The Ego and the Id
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Sigmund FreudThe Ego and the Id
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Themes
The Conflict Between Ego and Id
In The Ego and the Id, Freud presents his theory of the psyche as a dynamic system whose fundamental relationship is the antagonism between the ego, or self, and the constellation of unruly and inchoate impulses that comprise the id.
Freud asserts that the id is “totally non-moral” (44). It operates in connection with the pleasure principle, the notion that the psyche moves toward things it finds pleasurable and away from things it finds unpleasurable. As such, it is largely animated by the life drive, or Eros—a life-affirming force that seeks to unify, sustain, and reproduce. The sexual aspect of this life drive is the libido. In seeking to satisfy the life drive, the id comes into conflict with a society that imposes distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable desires. The ego must negotiate these conflicts in order to function within society, and to do so it must learn to rein in the id’s unacceptable impulses. Freud uses the analogy of the horse and rider to describe the relationship of the id to the ego:
Thus in its relation to the id [the ego] 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. […] 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 (15).
Key to this analogy is that the horse is much larger and stronger than the rider. The rider cannot steer the horse as one would a car, but instead must secure the horse’s cooperation. To secure the cooperation of the id, the ego relies on “borrowed forces”—that is, the internalized familial and cultural authority represented by the super-ego. Even so, it is often difficult to tell who is guiding whom—the ego may direct the id, but only by offering a version of (or convincing substitute for) what the id already desires.
One method the ego uses to redirect the id’s energy is through identification. When the id fixes its desires on an unattainable or unacceptable object, the ego can redirect the id’s energy by taking on aspects of the unattainable object through the process of identification. This is “narcissistic libidinal cathexis” (48), in which the ego identifies itself with that which the id wants but can’t have. This process in childhood leads to the creation of the superego. The id fixes its desires on the parents; the child’s ego identifies with the parents and takes on aspects of their authority to expiate this desire for an unattainable object. As a result, the parents’ authority becomes part of the ego, representing the ideal to which the ego aspires. This ego ideal, reinforced through authoritative institutions like education and religion, becomes the superego. The distinction between the actions of the ego and the expectations of the superego are a key driver of feelings of guilt, both conscious and unconscious.
Freud argues that that which is unconscious in the id, ego, and superego can become conscious through the process of psychoanalysis, in which the patient learns to affix language to the inchoate aspects of the psyche.
The Pernicious Effects of Unconscious Guilt
In The Ego and the Id, Freud is particularly interested in unconscious guilt and its role in mental illness. He sees unconscious guilt as one of “the most powerful obstacles in the way of recovery” (17). He had previously explored the concept of unconscious guilt in his essays “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices” (1907) and “The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence” (1894), but in The Ego and the Id, he describes the process that gives rise to guilt in greater detail.
Freud argues that guilt is generated through interaction between the ego and the superego. The superego upholds the authoritative, moral ideal to which the ego aspires. When the ego fails to live up to the superego’s expectations, it experiences a feeling of guilt and condemnation. This dynamic can become pathological and lead to mental illness when the super-ego “displays particular severity and often rages against the ego in a cruel fashion” (41). This can lead to mental illnesses like “melancholia” and “obsessional neurosis.” Critical to Freud’s analysis is that this dynamic is internal. While the superego arises from the ego’s identification with external authority figures, primarily the parents, the feeling of guilt is generated from within the psyche, not in immediate reaction to say, physical punishment or verbal criticism.
In Part 5, Freud analyzes the processes that lead to unconscious guilt. He argues that the pathological repression of erotic impulses can lead to paralysis, blindness, pain, or other physical symptoms grouped under the term “hysteria.” Just as the self (the ego) represses the libidinous impulses of the id, it also represses the criticisms of the superego, leading to unconscious guilt that can be more psychologically damaging than conscious self-blame. Freud notes that this unconscious dynamic puts great strain on the sense of self. In its attempts to manage the id, the superego “chastises” the ego. “Helpless in both directions, the ego defends itself vainly, alike against the instigations of the murderous id and the against the reproaches of the punishing conscience” (43). This war on two fronts—against the unruly id on one side and the authoritarian superego on the other—takes place largely in the dark, on the subterranean level of the unconscious, leaving the individual unable to address or even recognize the source of their conflicted feelings.
For Freud, the purpose of psychoanalysis is to make these invisible conflicts visible. The unconscious guilt nurtured by the super-ego “produces powerful effects without itself being conscious and […] requires special work before it can be made conscious” (7). This special work takes place under the care of the psychoanalyst, offers the patient a chance to name and thus gain control over previously inchoate but powerful feelings.
The Interplay of the Life and Death Instincts
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud developed his theories about the life instinct or Eros, the force that drives a living being toward life-affirming and life-reproducing actions. This life force is closely tied to the libido, or sexual energy, but is not exclusively comprised of sexual energy. In the final chapter of that work, Freud sketched out his ideas about another force that impacts the dynamics of the psyche, the death drive, here translated as the “death instinct.” In The Ego and the Id, Freud builds on his discussion of the death instinct to illustrate how these two forces work both in tension and in concert with each other.
Freud argues that Eros and Thanatos (the death drive) exist in both fused and defused states. In their most polarized, defused forms, Eros enacts its main purpose—“that of uniting and binding” (35)—while the death drive seeks to destroy and separate. Both of these drives seek to return the organism to a stasis. The life drive seeks to maintain the organism’s existing state, that of life, while the death drive seeks to return it to its previous state, that of the inanimate object.
These two impulses exist simultaneously in the individual. As Freud argues, “the death instincts are by their nature mute and […] the clamour of life proceeds for the most part from Eros. And from the struggle against Eros!” (36) As both instincts exist simultaneously in fusion, they ultimately work in concert with each other. Freud uses the example of sexual orgasm and copulation to illustrate this point. Sexual release is part of the life drive, as it is constituent of procreation and the reproduction of life itself through fertilization. However, the death instinct also plays a part, as the organism seeks sexual release in order to lower its libidinal energy, that is return to a state closer to that of death. Freud argues that the mingling of the life and death drives in the act of sexual release “accounts for the likeness of the condition that follows complete sexual satisfaction to dying” (37).
In his topography of the psyche, Freud locates the life and death drives largely within the id, nothing that “Eros and the death instinct struggle within it” (49). The impulses of the id that the ego must mediate are created out of the conflict between these two drives.
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