ABSTRACT
On the surface, the fact that the ego has ‘returned’, broadly speaking, to psychology of personality may seem a sign of the durability of a philosophical or theological soul. The mind (the soul, psyche, self, or ego) was unacceptable to an objective psychology because it certainly was not open to public scrutiny and in no sense yielded to experimental probing. But such a soul had already been sent into oblivion by philosophers who, failing to find some circumscribed or encapsulated entity, tried to substitute for it some pattern of psychical elements. Failing in this, they turned to behavioural dispositions which, in the main, could be acquired and observed in a society, and which could be related to, if not identified with, brain processes.
