Control

Lacking the normal, protective barriers of inhibition,
the normal, organically determined boundaries of self,

the (...) ego is subject to a lifelong bombardment.

He is beguiled, assailed, by impulses from within and without,

impulses which are organic and convulsive,

but also personal (or rather pseudo-personal) and seductive.

How will, how can, the ego stand this bombardment? Will identity survive?

Can it develop in face of such a shattering, such pressure - or will it be overwhelmed (...)?

[Can it be] held whole and sovereign or [will it] be taken over,

possessed and dispossessed,

by every immediacy and every impulse.

Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat

Certainly, here Oliver Sacks is talking about Tourette's . But is this not, grotesquely exacerbated, an eerily accurate portrayal of a certain temperamental disposition? A lurid reminder? It is hard not to occasionally remember how the mantra that we belong to ourselves may readily disappear: now a second nature reality, tomorrow a fugitive phantom, the stuff of thought, held in place only by a painfully conscientious process of the rational mind.

Living in a world void of any certainty, a permanent anxiety looms beneath the surface of every moment. All action, thought, decision - however simple and inconsequential - carries the burden of a Damocles' sword. Tomorrow's ego fears the temper and resolutions of today's. And when tomorrow lies permanently under the sharp blade of a potentially radical change of heart - how can the ego not live in a state of permanent anxiety? There is no control. One is merely swept away from one shore to another, where its reason must constantly dock and deal - held in a state of painful, permanent acuteness - with whatever happens to have come its way.

There is a lot to be said about the comfort of feeling at peace with one's own identity - a sense of self that does not shift and metamorphose incessantly, right from underneath the stand of reason. That does not make the ego a stranger to his own mind, stranger still to all of his loved ones. That braves the flow of time. That stays recognisable, giving some support to this illusion of the permanency of the soul. That tomorrow it shall not awake trapped - stripped of its proprioception of the psyche - into the unrecognised, unassumable and sometimes ghastly imprisoning life of a past-self long gone.