which expresses itself in the attempt to organise and understand experience. The process of understanding experience implies capacity to hold different bits of experiences together as parts of a unity and the capacity to evaluate them by being brought into mutual relation. The integration of the opposites of experience is a condition of emancipating consciousness from the thraldom of diverse compulsions and repulsions which tend to dominate consciousness irrespective of valuation. The early attempts to secure such integration are made through the formation of the ego as its base and centre.
The ego emerges as an explicit and unfailing accompaniment to all the happenings of mental life in order to fulfill a certain need. Ego arises to fulfill a need The part played by the ego in human life may be compared to the function of ballast in a ship. The ballast in a ship keeps it from oscillating too much. Without it the ship is likely to be too light and unsteady and is in danger of being overturned by the lawless winds. The psychic energy would be caught up endlessly in the multitudinous mazes of dual experience and would all be frittered away and dissipated if there were no provisional nucleus to take stock of all acquired experience and bind together the active tendencies born of the relatively independent and loose instincts inherited from animal-consciousness. The formation of the ego serves the purpose of giving a certain amount of stability to conscious processes and also secures a working equilibrium which makes for a planned and organised life.
It would be a mistake therefore to imagine that the arising of the ego is without any purpose. Necessary evil Though it arises only to vanish in the end, it does temporarily fulfill a need which could not have been ignored in the long
