Philosophers seem to me to start by looking at the concept of self as a logical problem of separating the individual and his or her consciousness from the world around it. The word "ego," which simply means "I" or "myself" in Latin, does not have any other specific meaning from a philosophical viewpoint: the ego is the self, or the self as it is perceived in the mind of a conscious human subject. Although this basic idea of the self as a separate individual may seem like one of the most obvious and "self-evi

After I reached this conclusion, I felt a little more secure about the ultimate source of my self and my ego, but strangely enough I still did not understand the reason or motive for its existence. Obviously, it was possible for me to imagine the non-existence of myself and even the non-existence of the world, and it this was possible, it should also be possible for God to imagine the non-existence of the world-- and, therefore, for the world not to exist at all. Without even asking myself the next obvious question (would God exist if the world did not exist), I began to wonder what the purpose of existence itself was. When I say this, I do not mean that I was asking questions like, "Who am I?" and "What is my purpose in life?" These selfish questions of the ego now seemed to me to depend on a much more basic question: why did God make the world at all?

By the time I became a teenager, I realized that not only was I not the center of the universe, but I was just one of the billions of people in the world. The disappearance of my self from the world, the most frightening possible concept to the ego, would only matter to a very few of those billions of people. At the same time, it became very important to me to be significant to some other person of the opposite sex. My ego became wrapped up in this need to be wanted by someone else, and I became extremely self-conscious, like most teenagers. I was obsessed with the way I dressed, the way my hair was combed, and most of all with whether or not other people thought I was attractive and intelligent. I am not sure that completely understood why this was so important at the time-- my selfish "ego" was almost like an instinctive drive.

Some topics in this essay:
Sigmund Freud, PERSONAL VIEW, concept ego, ego self, philosophical question, world exist, existence world, ego separate, center universe, self world, rest world, conscious mind, exist world exist, ego separate self,