The ego is structured around a historically receding spiral of primary wounds, or reflexes of contraction. Assuagement and solace are real and provide the matrix for desire, and recurrence as these measures always ultimately fail. The details of these wounds themselves are unconscious but they produce a very familiar context of feeling. But there cannot be a wound without an ego to register it as such, and there cannot be an ego without such a prior wound - its origin is in no one moment of time but in a developmentally mediated 'deferred action'. It is a sense, a way of interpreting others and the world, a pattern for coincidence. Maintaining the wound as wound is one of your strongest motives - without it you would likely vanish.