The Ego and Defence Mechanisms: Boundary Policy in Action

I am the human ant, and my ego is not a king. Nor is it the "ego" a person supposedly gets too much of after a promotion. Arrogance is an action the system can produce; it is not the whole system.

The ego is the policy of boundary and regulation through which the nervous system translates emotional appraisal into an action of remaining: what receives weight, what opens or closes, which structure is preserved or changed, which action goes out, how far it reaches, whose movement it restricts, and who bears its cost.

The ego is not an organ, boundary, salt or reservoir of water. Attention, memory, inhibition, prediction, body representation and social learning are parts of the policy's distributed implementation. Through them the system allocates weight, capacity and price and organises action in the first person.