I'm going to keep this essay open and come back to re-read it when I can give it the focus it needs.

I agree that ego has good and bad aspects. I don't love the term ego because it means different things to different people.

I prefer to think of ego as the human part of the human soul relationship/duality. Among other thoughts, I wrote in my https://medium.com/know-thyself-heal-thyself/the-human-spirit-duality-e456c0729e99

“Integration is supposed to be a state of seamless interdependence. Greg cannot nor should lose himself to us. We should exist in harmonious symbiosis, we should each be aware of the other and of our separate completeness; the only thought that existed of this before we just wrote it was one word–interdependence.”