Erich Fromm
Author: Erich Fromm
Publisher: Continuum Impacts (2005)

Our ego is the most important object of our property feeling, for it comprises many things: our body, our name, our social status, our possessions (including knowledge), the image we have of ourselves and the image we want others to have of us. Our ego is a mixture of real qualities, such as knowledge and skills, and of certain fictitious qualities that we build around a core of reality. But the essential point is not so much what the ego's content is, but that the ego is felt as a thing we each possess, and that this 'thing' is the basis of our sense of identity.