Leila Ainge

speaker

1,507 appearances 7 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 10 Aug

Leila Ainge’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 5.

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Psychologically Speaking with Leila Ainge · Evidence Over Ego: Why Curiosity Leads to Better Decisions · 29 Jul 2026 podcast

And that's why one question that I have almost had to become a reflex is, what perspective can I see?

Now, this is probably why I am so drawn to art and poetry and museums alongside psychology journals.

None of them tell me what to think.

They invite me to pause or to notice and to reflect and to ask another question.

And I think this is what good research does too, because it doesn't give us certainty.

It's not going to hand it to us tied up in a nice little neat bow.

it just gives us another perspective.

But before we get into it, it's worth mentioning that psychologists don't actually agree what ego is.

Now, one of the godfathers, if you like, of psychology, Freud, imagined it as the part of us trying to negotiate between our impulses, our conscious and our reality.

So in his model, the ego isn't a villain.

It's this kind of negotiator trying to keep everything in balance.

But I do feel that I need to mention a perspective here, which is a feminist one, because Freud also believed that women were, in psychological terms, defined largely by what they lacked.

And his theory of penis empathy suggested that women developed a sense, or girls, developed a sense of inferiority when they realized they did not have a

penis.

Obviously, one of the central feminist critiques of this idea and one that was brought to the front by Karen Horney, who argued that Freud had mistaken social inequality for biological destiny.

I couldn't agree more.

But rather than women feeling inherently inferior, she suggested that what Freud observed was the psychological impact of living in a society where women

women didn't hold power, status and opportunity.

What has changed?

You know, maybe not a lot.

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