The Ego and the Id

The ego and the id describes the structural model that is now common knowledge; the id, ego, and superego. Prior to this, Freud used the topographical model of unconscious, pre-conscious, and conscious. The notion of the unconscious having explanatory power over conscious life is the essence of psychoanalysis. The essay begins with this, and then proceeds to lay out the limitations of the topographical model. The question is how does the unconscious get into the pre-conscious. There must be a censor of some sort which part of it which censors the unconscious is itself unconscious. But how would this fit into the topographical model, a mechanism which straddles the conscious and unconscious? Here comes the structural model of id, ego, and superego. The ego operates according to the reality principle, restraining the pleasure principle of the id. The ego can therefore be conscious and unconscious so long as it operates to both fulfill the demands of the id and the limits of the external world. Because of the ego, we can sustain long periods of unease so long as there is an opportunity to find pleasure down the road.

Freud's concept of pleasure and pain described in the prior essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle is a pessimistic one. Happiness is a sort of equilibrium, stability. It is pain that is a motivator to act. "Any given process originates in an unpleasant state of tension, i.e. with avoidance of pain or the production of pleasure". The pursuit of happiness is conservative, about conserving energy. Action doesn't reach toward any final goal, it is motivated by a quantitative disturbance. Pain and pleasure are only relevant according to this disturbance in the investment of energy. This energy "psychophysics" is beyond this book, but it does give insight into how nuanced Freud's argument is. This is the paradox of psychoanalysis, sometimes it appears to fit in with natural science. But then psychoanalysis posits unobservable explanations for naturalistic phenomena. However these unobservable explanations aren't supernatural. The job of the ego is to manage the expenditure of energy (called cathexis: the investing of energy into an object) to meet the competing demands of reality and the pleasure of the id. It may not be observable or measurable like the "physical" world but it is limited by it.

The ego is epiphenomenal. It rides atop the objective world described by physics and the unconscious realm of the id. Freud gives the metaphor of a man riding a horse, whose success entails satisfying the needs of the horse. He gets his power from the horse, his job is to direct the horse for his own needs as a conscious director working according to his foresight of environmental challenges (has a map I guess? I'm going a bit behind Freud's metaphor). But there is another demand on the poor ego, the superego. The superego is more complicated than I thought it was. Apparently it also gets its power from the unconscious despite being abstract. The superego is social morality. Although it seems abstract and universal like religion, it is inherently social. It emerges from the Oedipal desire to kill the father and love the mother. As this is not possible for the child, the child identifies with the father and seeks another woman to love. The female can also identify with the father apparently, but this isn't explained too much in this book. What happens is that the destructive desire of repressing the Oedipal desire becomes an ideal-self for the ego to achieve. The ego cannot fulfill its desire for the mother and hate for the father and must identify with them, and so the achievement of this is spurned by a negative emotion; guilt. This is explained in depth in other writings like Totem and Taboo, but the point is that the superego is an ideal ego which gets its power from repressed unconscious desire which internalizes social restriction.

With this tripartite model, conscious life seems very strained and weak. Freud says in Civilization and Its Discontents that "life as we find it is too hard for us". There are so many competing demands for the conscious self. The instincts, the external world, social obligations, and morality. But this is the cost of being a complex organism. Freud mentions that the long period of dependence on the parents from our Mammalian nature is responsible for this feeling of helplessness. We require so much to go right for us because of the complexity of our energy management and the limits of our budget. So we need to recognize the shortcuts that unconscious forces give us.

At the end of the Interpretation of Dreams Freud consoles us by saying we should not be held responsible for the seemingly immoral desires of the unconscious life.

"I think that the Roman emperor was wrong when he had one of his subjects executed because he had dreamt of murdering the emperor...would it not be right to bear in mind Plato's dictum that the virtuous man is content to dream what a wicked man really does? I think it best, therefore, to acquit dreams."

At the end of Ego and Id, he assured us that the id is neither moral or immoral. The superego of conscious is what provides morality. But we should not pretend that civilization can rid us of these undesirable feelings. These instincts in a controlled way make society and morality possible, and sure do take a load off of us. Surely the ego is at least strong enough to allow us to manage the instincts, fulfilling their needs.