Is there a clear definition of the ego which is accepted by the neuroscientific community?
I have seen a previous post (What do id, ego and super-ego exactly mean?) but this definition is for the Freudian concept of the ego. In neuroscience, the concept of ‘ego depletion’ is used (Baumeister) - but this has a different connotation.
I've read this opinion in Quartz
Axel Cleeremans pointed out that Freud’s Id-Ego-Superego structure roughly matches onto the Unconscious-Conscious-Metacognition structure of the mind studied in neuroscience today.
“The ‘id’ is what we call the unconscious today or the idea that there’s a vast reservoir of representations that sits there and influences ongoing processing but without being available to conscious awareness,” he says. “The ‘super-ego’ in a sense is connected with meta-cognition, with the idea that in addition to first-order awareness, the technical movie that we have as soon as we wake up and the field of sensations we experience and thoughts we have, there’s an additional monitoring and control system.”
Cleeremans believes that much of Freud’s work has scientific value today. “I think he’s wrongly discredited. He’s discredited for all sorts of political reasons that have nothing to do with the ideas,” he says. While Freud’s work on sexuality and women, for example, are largely dismissed, there’s still considerable value in broad structure of his work. “The core set of ideas hold up,” adds Cleeremans.
YMMV how correct or widely shared that view is. As far as I can tell Cleeremans is a psychologist, not a neuroscientist.
Also Freud's ideas are still pretty popular in France; I don't know about Belgium, but... it's close geographically; Cleeremans holds a professorship at a Francophone Belgian university.
You could also read Rizzolatti et al. "Linking psychoanalysis with neuroscience: the concept of ego." for more details. Looking at the authors' list of this paper, it does seem an interdisciplinary approach (one of the co-authors is affiliated with a neuroscience department). They seem to advance roughly the same analogy as Cleeremans:
We maintain that, in order both to act coherently and to have a basic, first person, understanding of the behavior of others, it is necessary to posit the existence of a neurophysiological "motor" ego similar to the "rider" of the Freudian metaphor. We review then a series of neurophysiological findings showing that the systems underlying the organization of action and conscious perception are both mediated by a cortical motor network formed by parieto-frontal circuits. In conclusion, we show that the activity of this network has strong similarities to that postulated by Freud for the conscious part of ego. We also propose that the default-mode network might represent that part of ego that is mostly involved in unconscious processes.
