Ego, super-ego, and id

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The ego, super-ego, and id are the divisions of the psyche according to the psychoanalytic theory developed by Sigmund Freud. 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.Image:Structural-Iceberg.jpg Most people who identify with the contemporary school of ego psychology place its beginnings with Sigmund Freud's 1923 book The Ego and the Id (1923), in which Freud firmly established what would later come to be called the structural theory of psychoanalysis. However, the first traces of the theory remain in his essay "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" (1920), in which it was adopted because of his dissatisfaction with the topographic scheme (Cs, Ucs, Pcs). The structural theory divides the mind into three agencies or "structures": the id, the ego, and the super-ego.

1 Freud's structural theory
2 Working together
3 See also
4 References and Further Reading
5 External links

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Freud's structural theory

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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. 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 personal pronoun and is translated as 'I myself'.

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Super-ego

The super-ego is an internalization of the father figure and cultural regulations. The super-ego tends to stand in opposition to the desires of the id because 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. In Freud's later works such as Civilization & Its Discontents and Totem & Taboo he also discusses the concept of a 'cultural super-ego'.

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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 Project.

Freud borrowed the term das Es from personal acquaintance with the ideas of Georg Groddeck, a pioneer of psychosomatic medicine, who published Das Buch vom Es, roughly, "The Book of It", in the same year that Freud published The Ego and the Id (1923). German readers would have been aware that this pronomial personification of impersonal natural law went back to Nietzsche, at least.

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Working together

The ego, super-ego, and id work together to control the body. For example a newborn baby, when he is hungry, will cry for his mother. This is because the id is hungry and the ego has worked out that a mother will feed her crying baby. However, when an adult is hungry, she will not cry. This is, in part, because the ego knows that her mother will no longer come to feed her, but also in part, due to the super-ego which knows that crying is not a socially acceptable reaction to being hungry.

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References and Further Reading

Burger, J.M. (2004). Personality. Belmont, CA: Thompson-Wadsworth.
Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
Freud, S. (1923). The Ego and the Id.
Freud, S. (1910). The origin and development of psychoanalysis. American Journal of Psychology, 21(2), 196-218.
Gay, Peter. Ed. (1989). The Freud Reader. W.W. Norton.
Myers, D.G. (2004). Psychology. New York: Worth Publishers.

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