Healing the False Self Through Psychotherapy

Here Ken traces the progress of ego development through successive stages of unfolding, noting the different sorts of pathology that can occur at any given stage.  He describes this process as one of "subject becoming object," paying particular attention to a common mistranslation of Sigmund Freud—the famous quote "where id was, there shall ego be," which is an unnecessary convolution of his original words: "where it was, there shall I become."  By understanding these various dynamics of psychological reality, we go a long way toward healing the violent split that occurs between "false self"—that is, the often-tattered identity we walk around with every day—and the "actual self"—or the potential for full integration at whatever stage in our journey we might find ourselves.  By helping us to better translate our lives and our world in as healthy a way as possible, we can begin the slow process of transforming into bigger, better, and infinitely more fulfilled human beings.

Since Ken's hand-drawn graphic is not easy to see in this video, we have reproduced the image below, which shows some of the general stages of psychological development and the pathologies that can occur at each of these stages.  The graphic was reproduced from Ken's book A Brief History of Everything—but keep in mind that Ken is now working on a much more detailed presentation for his upcoming revision to Transformations of Consciousness, which you can hear more about in the Explore links below.