Whatever the verdict of psychoanalysis proves to be it remains the mode of inquiry that most keenly raises the question of the ego and its relations with consciousness and with being. The latter give rise to the dialectic of the particular and the universal, but it is by no means obvious that this should necessarily play itself out through a structure such as the ego-self. If you bring in the constraints of biology and evolution, language and social being, it becomes more plausible, but these only serve as clarifications from the universal side and so they unbalance the relation of the original terms. What is needed, and what still remains mysterious is how this mediation works from the side of consciousness. But here theoretical solutions and explanations are otiose, it is the sharpening of the question that is required. This goes beyond what can be learned from pathologies - it enough to know that pathologies are always a possibility. To put it another way, why is it that the soul is such an effective term, and perhaps in the end there is none better, in the self-understanding of embodied consciousness? Or again, while nothing seems more self-evident than personal egoity, yet if you look more closely at it, there is nothing more strange and inexplicable.