Aladdin and the Ego-Genie
The ego is the part of the mind that manages self-esteem. The bigger the ego the higher the self-esteem, and vice versa. To accomplish anything worthwhile, the ego is necessary. It is what makes us think that we will succeed even when others have failed. Think of the fairy-tale knight, undaunted by scorched bones in the dragon cave; this is because of ego. The ego facilitates heroic feats. An overdeveloped ego, however, almost always brings disaster. It can even grow so big that it begins to supplant one’s primary identity with its own unbearably puffed-up persona. This is why the ego has such a bad reputation; it has become synonymous with this overdeveloped version of itself. Now, any ego is seen as a bad thing; we are told ‘ego is the enemy’, and are encouraged in the direction of ‘ego dissolution’, or ‘ego death’. The problem is: without the ego, there is no one dumb enough to challenge the dragon (you can substitute dragon with any daunting task). The ego is not the enemy; it is there to help us.
My favourite analogy for this is the genie in Disney’s Aladdin. The genie is the ultimate ego persona. He aids in Aladdin’s development, boosts his self-esteem and encourages him to try. The genie’s song, ‘Friend Like Me’, lists these benefits — which are also the benefits of ego: ‘You got some power in your corner now. Some heavy ammunition in your camp. You got some punch, pizzazz, yahoo and how’. Sufficient ego creates charisma, and as the embodiment of pure ego, there is no one more charismatic than the genie. When he emerges from the lamp, he is larger than life, bright blue, luminous, loud, funny, a showman, a master impersonator. Aladdin has quite literally never had a friend like this. This is how we should conceptualise the ego; as a powerful, charismatic friend, helping us to get what we want.
Another way of saying this is the genie grants wishes. This is its mythic function. You get three wishes with three caveats: you cannot kill someone, you cannot make someone fall in love with you, and you cannot bring someone back from the dead. Other than that, the genie is capable of fulfilling any desire. You can request wealth, power, presumably even immortality. The possibilities are endless. The problem is that most people do not know what to do with this sort of power. They make the mistake of identifying too closely with it and don’t know how to surrender it when they have accomplished their goal. This is what happens with the story’s villain, Jafar. Aladdin, on the other hand, is special in that he (spoiler alert) relinquishes the genie’s power. He does what no one before him has ever done: he uses his third wish to set the genie free.
To understand the enormity of this decision, let us put it in the context of Aladdin’s goal. In the beginning of the film, Aladdin is a beggarly thief. Naturally, he desires more. He wants what any poor young man wants: wealth, power, fame. This all changes when he meets a woman in the market who turns out to be the princess Jasmine. He instantly falls in love with her but knows he cannot pursue her because the law strictly states that she can only marry a prince. When Aladdin meets the genie, he uses his first wish to become a prince, adopting a new hybrid persona (a combination of Aladdin and the genie): Prince Ali Ababwa. When Jasmine meets this pretend Prince he behaves no different from any of the other self-absorbed princes she has met. He essentially falls for the ego-trap: an over-identification with the ego persona. When Jasmine recognises small glimpses of the man she met in the marketplace, he stupidly says, ‘The marketplace? I have servants that go to the marketplace for me. Why I even have servants who go to the marketplace for my servants, so it couldn’t have been me you met.’
When Jasmine eventually figures out who Prince Ali is, she asks him, ‘Who are you? Tell me the truth!’. He stammers in confusion. Who is he? Because of his over-identification with the ego persona he is not even sure of his identity. This uncertainty (and the memory of his former non-significance) makes him even more attached to the genie and the ego persona. When the genie reminds him that ‘he won’ already, Aladdin replies, ‘Because of you! The only reason anyone thinks I’m anything is because of you. What if they find out I’m not really a prince? What if Jasmine finds out? I’ll lose her. Genie, I can’t keep this up on my own. I can’t wish you free’.
Things become even more problematic when Aladdin is forced to use his second wish to save his own life. Jafar then takes control of the genie and identifies completely with the genie’s power. All hell breaks loose: His first wish is ‘to rule on high, as sultan!!!’. His second wish is ‘to be the most powerful sorcerer in the world!’. His third wish, however, is his undoing. Aladdin taunts Jafar by calling the genie superior to him. Jafar then wishes to be ‘an all powerful genie!’. He then grows into a large red genie and appears to be (or feels at least) omnipotent: ‘Yes! Yes! The power! The absolute power!’. This is his Icarus moment: ‘The universe is mine to command, to control!’. Unfortunately, as the genie states earlier in the film, the cost of ‘the whole genie gig’ is ‘phenomenal cosmic powers’ but ‘itty bitty living space’; i.e. the lamp. Jafar shrinks and disappears into the lamp, never to be seen again.
At this point of the story, with the villain defeated, Aladdin still has one more wish. He must decide between becoming a prince (so that he can marry Jasmine) or keeping his promise to set the genie free. To the genie’s surprise, Aladdin sets him free. He does what no one else was capable of doing before him; he relinquishes the power and with it, the ego persona. His reward: the sultan accepts him as a suitor, despite his princelessness.
The benefit of the Aladdin analogy is that it plays out externally what is, in reality, an internal and invisible struggle. This even applies to the animal characters in Aladdin, which are like the daemons in Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials: external representations of souls/ personas (the anima/ animus archetypes in Jungian terms). Aladdin has the mischievous monkey, Abu; Jasmine, the intimidating tiger, Rajah (who Jafar interestingly shrinks and cages when he takes control); and Jafar has the impatient and irritable parrot, Iago. Jafar says that he loves the way Iago’s ‘foul little mind works’, because it is a mirroring (a parroting) of his own abhorrent persona.
Jafar’s is a cautionary tale — not against the ego per se, but against an over-identification with or overdevelopment of the ego. Aladdin is referred to as ‘a young man [who] was more than what he seemed’, ‘a diamond in the rough’, ‘one whose worth lies far within’ — not because he is a beggar cum prince, but because he knew how to let the ego go.
