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    The Ego and the Id
    The Ego and the Id
    The Ego and the Id
    Ebook97 pages1 hour

    The Ego and the Id

    By Sigmund Freud

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    “Many major ideas have been borne out [of his theories] and are still relevant today.” —Huffington Post
    One of famed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s most prominent ideas was that of the id, the ego, and the super-ego—the three main factors behind the workings of the human mind. Freud claimed these components of the human psyche controlled all processes of personality, behaviors, and traits in a person.

    The Id was a person’s most basic and impulsive instincts—the ones that feed into our deepest desires and physical needs. The Super-Ego was the opposite of the id. This component controlled our highest morals and standards, operating through our conscience and making us desire to be our most ideal-selves. The piece in the middle is the Ego. The ego mediates between the id and realities of the world around us, while being supervised (and guilted) by the super-ego.

    In this new edition of his book, The Ego and the Id, Sigmund Freud delves deeper into the concepts of the human mind and the results of the conflicts and workings between them.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherClydesdale
    Release dateMay 7, 2019
    ISBN9781945186936
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      Book preview

      The Ego and the Id - Sigmund Freud

      First published in 1923 by Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag (Vienna)

      First Clydesdale Press Edition 2019

      Translation © 2019 by Clydesdale Press

      All rights to any and all materials in copyright owned by the publisher are strictly reserved by the publisher.

      Clydesdale books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or info@skyhorsepublishing.com.

      Clydesdale Press™ is a pending trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

      Visit our website at www.skyhorsepublishing.com.

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

      Series design by Brian Peterson

      Cover artwork credit: iStockphoto

      Print ISBN: 978-1-945186-79-0

      eISBN: 978-1-945186-93-6

      Printed in the United States of America

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      The Ego and The Id

      I. Consciousness and The Unconscious

      II. The Ego and The Id

      III. The Ego and The Super-Ego (Ego Ideal)

      IV. The Two Types of Instincts

      V. The Dependencies of the Ego

      In This Edition

      Afterword

      References

      Endnotes

      THE EGO AND THE ID

      The following discussion continues the train of thought that had begun in my work Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and which, I personally—as noted therein—approach with a conscience of benevolent curiosity. This work takes up those ideas, links them to various facts of analytical observation, and culls from this amalgamation to derive new conclusions but borrows nothing new from biology and thus remains closer to psychoanalysis than Beyond the Pleasure Principle. If anything, this bears more a character of synthesis than speculation and appears to have set itself a lofty goal. However, I know that it stops at a rough synopsis and am quite alright with this limitation.

      This work mixes in things not yet become subject to psychoanalytical treatment and also cannot avoid grazing many a theory proposed by non-analysts or former analysts in their retreat from analysis¹. I otherwise have always been ready to recognize my indebtedness to other workers, but in this case, I feel unburdened by any such debt of gratitude. If psychoanalysis has so far not valued certain things, this has never occurred because it overlooked their accomplishments or wanted to disavow their significance, but because it followed a particular path that has not yet borne it so far. And eventually, when it has arrived there, things will also seem different to it than to others.

      I

      CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

      In this introductory chapter there is nothing new to say, nor can it refrain from the repetition of what was so often said before.

      The differentiation of the psychical into consciousness and the unconscious is the basic tenet of psychoanalysis and alone gives it the possibility to understand the equally common and important pathological² procedures in the psyche and to categorize them within the science. Again, put differently: psychoanalysis cannot reposition the essence of the psychical in consciousness, rather it must see consciousness as a quality of the psychical, which must go along with the other qualities or keep apart.

      If I could imagine that all interested in psychology would read this text, I also at this point would have prepared for a portion of the readers already to stop and go no farther, for here is psychoanalysis’ first shibboleth³. For most of the philosophically educated, the idea of a psyche which is not also conscious is so unfathomable that it appears absurd, and by sheer logic, unprovable. I believe that is only because they haven’t studied the pertinent phenomena of hypnosis and dreams, which—quite aside from just pathologically—compel such a notion. Their psychology of the unconscious is also inapt, however, for solving the problem of dreams and hypnosis.

      To be conscious is, first of all, a mere descriptive term, which itself invokes the most direct and important perception. Experience shows us that a psychical element (e.g., an idea) is usually not perpetually conscious. Rather it is typical that the state of consciousness passes quickly; that the now conscious idea is, in the next moment, no longer so, but it can be so again under easily produced conditions. What it was in between we do not know; we can say that it has been latent,⁴ and meaning therefore, that at any time it was able to become conscious. As well, if we say it has been unconscious, we have given a correct description. This unconscious state then coincides with the latent ability to become conscious. Certainly the philosophers would chime in: No, the term unconscious does not apply here, as long as the idea was in a state of latency, it was not in the least psychical. Were we to then contradict this point, we would thus get into a debate, in which neither side allows itself defeat.

      However, we have come to the term or concept of the unconscious by another path, through the workmanship of experience, in which mental dynamics⁵ play a part. We have learnt, that is, we must accept that there exists a very robust mental process or set of processes—here a quantitative and also economic element⁶ comes into consideration—that can have all the effects in the inner life that the psyche can have, like random ideas, as well as such effects that in turn can, as ideas, become conscious, only they themselves are unconscious. It is not important to repeat here in detail what so often has been described⁷. Suffice, at this point, to apply the psychoanalytical theory and aver that such ideas cannot be conscious, because a certain force resists them. Otherwise they could become conscious, and we’d then see how little they differ from other accepted psychic elements. This theory would thus be irrefutable, for they have found within the psychoanalytical field, a means to lift the resistant force and, with its aid, can make the ideas in question conscious. The state in which they resided before consciousness we call repression and the force which induced the repression⁸ and upheld it, we argue, is felt as resistance⁹ during analytical work.

      Our term of the unconscious we obtained too from the theory of repression. The repressed is for us the paragon of the unconscious. We see, however, that we have a twofold unconscious, the latent, yet able to become conscious, and the repressed, which, in and of itself and by implication, is unable to become conscious. Our insight into the psychical dynamics cannot remain without impact on the nomenclature¹⁰ and descriptions. We call the latent only what is descriptively unconscious, not, in the dynamic sense, preconscious; the name unconscious we limit to the dynamic unconscious repressed, so we have now three terms, conscious (cs), preconscious (pcs), and unconscious (ucs), no longer in the merely descriptive sense. Consider the pcs, which lies closer to the cs than to the ucs, and since we have called the ucs psychical, we will do the

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