Id, ego and super-ego

The ego, super-ego, and id are the divisions of the psyche according to psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud's "structural theory". The id contains "primitive desires" (hunger, rage, and sex), the super-ego contains internalized norms, morality and taboos, and the ego mediates between the two and may include or give rise to the sense of self.

"Tip of the Iceberg" — Structural and Topographical Models of Mind

History

Most people who identify with the contemporary school of ego psychology place the theory's beginnings with Freud's 1923 book The Ego and the Id, in which he firmly established his structural theory. However, the first traces of the theory appear in his essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), in which it was introduced due to his dissatisfaction with his topographic scheme (conscious, unconscious, preconscious). The Ego, the Id and the Ideal of the Ego was then used in Group Psychology and Ego Analysis (1921); Freud would later replace the "Ideal of the Ego" by the Super-Ego.

Freud's structural theory

Ego

In Freud's theory, the ego mediates between the id, the super-ego and the external world. Its task is thus to find a balance between primitive drives, morals and reality. Its main concern is with the individual's safety, and allows some of the Id's desires to be expressed, but only when consequences of these actions are minimal.

Although in his early writings Freud equated the ego with the sense of self, he later began to portray it more as a set of psychic functions such as reality-testing, defence, synthesis of information, intellectual functioning, and memory.

The word ego is taken directly from Latin where it is the nominative of the first person singular personal pronoun and is translated as "I myself" to express emphasis.

Super-ego

The super-ego is a symbolic internalization of the father figure and cultural regulations. The super-ego tends to stand in opposition to the desires of the id because of their conflicting objectives, and is aggressive towards the ego. The super-ego acts as the conscience, maintaining our sense of morality and the prohibition of taboos. Its formation takes place during the dissolution of the Oedipus complex and is formed by an identification with and internalization of the father figure after the little boy cannot successfully hold the mother as a love-object out of fear of castration. "The super-ego retains the character of the father, while the more powerful the Oedipus complex was and the more rapidly it succumbed to repression (under the influence of authority, religious teaching, schooling and reading), the stricter will be the domination of the super-ego over the ego later on — in the form of conscience or perhaps of an unconscious sense of guilt" (The Ego and the Id, 1923). The concept of super-ego has been subject to criticism for its sexism. Women, who are considered to be already castrated, do not identify with the father, and therefore form a weak super-ego, apparently leaving them susceptible to immorality and sexual identity complications. In Freud's work Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) he also discusses the concept of a "cultural super-ego".

Id

The id ("das Es", cf. Latin id, English it, German es) is the psychical system "which behaves as though it were the Unconscious", or the "dynamically unconscious repressed", in effect, the reservoir of need-gratification impulses such as the primitive instinctual drives of sexuality and aggression. Freud believed that the id is inborn, operating on the dynamics of the primary process mode of thinking. The drives of the id are said to work according to the pleasure principle, requiring immediate gratification or release without concern for external exigencies. Though hunger itself may be seen as a pure id desire, the crying of the hungry infant is already an instinctive attempt to relate, that is, to communicate that need to the object of the drive in question, namely, one who can help to satisfy that need. Thus drives are linked to object relations, as Freud observed in his 1895 essay "Project for a Scientific Psychology".

Freud may have borrowed the term das Es from his advocate and personal acquaintance Georg Groddeck. Groddeck, a pioneer of psychosomatic medicine and self-proclaimed "wild analyst", published Das Buch vom Es (roughly, "The Book of It") several weeks before Freud published The Ego and the Id (1923). German readers would have been aware of Nietzsche's previous use of "it" to describe that which is impersonal and subject to natural law within us.

Collaboration and coordination

The id, the ego, and the super-ego collaborate to serve the needs of the body and to control the conduct of the person. For example, an infant will cry when hungry, because the long evolutionary history of the species that a convenient figure of speech dubs the "id" has provided this means for attracting, indeed, compelling the attention of one who fills a suitably coevolved caregiver role. However, an adult will not normally cry when hungry, because the more experienced ego has learned that the same recourse is no longer available, and also because the enculturated super-ego embodies the information that crying is not a socially acceptable reaction to being hungry. It may be pertinent in this connection that an infant in German is referred to under a grammatically neuter gender, in other words, as an "it".

References and further reading

• Burger, J.M. (2004), Personality, Thompson-Wadsworth, . Belmont, CA.

• Freud, Sigmund (1910), "The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis", American Journal of Psychology 21(2), 196–218.

• Freud, Sigmund (1920), Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

• Freud, Sigmund (1923), Das Ich und das Es, Internationaler Psycho-analytischer Verlag, Leipzig, Vienna, and Zurich. English translation, The Ego and the Id, Joan Riviere (trans.), Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-analysis, London, UK, 1927. Revised for The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, James Strachey (ed.), W.W. Norton and Company, New York, NY, 1961.

• Gay, Peter (ed., 1989), The Freud Reader. W.W. Norton.

• Myers, D.G. (2004), Psychology, Worth Publishers, New York, NY.

See also

People

Abraham, Karl Adler, Alfred Ferenczi, Sándor Jones, Ernest Jung, Carl

Klein, Melanie Lacan, Jacques Laplanche, Jean Loevinger, Jane Reich, Wilhelm

Related topics

Alter ego Ego psychology Collective unconscious

Consciousness Egolessness Instinct

Mind Self (psychology) Unconscious mind

External links

• American Psychological Association

• Sigmund Freud and the Freud Archives

• Section 5: Freud's Structural and Topographical Model, Chapter 3: Personality Development Psychology 101.

• lacan dot com, Jacques Lacan in the US

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