The Ego and the Id, Freud (1923)

Conscious and Preconscious

Freud begins this work by dividing and categorizing. There are two types of mental elements, conscious and unconscious. And there are two types of unconscious elements, preconscious and repressed. Preconscious elements are thoughts that might not be conscious at the moment but can easily become conscious. Repressed elements are not as easily accessible, as they prevented from internal forces from becoming conscious and can only be made conscious through considerable effort (e.g., analysis).

Ego

Freud writes that the above distinctions are limited in their practicality, and so he proceeds to introduce new terminology. The ego, he writes, organizes mental processes, regulating the discharge of our excitations, repressing certain unconscious material. It contains elements that are conscious, but since it’s the ego that causes resistance in psychoanalysis, it follows that part of it is unconscious.

He next explains how it is that something that was unconscious can be made conscious. The answer is that everything that is unconscious was once conscious. We have conscious perceptions, sense-perceptions of the external world and internal perceptions of sensations and feelings. These perceptions become memories, and sometimes these memories become preconscious and sometimes repressed. And so to say that the unconscious becomes conscious is to say that we put into words a memory of one of these perceptions.

Id

Our psyche or mental apparatus can be reduced to the id. The ego is that part of the id which has been influenced by external sense-perceptions and internal perceptions (sensations and feelings) and follows the reality principle. The id proper (hereafter referred to simply as the id) is influenced by the instincts and follows the pleasure principle. The ego tries to control the id, but it must often submit to its will. The ego and the id can be compared to a man riding a horse: the man (ego) “tries to hold in check the superior strength of the horse” (id) and sometimes does so successfully, although sometimes the rider, “if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go.”

Superego

Just as the ego is part of the id, so too the superego is part of the ego. Whereas most of the ego is conscious, most of the superego is unconscious. The superego can be thought of as an inner voice of self-criticism and conscience. To explain it, Freud reminds readers of his earlier writing on melancholia. There he claimed that melancholics can be thought to have the object that they lost set up inside their ego, meaning that “the object-cathexis has been replaced by an identification.” Something similar happens during the formation of the superego.

Freud notes that the young boy initially cathects to his mother and identifies with his father. In time, he develops intense sexual desires for his mother; seeing his father as an obstacle to the fulfillment of these desires, he finds himself wanting to get rid of his father. Of course, this is not possible, and in response to this problem, the superego develops. Just as in real life, the boy’s father prevents him from fulfilling his desires, the superego “retains the character of the father” and represses his desires. The boy then intensifies his identification with his father and lesses his affection for his mother.

“As a child grows up, the role of father is carried on by teachers and others in authority; their injunctions and prohibitions remain powerful in the ego ideal and continue, in the form of conscience, to exercise the moral censorship. The tension between the demands of conscience and the actual performances of the ego is experienced as a sense of guilt.”

Instincts

There are two types of instincts, sexual instinct (Eros) and the death instinct. Sexual instincts include not only sexual desires but also the desire to continue living, to preserve life. The death instinct desires to return to the inanimate state. All living organisms contain both instincts.

But are these two instincts really different instincts or just different manifestations of the same instinct? To answer this question, he notes that the sexual instinct is characterized by love and the death instinct by hate. If love can turn into hate and hate into love, then it would seem that the sexual instinct and death instinct are not different. Although there are clinical examples in which a person’s love seems to transform to hate and vice versa, Freud says that it’s possible that something else is actually happening, namely the displacement of an energy from a loving impulse to a hateful impulse. In other words, Freud postulates that the mind contains displaceable energy that is different from both the sexual instinct and the death instinct.