Id, ego and superego

For other uses, see Ego (disambiguation), ID (disambiguation), and Superego (disambiguation).

In psychoanalytic theory the “id, the ego and the superego” are three different, interacting agents in the psychic apparatus as Sigmund Freud summarized and defined it in his structural model of the psyche. He developed these three terms to describe the basic structure and various phenomena of mental life as they were encountered in psychoanalytic practice. Freud himself used the German terms das Es, Ich, and Über-Ich, which literally translate as "the it", "I", and "over-I". The Latin terms id, ego and superego were chosen by his original translators and have remained in use.

In the essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud introduced his "structural model" of the soul. It describes the instincts of the unconscious as the primary process, which the consciousness - the secondary process - values according to its socialisation and directs in relation to the reality. This second model - further refined and formalised in subsequent essays as The Ego and the Id - represents a response to the ambiguous/contradictory use of the terms conscious and unconscious in the first model of the soul.

In this ego psychology model of the psyche, the id is a set of uncoordinated instinctual needs; the superego plays the moralizing role via internalized experiences; and the ego is the perceiving, logically organizing agent that mediates between the id's instinctual desires, the demands of external reality and those of the critical superego; Freud compared the ego - in its relation to the id - to a man on horseback: the rider must restrain and direct the superior energy of his animal and at times allow for a satisfaction of its urges if he wants to keep it alive and the species healthy. The ego is thus "in the habit of transforming the id's will into action, as if it were its own."

Psychic apparatus

Freud's model of the soul, referring to his rider parable: The human head symbolizes the ego, the animal the id. Dualistic in an analogue way, the libidinal energy branch out from the id into two main areas: the mental urge to know and the bodily urge to act. Both are bundled into actions in the ego with aim of satisfying the id's needs. This includes the perception and valuation of external reality factors and leads to experiences that the superego internalizes through neuronal imprinting. In general, this instance contains the socialization that takes place during childhood; this gives it its function as our conscience. The borders between un- and consciousness aren't sharp: "Where id was, ego shall become."

In order to overcome difficulties of understanding as far as possible, Freud formulated his "metapsychology" which for Lacan represents a technical elaboration of the concepts of the soul model: dividing the organism into three instances the id is regarded as the germ from which the ego and the superego develop. Driven by an energy that Freud calls libido in direct reference to Plato's Eros, the instances complement each other through their specific functions in a similar way to the organelles of a cell or parts of a technical apparatus.

Further distinctions (as the coordinates of topology, dynamics and economy) encouraged Freud to assume that the metapsychological elaboration of the structural model would make it fully compatible with biological sciences such as evolutionary theory and enable a well-founded concept of mental health including a theory of human development, which naturally completed in three successive stages: the oral, anal and genital phase. However, as important as this is for the diagnostic process (llness can only be realised as a deviation from the optimal cooperation of all psycho-organic functions), Freud had to be modest and leave structural model in the unfinished state of a torso because - as he stated one last time in Moses and Monotheism - there was no well-founded primate research at the time. Without knowledge of the instinctive social behaviour with the corresponding structure of cohabitation of our genetically closest relatives in realm of primates, Freud's thesis of Darwin's primordial horde (as presented for discussion in Totem and Taboo) can't be tested and, if possible, replaced by a realistic model. Horde life and its violent abolition through introduction of mononogamy (as an agreement between the sons who murdered the horde's polygamous father) embody the evolutionary as well as cultural-prehistorical core of psychoanalysis. It stands in contrast to the religiously enigmatic reports about the origin of monogamous couples on earth as an expression of divine will, but closer to the ancient trap to pacify political conflicts among the groups of Neolithic mankind. (See Prometheus' uprising against Zeus, who created Pandora as a fatal wedding gift for Epimetheus to divide and rule the titanic brothers; Plato's myth of spherical men cut into isolated individuals for the same reason; and the similarly resolved revolt of inferior gods in the Flood epic Atra-Hasis). Additional important assumptions are based on it, such as the Oedipus complex, the origin of moral-totemic rules like Incest taboo and, not least, Freud's Unease in Culture. Nonetheless, due to the lack of ethological primate research, these ideas remained an unproven belief of palaeo-anthropological science – only a hypothesis or "just so story as a not unpleasant English critic wittily called it. But I mean it honours a hypothesis if it shows capable of creating context and understanding in new areas."

Id

Freud conceived the id as the unconscious source of all innate needs, emotional impulses and desires, including the sexual drive. The id acts driven by aggression (energy), it's "the dark, inaccessible part of our personality". It seems limited to analysis of dreams and neurotic symptoms, and can only be described in terms of its contrast with the ego. It has no organisation and no collective will: It only demands immediate gratification of its instincts according to the pleasure principle. It is oblivious to reason and the presumptions of ordinary conscious life: "contrary impulses exist side by side, without cancelling each other. . . There is nothing in the id that could be compared with negation. . . nothing which corresponds to the idea of time." The id "knows no judgements of value: no good and evil, no morality. ...Instinctual cathexes seeking discharge—that, in our view, is all there is in the id."

Developmentally, the id precedes the ego. The id consists of the basic instinctual drives that are present at birth, inherent in the somatic organization, and governed only by the pleasure principle. The psychic apparatus begins as an undifferentiated id, part of which then develops into a structured "ego", a concept of self that takes the principle of reality into account.

Freud understands the id as "the great reservoir of libido", the energy of desire as expressed, for example, in the behaviours of sexuality, the incorporation of food or the baby-care (maternal love). In general, the nature of libido is that of Platonic Eros, a universal desire that is inherent in all life instincts. They constantly strive to compensate for the processes of biological decay, rejuvenating the species of living beings by means of their metabolism and reproduction.

Complementing this constructive aspect of the libido, the author later postulated an inherent death drive, the Thanatos that has a decomposing effect and seeks "to lead organic life back into the inanimate state. For Freud, "the death instinct would thus seem to express itself—though probably only in part—as an instinct of destruction directed against the external world and other organisms" through aggression. Since libido energy encompasses all instinctive impulses, Eros and Thanatos are regarded as fundamental forces of the id, which co-operate despite their apparent incompatibility: The organism has the urge to 'synthetically' regenerate by integration of suitable molecules or energy into itself, for this purpose it must first deconstruct the ingested food complexes: the ‘analytical’ effect of stomach acid.

Ego

The ego acts according to the reality principle. It analyses complex perceptions (things, ideas, dreams), synthesises the appropriate parts into logically coherent interpretations (also models) and rules the muscular apparatus. Since the id's drives are frequently incompatible with the moral prescriptions and religious illusions of contemporary cultures, the ego attempts to direct the libidinal energy and satisfy its demands in accordance with the imperatives of that reality. According to Freud the ego, in its role as mediator between the id and reality, is often "obliged to cloak the (unconscious) commands of the id with its own preconscious rationalizations, to conceal the id's conflicts with reality, to profess...to be taking notice of reality even when the id has remained rigid and unyielding."

Originally, Freud used the word ego to mean the sense of self, but later expanded it to include psychic functions such as judgment, tolerance, reality testing, control, planning, defense, synthesis of information, intellectual functioning, and memory. The ego is the organizing principle upon which thoughts and interpretations of the world are based.

According to Freud, "the ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world. ...The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions... it is like a tug of war... with the difference that in the tug of war the teams fight against one another in equality, while the ego is against the much stronger 'id'." In fact, the ego is required to serve "three severe masters...the external world, the superego and the id." It seeks to find a balance between the natural drives of the id, the limitations imposed by reality, and the strictures of the superego. It is concerned with self-preservation: it strives to keep the id's instinctive needs within limits, adapted to reality and submissive to the superego.

Thus "driven by the id, confined by the superego, repulsed by reality" the ego struggles to bring about harmony among the competing forces. Consequently, it can easily be subject to "realistic anxiety regarding the external world, moral anxiety regarding the superego, and neurotic anxiety regarding the strength of the passions in the id." The ego may wish to serve the id, trying to gloss over the finer details of reality to minimize conflicts, while pretending to have a regard for reality. But the superego is constantly watching every one of the ego's moves and punishes it with feelings of guilt, anxiety, and inferiority.

To overcome this the ego employs defense mechanisms. Defense mechanisms reduce the tension and anxiety by disguising or transforming the impulses that are perceived as threatening. Denial, displacement, intellectualization, fantasy, compensation, projection, rationalization, reaction formation, regression, repression, and sublimation were the defense mechanisms Freud identified. His daughter Anna Freud identified the concepts of undoing, suppression, dissociation, idealization, identification, introjection, inversion, somatization, splitting, and substitution.

"The ego is not sharply separated from the id; its lower portion merges into it.... But the repressed merges into the id as well, and is merely a part of it. The repressed is only cut off sharply from the ego by the resistances of repression; it can communicate with the ego through the id." (Sigmund Freud, 1923)

In a diagram of the Structural and Topographical Models of Mind, the ego is depicted as being half in the conscious, a quarter in the preconscious, and the other quarter in the unconscious.

Superego

The superego reflects the internalization of cultural rules, mainly as absorbed from parents, but also other authority figures, and the general cultural ethos. Freud developed his concept of the superego from an earlier combination of the ego ideal and the "special psychical agency which performs the task of seeing that narcissistic satisfaction from the ego ideal is ensured...what we call our 'conscience'." For him the superego can be described as "a successful instance of identification with the parental agency", and as development proceeds it also absorbs the influence of those who have "stepped into the place of parents — educators, teachers, people chosen as ideal models".

Thus a child's super-ego is in fact constructed on the model not of its parents but of its parents' super-ego; the contents which fill it are the same and it becomes the vehicle of tradition and of all the time-resisting judgments of value which have propagated themselves in this manner from generation to generation.

The superego aims for perfection. It is the part of the personality structure, mainly but not entirely unconscious, that includes the individual's ego ideals, spiritual goals, and the psychic agency, commonly called "conscience", that criticizes and prohibits the expression of drives, fantasies, feelings, and actions. Thus the superego works in contradiction to the id. It is an internalized mechanism that operates to confine the ego to socially acceptable behaviour, whereas the id merely seeks instant self-gratification.

The superego and the ego are the product of two key factors: the state of helplessness of the child and the Oedipus complex. In the case of the little boy, it forms during the dissolution of the Oedipus complex, through a process of identification with the father figure, following the failure to retain possession of the mother as a love-object out of fear of castration. Freud described the superego and its relationship to the father figure and Oedipus complex thus:

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.

In The Ego and the Id, Freud presents "the general character of harshness and cruelty exhibited by the [ego] ideal — its dictatorial Thou shalt". The earlier in the child's development, the greater the estimate of parental power.

. . . nor must it be forgotten that a child has a different estimate of his parents at different periods of his life. At the time at which the Oedipus complex gives place to the super-ego they are something quite magnificent; but later, they lose much of this. Identifications then come about with these later parents as well, and indeed they regularly make important contributions to the formation of character; but in that case they only affect the ego, they no longer influence the super-ego, which has been determined by the earliest parental images.

— New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, p. 64.

Thus when the child is in rivalry with the parental imago it feels the dictatorial Thou shalt—the manifest power that the imago represents—on four levels: (i) the auto-erotic, (ii) the narcissistic, (iii) the anal, and (iv) the phallic. Those different levels of mental development, and their relations to parental imagos, correspond to specific id forms of aggression and affection.

The concept of the Oedipus complex internalised in the superego - anchored by Freud in the hypothetical murder of the forefather of the Darwinian horde by his sons - has been criticised for its supposed sexism. Women, who cannot develop a fear of castration due to their different genital make-up, do not identify with the father. Therefore, ‘their superego is never as implacable, as impersonal, as independent of its emotional origins as we demand of men...they are often more influenced in their judgements by feelings of affection or hostility.’ - not by fear of castration, as was the case with ‘Little Hans’ in his conflict with his father over his wife and mother. However, Freud went on to modify his position to the effect "that the majority of men are also far behind the masculine ideal and that all human individuals, as a result of their human identity, combine in themselves both masculine and feminine characteristics, otherwise known as human characteristics."

Advantages of the structural model

The iceberg metaphor. It's often used to illustrate the spatial relationship between Freud's first model and his new structural model of the soul (id, ego, superego).

In his earlier "topographic model", Freud divided the psyche into three "regions" or "systems": "the Conscious", that which is present to awareness at the surface level of the psyche in any given moment, including information and stimuli from both internal and external sources; "the Preconscious", consisting of material that is merely latent, not present to consciousness but capable of becoming so; and "the Unconscious", consisting of ideas and impulses that are made completely inaccessible to consciousness by the act of repression. By introducing the structural model, Freud was seeking to reduce his reliance on the term "unconscious" in its systematic and topographic sense—as the mental region that is foreign to the ego—by replacing it with the concept of the 'id'." The partition of the psyche outlined in the structural model is thus one that cuts across the topographical model's partition of "conscious vs. unconscious".

Freud favoured the structural model because of the increased degree of precision and diversification that it allowed. Although the id is unconscious by definition, the ego and the superego are both partly conscious and partly unconscious. With the new model, Freud felt he had achieved a more effective classification system for mental disorders than had been available previously:

Transference neuroses correspond to a conflict between the ego and the id; narcissistic neuroses, to a conflict between the ego and the superego; and psychoses, to one between the ego and the external world.

The three newly presented entities, however, remained closely connected to their previous conceptions, including those that went under different names – the systematic unconscious for the id, and the conscience/ego ideal for the superego. Freud never abandoned the topographical division of conscious, preconscious, and unconscious, though he noted that "the three qualities of consciousness and the three provinces of the mental apparatus do not fall together into three peaceful couples...we had no right to expect any such smooth arrangement."

The iceberg metaphor is a commonly used visual metaphor depicting the relationship between the ego, id and superego agencies (structural model) and the conscious and unconscious psychic systems (topographic model). In the iceberg metaphor the entire id and part of both the superego and the ego are submerged in the underwater portion representing the unconscious region of the psyche. The remaining portions of the ego and superego are displayed above water in the conscious region.

History and translation of the terms

The terms "id", "ego", and "superego" are not Freud's own; they are Latinizations by his translator James Strachey. Freud himself wrote of "das Es", "das Ich", and "das Über-Ich"—respectively, "the It", "the I", and "the Over-I". Thus, to the German reader, Freud's original terms are to some degree self-explanatory. The term "das Es" was originally used by Georg Groddeck, a physician whose unconventional ideas were of interest to Freud (Groddeck's translators render the term in English as "the It"). 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. Figures like Bruno Bettelheim have criticised the way "the English translations impeded students' efforts to gain a true understanding of Freud" by substituting the formalised language of the elaborated code for the quotidian immediacy of Freud's own language.

See also

• Censorship (psychoanalysis) – Barrier of the conscious and unconscious
• Ego death – Complete loss of subjective self-identity
• Plato's theory of soul – Plato's account of the soul as consisting of logical, spirited, and appetitive parts
• Psychology of self – Study of the representation of one's identity
• Resistance (psychoanalysis) – Term used in psychoanalysis describing oppositional behaviors

Further reading

• Freud, Sigmund (April 1910). "The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis". American Journal of Psychology. 21 (2): 181–218. doi:10.2307/1413001. JSTOR 1413001.
• 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 City, NY, 1961.
• Freud, Sigmund (1923), "Neurosis and Psychosis". The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIX (1923–1925): The Ego and the Id and Other Works, 147–154
• Gay, Peter (ed., 1989), The Freud Reader. W.W. Norton.
• Rangjung Dorje (root text): Venerable Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche (commentary), Peter Roberts (translator) (2001) Transcending Ego: Distinguishing Consciousness from Wisdom, (Wylie: rnam shes ye shes 'byed pa) Archived 2012-03-24 at the Wayback Machine
• Kurt R. Eissler: The effect of the structure of the ego on psychoanalytic technique (1953) / republished by Psychomedia

External links

• American Psychological Association
• Sigmund Freud and the Freud Archives Archived 2021-10-23 at the Wayback Machine
• Section 5: Freud's Structural and Topographical Model Archived 2011-09-03 at the Wayback Machine, Chapter 3: Personality Development Psychology 101.
• An introduction to psychology: Measuring the unmeasurable
• Splash26, Lacanian Ink
• Sigmund Freud
• Sigmund Freud's theory (Russian)
• Education portal's lesson on the id, ego, and superego
• Information on Charcot, Freud's teacher and mentor
• Background information on Freud