ego

The thinking, active self; the self conceived of as the organizing and continuing subject of experience and the author of action. In Kant there is a distinction between the empiricial ego, given in ordinary self-consciousness, and the transcendental or pure ego, which cannot be known but must be presupposed for our experience to have the unity that it needs in order to be experience at all. In Freudian psychology the ego is the conscious self, occupying a beleaguered middle ground between the disreputable demands of the id, and the repressive discipline of the superego. See also Cartesian ego, personal identity.