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    The Ego and the Id
    The Ego and the Id
    The Ego and the Id
    Ebook57 pages1 hour

    The Ego and the Id

    By Sigmund Freud

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    In what is considered one of his most prominent ideas, Austrian psychiatrist, Sigmund Freud explains the dynamic of the human psyche in terms of the roles and conflicts produced by the id, ego, and super-ego. Freud suggests that all human behaviors and traits, including personality disorders, are created by the complex conflicts and workings of these three components of human personality.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherReading Essentials
    Release dateDec 4, 2018
    ISBN9781773233574
    The Ego and the Id

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      The Ego and the Id - Sigmund Freud

      Ego

      Preface

      THE present discussions are a further development of some trains of thought which I opened up in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), and to which, as I remarked there, my attitude was one of a kind of benevolent curiosity. In the following pages these thoughts are linked to various facts of analytic observation and an attempt is made to arrive at new conclusions from this conjunction; in the present work, however, there are no fresh borrowings from biology, and on that account it stands closer to psychoanalysis than does Beyond the Pleasure Principle. It is more in the nature of a synthesis than of a speculation and seems to have had an ambitious aim in view. I am conscious, however, that it does not go beyond the roughest outline and with that limitation I am perfectly content.

      In these pages things are touched on which have not yet been the subject of psycho-analytic consideration, and it has not been possible to avoid trenching upon some theories which have been put forward by non-analysts or by former analysts on their retreat from analysis. I have elsewhere always been ready to acknowledge what I owe to other workers; but in this instance I feel burdened by no such debt of gratitude. If psychoanalysis has not hitherto shown its appreciation of certain things, this has never been because it overlooked their achievement or sought to deny their importance, but because it followed a particular path, which had not yet led so far. And finally, when it has reached them, things have a different look to it from what they have to others.

      I. Consciousness and What is Unconscious

      IN this introductory chapter there is nothing new to be said and it will not be possible to avoid repeating what has often been said before.

      The division of the psychical into what is conscious and what is unconscious is the fundamental premiss of psychoanalysis; and it alone makes it possible for psychoanalysis to understand the pathological processes in mental life, which are as common as they are important, and to find a place for them in the framework of science. To put it once more, in a different way: psychoanalysis cannot situate the essence of the psychical in consciousness, but is obliged to regard consciousness as a quality of the psychical, which may be present in addition to other qualities or may be absent.

      If I could suppose that everyone interested in psychology would read this book, I should also be prepared to find that at this point some of my readers would already stop short and would go no further; for here we have the first shibboleth of psychoanalysis.

      To most people who have been educated in philosophy the idea of anything psychical which is not also conscious is so inconceivable that it seems to them absurd and refutable simply by logic. I believe this is only because they have never studied the relevant phenomena of hypnosis and dreams, which-quite apart from pathological manifestations-necessitate this view. Their psychology of consciousness is incapable of solving the problems of dreams and hypnosis.

      ‘Being conscious’ is in the first place a purely descriptive term, resting on perception of the most immediate and certain character. Experience goes on to show that a psychical element (for instance, an idea) is not as a rule conscious for a protracted length of time. On the contrary, a state of consciousness is characteristically very transitory; an idea that is conscious now is no longer so a moment later, although it can become so again under certain conditions that are easily brought about. In the interval the idea was-we do not know what. We can say that it was latent, and by this we mean that it was capable of becoming conscious at any time. Or, if we say that is was unconscious, we shall also be giving a correct description of it. Here ‘unconscious’ coincides with ‘latent and capable of becoming conscious’. The philosophers would no doubt object: ‘No, the term unconscious is not applicable here; so long as the idea was in a state of latency it was not anything psychical at all.’ To contradict them at this point would lead to nothing more profitable than a verbal dispute.

      But we have arrived at the term or concept of the unconscious along another path, by considering certain experiences in which mental dynamics play a part. We have found-that is, we have been obliged to assume-that very powerful mental processes or ideas exist (and here a quantitative or economic factor comes into question for the first time) which can produce all the effects in mental life that ordinary ideas do (including effects that can

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