The word ‘ego’ has become part of everyday language to describe who we are. Sometimes the word evokes a little shiver of recognition, that it comes from the writings of Sigmund Freud, but often those hints at psychoanalysis – sexual repression, objects of desire, the unconscious, and so on – are wiped away so that the ‘ego’ can appear to us as something more innocent than it really is. When the word appeared in English as a psychoanalytic term (alongside the ‘superego’ and the ‘id’) it was actually designed by the translators of Freud to function as a more scientific designation of the everyday German terminology employed by Freud when he spoke of the ‘Ich’, which was our old friend, the ‘I’.

When psychoanalysts describe the bizarre ways that ‘I’ functions – piecing itself together out of images of significant others, splitting itself into bits that are held close or spat out, gluing the whole of our being to it and insisting that others are understood within its frame – it is actually more disturbing to keep in mind that this is what we build our everyday reality upon. This, already, is the stuff of fantasy, this ‘I’. The unconscious material that swells around its edges, and which we like to keep at a distance when we see it represented by those schooled in psychoanalytic theory, is already washing around inside our thoughts, colouring our perceptions of every object around us.