Horses and riders

Any of us who have been introduced to the working world and the monster known as "market" have a good grasp of what ego stands for. Bonus if you work in any creative area - it is most likely you have had first hand encounters with textbook examples of an inflated ego. Ego is your sense of self, but not just that.Let us recap what Freud says about the ego in psychoanalysis. While id is the primal self, the instincts within us, ego is the counterbalance to the id constructed by our social experiences. It is the "reasoning", the sensible part of our self. As Freud himself exemplified, if the id was a horse, the ego would be the person riding it.Ego can too be a great barrier to creativity. Think of how this sense of self, this awareness of social response to your actions, regulates your instincts. You might be driven to create for a pure, instinctive need to say something, but the social component filters what you deem worth of saying. Or good enough, or necessary, whatever funnel those experiences translate to. Of course, ego is also what will regulate what you are saying, transpose it to an intelligible result, edit. It is fuel and it is also a leash.My understanding is that ego is not only beneficial as it is necessary to be a creator. It is what makes the instinct to pass on a message connect to people, to our environment and social circumstances. The ego transforms our primal into sociable. It helps interpreting the language of the animal self, whatever feelings embedded in that creation that turn to thoughts, metaphors, philosophy. And although not every creator seeks recognition in the most common sense of the word, recognition - the awareness, a state of being acknowledged - seems quite attached to creation. Who are we saying something to? A poem is still a poem if no one reads it. It has the form of a poem, but I wonder if it takes someone else's ego to interpret it into what we call poetry.Like the old-question-turned-meme poses: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?-Maíra