Tribal identities are not entertained but imprinted. They go deeper than the ego which draws its flexibility by a peculiar symbiosis from their comparative rigidity; they are the soil from which ego-drives draw nourishment, joy, desire and pain working to the same end. Identities are beliefs while the ego is a kind of free energy at several removes from its sustaining grounds. Conversions are rare and even more rarely authentic. Defense mechanisms are technologies of belief and so are there to protect the underlying beliefs far more than the economy of the ego. Precisely the same facts can be available to everyone but their interpretations differ tremendously. What seems to be an unconscious mind from the ego's point of view is nothing but a mode of interpretation at a deeper level affecting the 'natural' appearance of things, a level whose element is war.