous Ego is a conflict free zone, free from the war between the Superego and the Id, and it has its own autonomous system of drives, derived from the instinct for self preservation. A developed, Autonomous Ego is a conflict-free sphere of consciousness; there may be underlying conflicts outside this sphere that further development may resolve, but the consciousness within has a clear identity and is able to interact with the world independent of Id and Superego influences. It is free to reality test and to innovate creatively.

The history of Western civilization is, with the Ego's increasing capacity to reality test and therefore to reason and create, a story of progress from faith to reality testing. Man has gradually been discovering more about nature and how to control it. Through reality testing, for example, we no longer accept the idea that one becomes ill because of evil spirits. We have advanced to the point where we can often pinpoint the exact bacteria that are the cause of many diseases. Further, we know enough about science to prevent and cure many others. Additionally, we have had an explosion in technology that exemplifies our ability to bend nature to our will, making what had previously been fantasies into reality. These are examples of man's direct control over our environment through scientific knowledge and our understanding of cause and effect, rather than illusory control through faith.

The Ego can only become truly Autonomous by overcoming the Superego. The Autonomous Ego, by and large, is free from the dictates of the Id and has outgrown the Superego. The Ego understands and integrates the energetic drives of the Id and sublimates them toward loving sexuality and creative activity. The Autonomous Ego creates his or her own moral code and relies on his or her own sense of right and wrong, based on rational and objective analysis. This is an Independent Mind.

Both Ego strength and independence from the Superego are essential for an individual to be truly creative, outside of the box of his upbringing and parental and peer standards. The Superego stands in the way of major creativity by suppressing any thought or feeling that is too unconventional or that may be subject to external criticism, so it routinely censors anything truly creative. Freedom from the Superego is a necessary prerequisite, but creativity outside the boundaries of the ordinary also requires sufficient intelligence applied to an appropriate, wide-ranging database.

Creativity research has traditionally regarded the creative process as involving a full or partial regression of the Ego to a more primitive state of consciousness. While some playful and creative activities may be characterized by voluntary and/or involuntary regressions, more meaningful creativity requires access to the unconscious imagination without a corresponding loss of Ego functions. Creativity requires a relatively intact Ego; when the Ego deteriorates, so does the creative product. Combined with Ego strength, unconscious processes such as imagination and intuition become consciously directed and work in collaboration with the integrative functions of the Ego, such as logical thought, which are related to directed creative effort and implementation.

Integration is not only a normal function of the Ego but also a defense against disintegrative tendencies from the Id and Superego. Ego strength is necessary to empower creativity, which is essentially an integrative force based on love and the sublimation of aggression, energized by the Libido. Freud postulated that human beings are dominated by two basic instincts: Eros (the sexual drive or creative life force) and Thanatos (the death force or destructiveness), both forms of Libido energy. These instincts are also an aspect of what Jung termed the 'Shadow' - an unconscious part of the Ego, and receptacle for that which we have for one reason or another disowned or wish to remain out of sight and those qualities that one would rather not see in oneself, as well as unrealized potentials. By illuminating the Shadow into consciousness, its energy becomes a resource for inner-directed positive action rather than other-directed destructive actions. We need to integrate the Shadow and achieve sufficient Individuation, in order to overcome the Superego and achieve Ego-Autonomy.

Intelligence, which is essentially the ability to quickly establish new and multiple linkages between thoughts, ideas and feelings, is a necessary requisite of the creative synthesis. Freedom and mobility in the use of symbols is another requirement. True creativity does not stem from the Id; it is the result of a synthesis occurring in the unconscious Ego with conscious Ego direction. It's emergence into consciousness is prompted by relative freedom from repression and the dictates of the Superego. Creativity reduces instinctual tension, it fuses pleasure with reality, and satisfies the Libido.

However, a weak Ego run wild, out of the control of its Superego and driven by the Shadow, is not the means to valuable creativity; that is the route to hypomania, or even to mania and psychosis. This is also seen in some mystical and drug experiences, and even states of passionate love, if the Ego is unprepared to cope with such intense narcissistic and libidinal pressures, independent of guidance from the Superego.

Ego strength is the power, determination and ability to engage reality for whatever we find it to be - to accept what is as existing and to then use our cognitive-behavioral, emotional and relational skills to deal with such. Ego strength also refers to the inner personal strength by which we tolerate stress and frustration and to deal with reality without falling back to infantile defense mechanisms. A strong Ego can tolerate a difficult situation, can cope and then will look at it realistically and act on a solution. Ego strength, then, is our ability to play the Game of Life according to whatever curves life throws at us. The stronger our Ego grows, the more of a sense of self we develop and the greater our skills and resource to handle whatever comes.

The weak Ego and impulsiveness
The personality traits of a weak Ego include: authoritarianism, conformity, dogmatism, other-directedness, other-determinism, field-dependence, not tolerating uncertainty, low self esteem, and an egocentric viewpoint. An egocentric person is self-centered, having little or no regard for interests, beliefs, or attitudes other than one's own.

In comparison, the traits of a strong Ego include: strength of character, inner-directedness, self-determinism, field-independence, high self esteem, the acceptance of a plurality of ideas, and an idiocentric viewpoint. People who have an idiocentric value orientation tend to emphasize their own goals and needs over those of the groups to which they belong, and to be independent and self-reliant.

The weak Ego doesn't easily face, take in, and cope with what is. Instead it fights reality, hates it, and wishes it otherwise. Expectations are unrealistic and based on inadequate understanding. Reality seems too big, too frightening, too overwhelming ... and so we avoid the encounter. We feel unresourceful, weak, fragile, unable to cope, etc. The weaker the ego-strength, the less we will engage reality and the more we will flee to superstition, wishing rather than acting, and to addictions.

We need to be very much in touch with our feelings but still to remain intelligent about it - to remain in control, not driven by our emotions. We need a balance of left and right brain - rational mind and emotional mind, logic and feelings, intellect and intuition. This is where mindfulness and wisdom is found.

We tend to be too cut off from our feelings, in order to suppress painful ones - and this becomes a habit. Academic education reinforces this imbalance. And then we lose a lot of our creative and intuitional ability. At the same time, however, when those emotions 'escape' we tend to be driven by them, and think and act impulsively, without wisdom.

Deferred gratification or delayed gratification (as an aspect of emotional intelligence) is the ability of a person to wait for things they want. This trait is critical for life success. One often sees the lack of this ability with kids who act without thinking first, can't wait their turn in line or in a game, blurt out answers in class, speak when they're supposed to be quiet, maybe show aggressive behaviors, are often a little too loud, sometimes fight, and so on... they often get labeled with ADD. They impulsively say the wrong thing at the wrong time and then think, "Why did I say that?" The other kids are asking, "Who is this guy?" and often begin to avoid him. Impulsive people are not learning from past mistakes, and they're not listening. They haven't picked up on those subtle social cues that everybody else has learned, and so they're socially awkward and often don't know why. And this applies to adults too of course.

Those with poor impulse control suffer from "weak Ego boundaries"; the term comes from Sigmund Freud's theory of personality where the Id is the pleasure principle, the Superego is the morality or parent principle, and the Ego is the reality principle. The Ego's job is to satisfy the needs of the Id while being conscious of other people's needs.

Freud's definition of the Ego has it representing reason and circumspection. Most people are unaware that Freud's meaning of Ego is not some center of passion or self-serving desire - that is reserved, instead, for the Id. When we believe a person has a "big Ego" we are really referring to the Id running rampant. A person with a weak Ego tends be infantile in their approach and more egocentric than a person with a developed Ego. The Ego's job is to contain and direct the passions. It isn't the Ego which makes us yield to temptation or puts the weapon of anger in our hand; in fact, it is the Ego which apologizes. We can think of the Ego as being more like Dr. Jekyll while the Id represents Mr. Hyde. It is far better to have a strong, well-developed Ego than to fall prey to the Mr. Hyde within us who wants to rule our lives making the Ego its servant.

The marshmallow experiment is a famous test of this concept discussed by Daniel Goleman, an American psychologist, in his popular work. In the 1960s a group of four-year olds were tested by being given a marshmallow and promised another, if they could wait 20 minutes before eating the first one. Some children could wait and others could not. The researchers then followed the progress of each child into adolescence, and demonstrated that those with the ability to wait were better adjusted and more dependable (determined via surveys of their parents and teachers), and scored an average of 210 points higher on the Scholastic Aptitude Test.









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Korzybski said that most people are to some degree impulsive, therefore there is a compulsion to act or break out in speech and this limits their intelligence. His advice - when you feel this coming on - is to stop for a count of ten to let your much slower cortex (thinking brain) catch up with the emotional limbic system, before you act or speak. He went on to say that many people have an under-aroused cortex and an over-aroused limbic system: they guess rather than work out the solution to a problem, or when they are making a decision they don't work through a list of alternatives. A person in that state seeks immediate closure and cannot reject an immediate reward (immediate gratification) for a larger reward in the future, because he or she is acting impulsively - not being conscious of their choices. Acting in a more considered and intelligent way, on the other hand, will be much more true to the person's real needs and purposes, and therefore to their heart.
The remedy: mindfulness
Mindfulness has to do with the ability to accept, in a non-evaluative and nonjudgmental fashion, both oneself and the current situation - and how one feels about it. Acceptance of reality is not necessarily approval of reality; it is simply not being blind to it, not resisting nor distorting it. Then we can see the truth.

Fixed beliefs are always a limitation and unnecessary - they cause all the types of harm that occurs in the world, especially when they are rigidly identified with or attached to, so that one cannot tolerate another having different beliefs or it is felt to be a threat if they do. Provisional beliefs are necessary, as one needs to make a map of the world, but they must always be open to revision. Be open to the opinions of another that provoke a new view of things, or that seem to conflict with what you already know. It makes it easier to see the middle path, the shades of grey between the black and white of opposing viewpoints.

So, if you feel an impulsive reaction coming on - and you feel you are being driven rather than being the driver - then take a pause, breathe deeply for several seconds and look at your options, the pros and cons - BEFORE you say or do something that isn't really congruent with your inner truth.

Intuition is not subjective truth or inner knowing if it is based on a reactive emotional response, whether a painful feeling or even a good one. How do you know if it's reaction or a fast input? Emotional intelligence is about understanding emotions, not just accepting that whatever raises your heartbeat must be the way to go. Emotions always follow an interpretation. Reality testing is necessary, to see if there's more to it and you need to look deeper, or if it's an answer but in the wrong direction perhaps with thought distortions, or if it's somebody else's subjective truth rather than your own.

Training in Mind Development can benefit you in a number of ways, depending on what areas you feel you are weak at, or what you want to change about yourself and your capabilities. If you do these courses you should expect to see stable improvements in your career and abilities. You should have better judgment, increased mental speed and will power, better self-expression, the ability to study effectively and recall what you have learned, more creative insights, and confidence in your capacity to achieve your personal goals in life.

Loevinger's stages of Ego development
As we grow up, our Ego (the self-image or sense of being) puts changes in place to make coherent meaning of what is happening as it experiences day-to-day life. The Ego is not a thing we have, it is a large part of who we are, the analytical function of mind, including reasoning and conscious memory. The Ego is constantly engaged in making meaning out of life experience, organizing and reorganizing everything it sees, feels, hears, touches, senses, thinks and tastes. It does this to create and recreate a human viewpoint - your viewpoint. This is the individual perspective which each human can rely on to approach the enormous job of living life. Our Ego works tirelessly to make our world-view out of the barrage of conflicting information that we are immersed in everyday.

Jane Loevinger (born 1918) was a developmental psychologist who developed a theory of Ego development which emphasized the gradual internalization of social rules and the maturing conscience, for the origin of personal decisions. Her Sentence Completion Test (SCT) covers a broad range of Ego functions including moral development, interpersonal relations and conceptual complexity.

Jane Loevinger's Ego development theory proposes that individuals progress through a series of stages that reflect increased levels of cognitive complexity and Ego maturity. Loevinger proposes that the level of Ego functioning influences how an individual perceives and interprets personal experiences and interpersonal relationships. She describes nine stages of Ego development, which may be broadly divided into Pre-Conventional, Conventional and Post-Conventional.

Pre-Conventional

Infancy
Babies are born with no Ego, their sense of being is not differentiated from the world around them. They are pre-social, communicating only at the perceptual level. This stage of Ego development aligns with the Sensori-Motor stage of Cognitive Development as described by Piaget - see the article Adult Intellectual Development. The dominant mode of representation of the world is through kinesthetic senses.
Impulsive
In this mode, associated with very young children, people are little aware of distinctions between self and other, and as suggested by the name, they are often impulsive in their behavior, though curbed by restraints, rewards and punishments. Others are seen in terms of what they can give; they are "nice to me" or "mean to me." It is a present-centered orientation and causation is restricted to the physical; there is no sense of responsibility for psychological causation. This stage of Ego development aligns with the Pre-logical intuitive stage of Cognitive development. The dominant mode of representation of the world is through auditory senses.

Self-Protective
An awareness that others have their own viewpoint starts to arise, and with it a sense of self. However, it is a very limited sense of self in which any opposition to the desires of the self is labeled as "bad," anything congruent with the desires of self, "good," and little capacity for introspection or real empathy exists. The self-protective, egocentric person doesn't want to "get caught" and immediately labels anything that impedes the self's getting its way as "bad," so they are largely amoral and externalize blame. There is the beginnings of self-control and the anticipation of rewards and punishments. It is a state of opportunistic hedonism. This stage of Ego development aligns with the Low Concrete Operational stage of Cognitive development. A concrete visual mode of representation has become the predominant way of thinking about and remembering experience.

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Conventional
Conformist
An awareness of the needs of others starts to arise, and the need to ingratiate oneself with others becomes paramount as a way of achieving harmony, being well liked, and satisfying one's own needs in turn. This is an 'allocentric' orientation - the individual tends to be cooperative, interdependent, and to have a strong need to affiliate with others. The person is quick to take stereotypes roles and follow the rules of the group, with little sense of self - they are 'field-dependent,' dependent on direction from others. Security is found in belonging and behavior is judged by external standards, not by inner-directed intention. Thought processes are still limited to the level of concrete operations, with the ability to think systematically and quantitatively but little ability to think abstractly or in terms of hypotheses (formal operations). This stage of Ego development aligns with the Concrete Operational stage of Cognitive development. For conceptual information which isn't easily represented using pictures, symbolic representation is used, including inner speech, using words as formalized symbols which 'stand for' the concepts.
Self-Aware
Now the need for independence from norms and expectations arises, to assert and prove their competence, and to reject the constraints of either oppressive authority or the docility of the conformist. Most teenagers at one point or another exhibit this stage strongly. It is the beginnings of the inner life. Thought processes are beginning to become more abstract but remain naive. This stage of Ego development aligns with the Low Formal Operational stage of Cognitive development.

Conscientious
By now an individual has achieved a strong sense of self-identity, without the fragility and defensiveness of the previous stage, and is capable of and desires to work and cooperate successfully with others to achieve shared objectives... a person working in enlightened self interest to further his or her own career, while also being useful to the organizations they work with, and thereby, ideally, society as a whole. He or she is aware of their personal goals and ideals and has a sense of responsibility. Rules are internalized - they have a sense of self apart from that of their peers and act from their own determinism. The person can see themselves from the other's point of view and guilt occurs as a result of from hurting another, not from breaking arbitrary rules. Thought processes are at the level of Formal operations, with the ability to think logically about abstract problems and hypotheses. At the Concientious Level a student starts to gain an idiocentric value system. People with an idiocentric value orientation tend to emphasize their own goals and needs over those of the groups to which they belong, and to be independent and self-reliant. This stage of Ego development aligns with the Formal Operational stage of Cognitive development.

Note: The lowest level of Systems Intelligence - being aware of the systemic context of one's behavior - starts at the Conscientious Level. A person needs to have developed some level of detachment before he is able to see himself as part of a system. This detachment only comes with Formal Operations, even if the only goal is to conform. Before a person has reached the level of Formal Operations, he is running on automatic, he can only conform to simple systems like the family, and he is not aware that he is part of a larger system. Awareness that he is part of a system is only the first step, an individual will have to reach the level of Postformal Operations before he can have an impact and change a system in any but a minor way - and by this I mean a change for the better.

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Post-Conventional
Individualistic
The individuated person, while accepting the need to work with others in society, is skeptical of organizations and insists on the need to critically evaluate one's participation in them, and doesn't take for granted that working for the good of any organization, however socially respectable it may be, is necessarily beneficial to society as a whole. They have an 'idiocentric' value orientation and tend to emphasize their own goals and needs over those of the groups to which they belong, and to be independent and self-reliant. They are inner-directed. Self esteem is based on competence, not on others' real or imagined opinions. There is a greater tolerance of self and others. They are introspective and aware of inner conflict, hence there is a distancing from role identities, and an awareness of responsibility for personal development. They tend to be deeply concerned about higher goals beyond mere worldly success (as defined for example in our society almost exclusively by economic performance). This stage of Ego development aligns with the True Formal Operational stage of Cognitive development.
Autonomous
The person with an autonomous Ego is aware of inner conflicts of needs vs duties and can integrate their own different identities. There is a concern for emotional interdependence and self-fulfillment and freedom from imposed ideas of right and wrong. They can tolerate ambiguity and integrate their own and others' ideas - their thought processes are at the level of Postformal Operations. The person with an autonomous Ego becomes a mentor for others, and sees the successful development of others as paramount to society. At this stage, he or she has overcome the Superego. This stage of Ego development aligns with the Postformal operational stage of Cognitive development. The Postformal individual is more intelligent about the systems that he interacts with, becoming able to manage, sustain, initiate and provide leadership for productive, inovative and well-run systems of organization.

Wisdom is more than performance and cognitive functioning or personal attributes. Instead, we may view wisdom as an aspect of Postformal development. Wisdom is the result of exceptional self-development, including Ego maturity and Postformal operational thinking. Postformal development is often associated with a decentering of the Ego and the ability to think dialectically, to reconcile opposites, wherein an individual is able to integrate various aspects of the psyche - the Ego, Shadow, Animus, Anima, etc. - and accept inherent contradictions and alternate truths.

Integrated
This is the self-actualizing individual who has a fully worked out identity. He or she has transcended internal conflicts and achieved a high degree of inner peace and poise, empowered by integration of their strong Ego with the whole of their being and a sense of unity with the world around them. He or she is rarely flustered or perturbed by difficulties, and tends to radiate a calmness, warmth and compassion for others that is always noticed by all around them. In terms of thought processes, the integrated person rediscovers Korzybski's notion that "the map is not the territory." The linguistic process of splitting into polar opposites and the attending value judgments can become conscious; they start to see life with a universal or cosmic perspective. Good and evil, life and death, beauty and ugliness may now appear as two sides of the same coin, as mutually necessitating and defining each other. Achieving this state of being requires parallel cognitive, emotional, personality, moral and spiritual development, described in further detail below. This stage of Ego development aligns with the Metavert stage of Cognitive development.

In summary, these stages portray development as encompassing increasingly complex perceptions of the self and others. Conscious preoccupations move from the concrete to the abstract, and time orientation shifts from the immediate to the long term. The perception of other people, initially organized around simple dichotomies (e.g., nice vs. mean) becomes increasingly complex, encouraging a greater toleration of individual differences. These changes are accompanied by increasing psychological awareness and recognition of one's own internal motivations.

When they are adults, most people would be at the Conventional level. Mind Development is an ideal method to take a student from Self-Aware through to Autonomous, and the The Insight Project course the rest of the way.

Cognitive Complexity
Flexibility, cognitive complexity, and increased tolerance for ambiguity are key components of Loevinger's model of Ego development. Ego development is characterized by a more differentiated perception of the self, the social world, and the relations of one's feelings and thoughts to those of others. Each successive stage reflects the development and increased complexity of personality dimensions. A student, then, cannot reach the highest levels of Ego Autonomy described by Loevinger - the Autonomous and the Integrated - unless he or she has reached the Postformal stage of operations.

There is a high correlation between Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development, Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development and Loevinger's Stages of Ego Development. Cognitive Development is a necessary condition for Moral Development, and Moral Development is a necessary condition for Ego Development. The independent variable that causes this high level of correlation is a subject's level of Cognitive Complexity. A variety of research suggests that people have the potential to gradually reach higher levels of mental complexity throughout the course of their lifespan. Cognitive Development increases the symbol space of the conscious mind as well as the speed at which it is accessed, in order to increase the capacity for cognitive complexity, with all the attendant benefits that ensue.

As our minds develop, an increasing complexity of cognitive operations is required in order to know, understand and manipulate the world around us. When we are infants, we experience a lack of differentiation between subject and object. In short, we are one with the world. However, as we grow, our capacity to distinguish ourselves from the exterior world develops. When knowledge is embedded in our subjective awareness, we are controlled by it, captive to it, and identified with aspects of its meaning. In contrast, knowledge becomes objective to us when we can take a perspective on it, hold it as external to our own experience, and take responsibility for it, because we are no longer captive to it. As humans grow and develop, we become increasingly objective in our perceptions of the world, eventually resulting in the ability to entertain multiple points of view beyond our own. The ability to abstract from concrete situations increases and we are capable of imagining many scenarios and possibilities.

At the Concrete Operational stage of cognitive development we make unilateral descriptions, focusing on one idea or argument and not identifying alternatives. As we develop toward Formal Operations we can identify simple and obvious conflicts but without making a deeper assessment of the situation. By the stage of late Formal Operations we are starting to perceive an emergent complexity; we can identify more than one possible explanation or perspective. True Formal Thought accompanies the ability to make broad and informed interpretations and we are able to manipulate ideas within the perspective that has been established. At the level of Postformal Operations we are capable of an integrated analysis of all relevant factors - we can review the situation in terms of a network of cause-and-effect relationships, extrapolate ideas, and approach the problem from a new point of view.

So, as our minds develop, our thinking becomes more complex. This complexity refers to the number of separate factors and variables which need to be taken account of. Analysis of a situation or issue recognizes the connections and relationships among these elements, and is necessary to see the full picture and all its implications. People who are capable of cognitive complexity are multidimensional in their thinking.

People capable of complex thinking tend to take in more information and form more well rounded impressions than less complex persons. They are more flexible and fluent with creative ideas in novel situations. Less complex minds are prone to polarize on an issue and stick with the established solutions of others; because they cannot perceive counter-arguments they are more open to persuasion.

As one progresses in level of Ego development there is increased variability in self-experience. It has been found that at lower levels of Ego development, evaluation of negative aspects of the self was more restricted compared to the positive aspects. Higher levels of Ego development are associated with greater recognition of negative aspects of self - there is more willingness to introspect in a realistic manner and to come to terms with Shadow aspects of the personality. Recent research at the Young Adult Development Project in Massachusetts revealed that enthusiasm, affection, concern and neutrality were directly associated with the higher stages of Ego development, whereas sadness and anger were inversely correlated with Ego development. These associations were similar for both genders.

Our cognitive ability also impacts human relations. People capable of a range of cognitive complexity from basic to advanced can relate happily to both a dustman and a university professor. Those with a low level of cognitive complexity stick to their own - they may experience problems of self esteem when they talk to people with more sophisticated minds, and they are prejudiced when they look down on people more basic than themselves.

Our ability to think about and integrate complex issues also relates to our ability to make ethical decisions. Systems of 'morality' are, essentially, a complex set of rules, with multiple levels of reward and punishment, aimed at regulating the behavior of those in a particular society. Such systems have their origins in the distinctly human ability to make reasoned choices, to make decisions about our human nature and what we wish to become. Morality is thus the embodying of particular values and options in ourselves and in our communities. However, the complexity of ethical issues do not readily present simple "right" or "wrong" solutions. It requires considerable intelligence to take account of multiple simultaneous ethical perspectives and to find harmony between dissonant value systems.