The Freudian “ego” – Repression and rationality

I shall begin this chapter by exploring the Freudian model of the natural person, a very different one from my own. But I shall show that as the Freudians' interest expanded from psychopathology to embrace normal psychology, many of them developed models of “ego-autonomy” corresponding quite closely to my own model of the autarchic chooser. In ego-autonomy they found too the germs of personality ideals like integration, self-determination, and self-realization, ideals which are a good deal older than psychoanalysis. I consider these ideals further in Chapter 11 in order to examine more fully the relation between the notions of the ego and of the self which they presuppose. In this chapter I look at the relation between autonomy and two other ideals with which it is easily confused, particularly since the term “autonomy” is often used in connection with them.

In my discussion of “positive freedom” in Chapter 9, I referred to various traditional accounts of the relation between reason and passion, of how a person might be liberated from enslavement to “the mere impulse of appetite” by obedience to a nomos and of freedom as conformity to the law of reason. I elicited from a critique of this tradition the distinction between autarchy and autonomy, the latter a creative disposition to strive for coherence and the elimination of conflicts and inconsistencies latent in one's hitherto unexamined belief structure, as they are forced on one's attention by new and unfamiliar situations.