Two methods to shatter an ego.
Learnt this the real hard way.
Let me personify ego.
a) Clutch it in one quick firm grasp right in the neck and hit it so hard squarely on its head that it dies before it realizes that it is suffocating to death because of the asphyxiating grasp.
(This according to me is far less cruel.)
b) Pamper it a bit. Let its ego ( ego's ego) get to the head slightly. Know what it is like to revel in slight superiority. Then make it understand that it is going to be not destroyed but annihilated. Make it understand the fundamentals of Chemistry. " All elements are made up of small ( for most practical purposes indivisible) particles called atoms". Rip it atom by atom, molecule by molecule. But again not fast. Make it understand in the process that it is dying. Dont let it die without recognizing what is going on. Make it realize that its not dead, may be it never will die, but the destruction will continue for eternity. It can only think of half-life. May be its too radioactive to be theoretically destroyed. Give it a fake and completely ephemeral joy of building itself back and then again do the destruction. This time a little more slowly but a lot more severely.
Slow and steady. Patient and Ruthless. Meticulous and continuous. Unbiased and uniform.
There is only question or may be rhetoric that remains with the battered ego: " What have I been reduced to ? "
Reminded of this amazing line in 1984.
"....A needle slid into Winston's arm. Almost in the same instant a blissful, healing warmth spread all through his body. The pain was already half-forgotten. He opened his eyes and looked up gratefully at O'Brien. At the sight of the heavy, lined face, so ugly and so intelligent, his heart seemed to turn over. If he could have moved he would have stretched out a hand and laid it on O'Brien's arm. He had never loved him so deeply as at this moment, and not merely because he had stopped the pain. The old feeling, that at bottom it did not matter whether O'Brien was a friend or an enemy had come back. O'Brien was a person who could be talked to. Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as be understood. O'Brien had tortured him to the edge of lunacy, and in a little while, it was certain, he would send him to his death. It made no difference. In some sense that went deeper than friendship, they were intimates: somewhere or other, although the actual words might never be spoken, there was a place where they could meet and talk.... "
At times the ego does feel like how Winston Smith feels here. Inexplicable masochistic tendencies of an otherwise normal human - I would call it that.
