“We have come upon something in the ego itself which is also unconscious, which behaves exactly like the repressed—that is, which produces powerful effects without itself being conscious and which requires special work before it can be made conscious.”

Here, Freud begins to lay out one of the key interventions in psychoanalytic theory he makes in this essay. Drawing from his clinical experience, Freud argues that the ego, which is typically closely connected with the conscious mind, also has an unconscious component. The “special work” to which Freud alludes here is the work of psychoanalysis.

“The question, ‘How does a thing become conscious?’ would thus be more advantageously stated: ‘How does a thing become preconscious?’ And the answer would be: ‘Through becoming connected with the word-presentations corresponding to it.’”

In some passages in the essay, Freud uses a conversational, rather than scientific, tone to make his argument. Here, he raises his own question and then responds to it, a rhetorical technique known as hypophora. It is used both to suggest and answer questions the reader might not have considered as well as to pique the reader’s interest.

“I am speaking of Georg Groddeck, who is never tired of insisting that what we call our ego behaves essentially passively in life, and that, as he expresses it, we are ‘lived’ by unknown and uncontrollable forces. We have all had impressions of the same kind, even though they may not have overwhelmed us to the exclusion of all others, and we need feel no hesitation in finding a place for Groddeck’s discovery in the structure of science.”

Georg Groddeck (1866-1934) was an eccentric German psychoanalyst and physician known as a “wild analyst.” While he was often highly critical of Freud, the two had a close working relationship. Freud’s citation of Groddeck here is indicative of the respect he had for Groddeck’s theories.

“We shall now look upon an individual as a psychical id, unknown and unconscious, upon whose surface rests the ego, developed from its nucleus the Pcpt [perceptual], system. If we make an effort to represent this pictorially, we may add that the ego does not completely envelop the id, but only does so to the extent to which the system Pcpt. forms its [the ego’s] surface, more or less as the germinal disc rests upon the ovum.”

In Part 2, Freud describes his theory of the structure of the psyche, the metaphorical spatial relations between the id and the ego. In his description of this structure, he also uses the metaphor of an egg. This metaphor is symbolically relevant to the argument he makes later in the essay about the life drive or Eros. The id in this metaphor is the germinal disc or blastodisc where cell division takes place in an egg: it is the site of life-reproduction just as the id is the site where the life drive is most active.

“The functional importance of the ego is manifested in the fact that normally control over the approaches to motility devolves upon it. Thus in its relation to the id it is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own strength while the ego uses borrowed forces. The analogy may be carried a little further. Often a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego is in the habit of transforming the id’s will into action as if it were its own.”

This analogy comparing the relationship between the id and the ego to that of the horse and its rider is one of the most commonly-cited ones in the study of Freudian theory. It neatly illustrates how the ego “the rider” must negotiate the impulses of the much stronger id “the horse.”

“When the ego assumes the features of the object, it is forcing itself, so to speak, upon the id as a love-object and is trying to make good the id’s loss by saying: ‘Look, you can love me too—I am so like the object.’”

This statement adopts a familiar tone to summarize the process by which the ego redirects the id away from an unattainable, external love-object (object-cathexis) inward, toward the self. Freud’s use of the first-person pronoun in ventriloquizing the ego highlights the status of the ego as “The I” or the site of self-identity.

“The broad general outcome of the sexual phase dominated by the Oedipus complex may, therefore, be taken to be the forming of a precipitate in the ego, consisting of these two identifications in some way united with each other. This modification of the ego retains its special position; it confronts the other contents of the ego as an ego ideal or super-ego.”

In this passage, Freud lays out his essential conclusion about The Conflict Between the Ego and the Id. He argues that the lingering elements of the child’s identification with the parents help to spur the creation of the super-ego. The super-ego is the mechanism by which the ego uses “borrowed forces” (15) to control the much stronger id.

“We see, then, that the differentiation of the super-ego from the ego is no matter of chance; it represents the most important characteristics of the development both of the individual and of the species; indeed, by giving permanent expression to the influence of the parents it perpetuates the existence of the factors to which it owes its origin.”

Freud here connects his theory of the individual psyche to the greater study of human evolution in arguing that the human species developed a super-ego because of its comparatively long childhood and complex social interdependencies. This is an early indication of how Freud would go on to apply his psychoanalytic framework to the study of human society more generally in works like Civilization and Its Discontents (1930).

“‘Very true,’ we can say, ‘and here we have that higher nature, in this ego ideal or super-ego, the representative of our relation to our parents. When we were little children we knew these higher natures, we admired them and feared them; and later we took them into ourselves.’”

Freud here writes as if he is directly addressing his critics or those skeptical of his claims in a subtle form of procatalepsis. He is anticipating and responding to an objection to his analysis. This fictional “exchange” points to a distinction between Freud and many of his contemporaries: Freud was not only interested in identifying and treating mental pathologies but in understanding the phenomena that govern the psyche as a whole, including the existence of the conscience.

“The tension between the demands of conscience and the actual performances of the ego is experienced as a sense of guilt.”

This statement summarizes The Pernicious Effects of Unconscious Guilt. Freud does not see guilt as primarily induced by external authorities but rather as driven by the internal struggle between the expectations of the super-ego and the actions of the ego.

“The question is: which was it, the ego of primitive man or his id, that acquired religion and morality in those early days out of the father-complex? If it was his ego, why do we not speak simply of these things being inherited by the ego? If it was the id, how does that agree with the character of the id?”

The series of questions Freud raises and later answers in his essay point to the arguments he later develops about the phylogenetic, or hereditary quality, of the id and its relationship to the development of moral guidance and conscience. Freud explores many of these questions in greater depth in his work Totem and Taboo (1913).

“On the basis of theoretical considerations, supported by biology, we put forward the hypothesis of a death instinct, the task of which is to lead organic life back into the inanimate state; on the other hand, we supposed that Eros, by bringing about a more and more far-reaching combination of the particles into which living substance is dispersed, aims at complicating life and at the same time, of course, at preserving it. Acting in this way, both the instincts would be conservative in the strictest sense of the word, since both would be endeavouring to re-establish a state of things that was disturbed by the emergence of life.”

Freud here summarizes his arguments about The Interplay of the Life and Death Instincts. Freud introduced these competing instincts in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). In The Ego and the Id, he describes in greater detail how these opposing forces work in concert.

“Once we have admitted the idea of a fusion of the two classes of instincts with each other, the possibility of a—more or less complete— ‘defusion’ of them forces itself upon us.”

Freud lays out that the two “classes” of “instincts” or drives work in a complex dynamic system. They are often “fused,” that is, both the life drive and death drive work together. However, they can also work “more or less” independently, in what Freud describes a “defusion.”

“For the opposition between the two classes of instincts we may put the polarity of love and hate.”

As described in the Analysis of Part 1, Freud often relies on the principles of thermodynamics as a metaphorical framework for describing the dynamics of the psyche. Here, he alludes to this metaphorical framework by describing “the polarity of love and hate,” connected to the defusion of the life and death drives. These emotions are polarized just as positive or negative ions are polarized in a thermodynamic system.

“The question arises whether in these instances we are to assume a direct transformation of hate into love. It is clear that here the changes are purely internal and an alteration in the behaviour of the object plays no part in them.”

Freud often asserts that feelings such as guilt, or in this case love and hate, are not connected to external events, such as “the behaviour” of the [loved or hated] object. Rather, they arise from internal dynamics of the psyche. This contributes to his overall tendency to focus on mental processes rather than material realities in his analysis.

“In the present discussion, moreover, I am only putting forward a hypothesis; I have no proof to offer. It seems a plausible view that this displaceable and neutral energy, which is no doubt active both in the ego and in the id, proceeds from the narcissistic store of libido—that it is desexualized Eros.”

Many of the arguments Freud makes in The Ego and the Id, such as this argument about desexualized Eros as a primary source of mental energy, are hypotheses. The essay overall makes few definitive statements, but rather sets out a framework for future research to prove or disprove these hypotheses.

“If this displaceable energy is desexualized libido, it may also be described as sublimated energy; for it would still retain the main purpose of Eros—that of uniting and binding—in so far as it helps towards establishing the unity, or tendency to unity, which is particularly characteristic of the ego.”

In Freud’s description of The Conflict Between Ego and Id, the energy of the desexualized ego is the material that moves through the dynamic system of the psyche, much as electrons move through thermodynamic systems. The notion of “desexualized libido” might seem like an oxymoron, but it is illustrative of how Freud deploys notions of opposing forces throughout the work, such as the collaborative opposition between the life and death drives.

“[T]he ego, by sublimating some of the libido for itself and its purposes, assists the id in its work of mastering the tensions.”

The translation of Freud’s language in this text, and to some extent Freud’s original German itself, gives agency to the individual components of the psyche. The ego “assists” the id; the id “work[s]” to navigate the tensions between the life and death drives. Ascribing these components agency frames the psyche as a composite of semi-independent structures with their own sets of rules and motivations.

“Thus the super-ego is always close to the id and can act as its representative vis-à-vis the ego. It reaches deep down into the id and for that reason is farther from consciousness than the ego is.”

Freud’s conclusion here about the relationship of the super-ego to the id is a key finding he relies on to refute the claims made by others that the id does not govern higher-level thought processes like morality. He asserts that, in fact, the super-ego “reaches deep down into the id,” meaning that the internal moral guide is in fact born out of the most basic drives of the id, the life and death drives.

“[A]nalysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient’s ego freedom to decide one way or the other.”

Freud does not describe his clinical practice in detail in The Ego and the Id, but this comment in a footnote illustrates a crucial aspect of his view of the purpose of psychoanalysis. He believes its purpose is not to impose a cure for “pathological reactions”—that is, mental illness—but rather to give the patient the opportunity to decide whether to address mental pathologies. This view set Freud apart from many of his contemporaries at the time.

“One may go further and venture the hypothesis that a great part of the sense of guilt must normally remain unconscious, because the origin of conscience is intimately connected with the Oedipus complex, which belongs to the unconscious. If anyone were inclined to put forward the paradoxical proposition that the normal man is not only far more immoral than he believes but also far more moral than he knows, psycho-analysis, on whose findings the first half of the assertion rests, would have no objection to raise against the second half.”

Freud here argues that “the normal man” is “far more moral than he knows” because of his assertion that the super-ego is largely unconscious. Therefore, a normal person would be largely unaware of the moral frameworks governing his ego’s actions.

“From the point of view of instinctual control, of morality, it may be said of the id that it is totally non-moral, of the ego that it strives to be moral, and of the super-ego that it can be supermoral and then become as cruel as only the id can be.”

This statement neatly summarizes the relationship of the super-ego to morality. The prefix “super” here (über in the original German) should not be understood as “special” or “excellent,” but rather as an indication of its position “above” other elements.

“Psycho-analysis is an instrument to enable the ego to achieve a progressive conquest of the id.”

Freud here uses martial language that is reprised at the end of the essay. He describes how the ego can “achieve a progressive conquest of the id,” much as an invading army can take over a foreign territory. Through putting words to the unconscious, the patient can achieve greater control over the impulses that drive the id.