The ego as pilot is taxed with a number of tasks such as meeting bodily, mental social needs as these are presented to it - it does not generate them itself but has them thrust upon it - and it does more or less well at these. Some are beyond its capacity, or they fall upon it without warning, and so it has a sense of its own strengths and capacities which it would naturally seek to augment. Such tasks are in service to goals, are instrumental, and so the corresponding abilities have nothing in them per se that could ground that fragile love of self known as egotism. This latter is an excess and its source remains a mystery - it derives from a imagined judgment in relation to which, since one cannot influence it directly, one has a magical and superstitious relation.