Freud argues that psychoanalysis needs to focus on the role of the ego because previous psychological research focused excessively on the difference between the conscious, unconscious, and the repressed. He advocates the study of how the unconscious becomes conscious. To better understand this process, Freud describes a complex and dynamic topography of mental life.

First, Freud argues that preconscious ideas are connected to language, and especially to oral language. Language contains the “residue” of conscious ideas once held and can easily be recalled into the consciousness through “memory-traces.” (Freud argues that visual language is often more closely tied to unconscious thought.) The role of psychoanalysis, therefore, is to connect the unconscious to the preconscious through language.

It is easy to understand how the ego relates to external perceptions; it takes sensory information in as conscious ideas. However, the ego’s relationship to internal perceptions and processes is more complex. Freud notes that internal perceptions of pleasure or displeasure are “more primordial, more elementary, than perceptions arising externally” (12). Unpleasant sensations create an impulse for change, pleasant sensations create an impulse for “discharge,” or relief. Unpleasant sensations heighten mental energy (“energetic cathexis”); pleasant ones lower it.

Drawing from his clinical experience, Freud argues that the “pleasure-unpleasure series” (12) of mental processes create compulsions without the ego being aware of it. If these compulsions reach the preconscious system, they can enter into consciousness. If they do not, they are unconscious. Through thought and language, these unconscious internal thoughts can be perceived as if they were external stimuli and therefore pass into consciousness.

Freud summarizes the work of German physician Georg Groddeck who argued that the ego is “essentially passive.” It is at the mercy of “unknown and uncontrollable forces” (13). Freud terms these forces the “id.”

Freud then creates a diagram depicting the topography of the psyche that incorporates all of the above-discussed facets: consciousness and perception on the surface, preconsciousness just underneath. Underneath that is the ego, which in its lower portion is merged with the id. The ego is only cut off from the id by repression. The ego can also take in auditory information. The ego is effectively the part of the id that has been shaped by the influence of the consciousness, and it seeks to “substitute the reality principle for the pleasure principle” in the id (14). That is, the ego attempts to reign in or guide the id, as a rider attempts to reign in or guide a horse. The ego also functions as a mental projection of the body itself.

Freud argues that it is not accurate to say that “lower passions” (e.g. lust) reside solely in the unconscious nor that higher mental functions (e.g. mathematical ability) reside solely in the ego. For instance, one might sleep on a difficult math problem, allowing the unconscious to work, and wake up with a solution. Further, guilt, which is driven by high mental function, is often unconscious. Freud states that this “unconscious sense of guilt” (17) is often the source of mental pathologies and resistance to analysis.