The Ego and the Id

Summary

The Ego and the Id (Das Ich und das Es, Vienna, 1923) is the short, dense treatise in which Freud replaced his earlier map of the mind, divided into conscious, preconscious and unconscious systems, with the structural model of id, ego and super-ego. Joan Riviere's English translation, revised by Ernest Jones, Anna Freud and James Strachey, appeared in 1927; her note calls it 'this very obscure book'. Freud himself describes its thoughts as synthetic rather than speculative and says they offer only the baldest outlines. The argument proceeds in five chapters. Chapter I restates the distinction between conscious and unconscious, then reports a clinical puzzle: the resistance a patient shows in analysis comes from the ego, yet the patient is unaware of it. Part of the ego must therefore be unconscious without being repressed, so 'unconscious' can no longer serve as the basic dividing line. Chapter II borrows the term 'id' (Es) from the physician Georg Groddeck, who held that we are 'lived' by unknown forces, and pictures the ego as the part of the id modified by contact with the outside world through perception. The ego represents reason and sanity against the passions; it is like a rider who must often guide his horse where the horse wants to go, and it is 'first and foremost a body-ego'. Chapter III introduces the super-ego, or ego-ideal. Building on 'Mourning and Melancholia', Freud argues that the ego is formed largely by identifications with abandoned love-objects, and that the decisive identification with the parents at the close of the Oedipus complex sets up an inner agency of command and judgment. Conscience, the sense of guilt, and what people call the higher nature of man are, on this account, the parents taken into the self. Freud presents religion, morality and social feeling as derived from this 'father-complex'. Chapter IV applies his new dual theory of instincts, Eros and the death instinct, to the structure. Chapter V shows the ego as a 'poor creature owing service to three masters', the external world, the id and the super-ego, and explains the unconscious sense of guilt, the 'negative therapeutic reaction' of patients who get worse as treatment succeeds, the merciless super-ego of melancholia, and the fear of death. The book's vocabulary entered ordinary speech, often in loose forms, so reading it repays students who want to know what Freud actually claimed. It also contains his most direct naturalistic account of conscience and religion. A Christian reader can grant the force of his clinical observations about guilt that punishes without accusing, while questioning whether the origin of moral judgment in childhood explains away its truth, and whether a conscience formed by parents may also answer to a law not invented by them.

Plot or Argument

• Translator's note and introduction

  Riviere explains that the translation was discussed with Freud and revised by Jones, Anna Freud and Strachey. Freud presents the book as a development of Beyond the Pleasure Principle that draws no further on biology, and declares himself under no obligation to acknowledge theories by non-analysts or former analysts.

• I. Consciousness and the unconscious

  Freud restates that psychoanalysis cannot treat consciousness as the essence of mind, and distinguishes the descriptively unconscious but latent preconscious (Pcs) from the dynamically unconscious repressed (Ucs). He then reports that resistance in analysis comes from the ego without the patient knowing it. Hence part of the ego is unconscious though not repressed: all that is repressed is unconscious, but not all that is unconscious is repressed. Neurosis must now be explained as a conflict between the organized ego and what is repressed, not between conscious and unconscious.

• II. The ego and the id

  Asking how anything becomes conscious, Freud links preconscious thought to verbal memory-traces and contrasts it with older, more primitive thinking in pictures. Following Georg Groddeck, he names the unknown, unconscious depth of the mind the id; the ego develops from the perceptual system on its surface, substitutes the reality-principle for the pleasure-principle, and controls movement. He compares ego and id to rider and horse, and calls the ego first and foremost a body-ego, the projection of the body's surface.

• III. The ego and the super-ego (ego-ideal)

  Extending his account of melancholia, Freud argues that lost or abandoned love-objects are set up again inside the ego by identification, so that character is a precipitate of past object-choices. The resolution of the Oedipus complex leaves a special identification with the parents, the super-ego, which keeps the father's character and grows more severe the more forcefully the complex was repressed. Freud answers critics who accuse psychoanalysis of ignoring man's higher nature by locating that higher nature in the super-ego, and derives religion, morality and social feeling from the father-complex.

• IV. The two classes of instincts

  Freud adopts the instinct theory of 1920: Eros, which binds living matter into larger unities, and a death instinct, which seeks to return life to the inorganic state and is represented outwardly by sadism and destructiveness. He discusses the fusion and defusion of the two, proposes a neutral displaceable energy (desexualized libido) at the ego's disposal, and suggests that sublimation, by desexualizing libido, may leave the destructive tendency freer.

• V. The subordinate relationships of the ego

  The super-ego, formed from the id's earliest object-cathexes, stands closer to the id than the ego does. Freud explains the unconscious sense of guilt that shows itself in the negative therapeutic reaction, contrasts the self-reproaches of obsessional neurosis with those of melancholia, where the super-ego becomes 'a pure culture of the death-instinct', and portrays the ego as a borderland dweller serving three masters and facing three anxieties. He ends by treating the fear of death as a matter between ego and super-ego and by describing the id as having no unity of will.

Characters

• The id (das Es), mental agency

  The unknown, unconscious reservoir of instinct, ruled by the pleasure-principle, in which Eros and the death instinct contend; it 'cannot say what it wants'.

• The ego (das Ich), mental agency

  The organized portion of the mind that grows from the perceptual surface of the id, controls movement, applies the reality-principle, and is partly unconscious; pictured as rider, borderland dweller and servant of three masters.

• The super-ego (ego-ideal), mental agency

  The inner agency of conscience and self-judgment formed by identification with the parents at the close of the Oedipus complex; it can be harsh enough in melancholia to drive the ego toward death.

• Georg Groddeck, cited source

  German physician whose Das Buch vom Es (1923) supplied the term 'id'; Freud notes in a footnote that Groddeck followed Nietzsche's use of the impersonal 'it' for what is natural in us.

• Joan Riviere, translator

  British psychoanalyst whose 1927 translation, published in the International Psycho-Analytical Library, is the library's text; she discussed the work with Freud himself.

Lessons

• Rider and horse: who governs the soul?

  Freud's image of the ego as a rider who must often go where the horse wants recalls Plato's charioteer and the tripartite soul of the Republic, but with a crucial difference: for Plato reason has its own strength and a natural right to rule, while Freud's ego 'uses borrowed forces' and often merely disguises the id's wishes as its own. Comparing the two pictures helps students ask whether reason can actually govern desire, and what Scripture's account of the divided will (Romans 7) adds to both.

  • In Chapter II, what is the 'difference' Freud adds to the rider analogy, and why does it matter for his view of reason?
  • How does Freud's ego compare with the rational part of the soul in Plato's Republic?
  • Paul writes, 'the good that I would I do not'. Is that the same experience Freud describes, or a different diagnosis?

• When the unconscious is not the same as the repressed

  Chapter I turns on an honest admission: clinical evidence forced Freud to revise his own categories. Because resistance comes from an ego that does not know it is resisting, he concluded that the ego too is partly unconscious, and rebuilt his theory around structure rather than awareness. The chapter models a habit worth teaching: letting a stubborn observation overturn a convenient vocabulary, while noticing how much the new structure still depends on interpretation.

  • What observation in analysis led Freud to say that part of the ego is unconscious?
  • Why does Freud say the property of being unconscious 'begins to lose significance' once a third unconscious is admitted?
  • Is Freud right that the 'philosophers' who equate mind with consciousness simply have not studied hypnosis and dreams?

• Conscience as inheritance: an account to test

  Chapter III gives Freud's most direct naturalistic explanation of conscience: the higher nature of man is the parents 'taken into ourselves', and religion arises from longing for a father. The account deserves a fair hearing, since it explains why guilt can be severe, irrational or out of proportion to any act. But an explanation of how a capacity develops does not by itself settle whether its judgments are true. Students should distinguish genetic explanation from evaluation, and compare Freud with Romans 2, where the law is written on the heart, and with Augustine's account of conscience before God.

  • What does Freud mean by calling the ego-ideal 'the heir of the Oedipus complex'?
  • If a person's conscience was shaped by parents and teachers, does it follow that its verdicts are merely parental? Give reasons.
  • Freud says the sense of worthlessness of the believer 'attests his longing' for a father. How might a Christian reader answer this from the text of the Gospels?

• The guilt that punishes without accusing

  In Chapter V Freud describes patients who grow worse whenever treatment succeeds, and concludes that an unconscious sense of guilt is 'finding atonement in the illness'. He notes that this guilt is 'dumb': it never tells the patient he is guilty. Here Freud is closest to the pastoral tradition, which also knows of scruples and of self-punishment that refuses comfort; the difference lies in the remedy, analytic insight for Freud, confession and forgiveness for the Church.

  • What is the 'negative therapeutic reaction', and why does Freud call it the most powerful obstacle to recovery?
  • How does Freud distinguish the self-reproach of obsessional neurosis from that of melancholia?
  • What is the difference between guilt that leads to repentance and guilt that only seeks punishment? Does Freud's account allow for the first?

• Reading a technical vocabulary carefully

  Words such as ego, id, super-ego and 'cathexis' now circulate loosely. Freud's own uses are precise and sometimes surprising: the ego is partly unconscious, the super-ego is closer to the id than the ego is, and the id has 'no unity of will'. Close reading of definitions, and of the places where Freud says his diagrams have 'no pretensions to any special applicability', is training in intellectual honesty with any influential theory.

  • Find two places where Freud warns against taking his spatial pictures too literally. Why does he still use them?
  • Why does Freud say the super-ego stands closer to the id than the ego does?
  • Choose one term from this book that has entered everyday speech and compare its popular meaning with Freud's.

Context

Das Ich und das Es was published in April 1923 by the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag in Vienna. It completed a turn in Freud's theory begun in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), with its new dual theory of instincts, and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), with its discussion of identification and the ego-ideal. Shortly after publication Freud was found to have cancer of the jaw, the illness that shaped the rest of his life.

Composition

Freud worked on the book in 1922 and previewed its central idea, an unconscious part of the ego, at the International Psycho-Analytical Congress in Berlin that September. The term 'id' came from Georg Groddeck, whose Das Buch vom Es appeared the same year. Joan Riviere's translation was published in 1927 by the Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis in the International Psycho-Analytical Library; it is the library's text.

Reception

The structural model became the standard frame of psychoanalytic theory and of the ego psychology developed by Anna Freud in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936) and by Heinz Hartmann. Freud himself revised its account of anxiety in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926) and extended its account of the super-ego and guilt in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). James Strachey's later version appears in volume XIX of the Standard Edition. The book was included in volume 54 of the second edition of the Great Books of the Western World (1990).

Comparisons

• Beyond the Pleasure Principle

  Beyond the Pleasure Principle introduced the death instinct by way of repetition, war dreams and biology; The Ego and the Id sets that instinct theory aside as already established and puts it to work in Chapter IV, explaining sadism, melancholic self-hatred and the harshness of conscience.

• A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis

  The 1915-17 lectures explain neurosis through the conscious-preconscious-unconscious scheme and repression; Chapter I of The Ego and the Id announces that this scheme leads to 'endless confusion' and replaces it with a conflict between the organized ego and the repressed.

• Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego

  Group Psychology (1921) first worked out identification and the ego-ideal through crowds, armies and churches; The Ego and the Id internalizes these mechanisms, deriving the super-ego from the child's identification with the parents and social feeling from an ego-ideal held in common.

• Civilization and Its Discontents

  The super-ego's severity and the unconscious sense of guilt sketched in Chapter V become, in the 1930 book, the price civilization exacts from every individual, with aggression turned inward as conscience.

• The Republic

  Plato's division of the soul into reason, spirit and appetite is the classical ancestor of a three-part mind; but Plato's reason rules by right and by its own strength, whereas Freud's ego rules by borrowed force and serves rather than commands.

• On the Genealogy of Morality

  Nietzsche's account of bad conscience as instinct turned inward anticipates Freud's super-ego that has taken up 'the whole of the sadism available'; Freud's footnote credits Nietzsche, through Groddeck, with the impersonal 'it' that names the id.

• Confessions

  Augustine also discovers a self he does not know, in the vast halls of memory and in a will divided against itself; but he seeks the cure in God who knows him better than he knows himself, where Freud seeks it in analysis extending the ego's 'conquest of the id'.

Quotes

Medical Lens

A primary text in the history of psychiatry: the source of the id-ego-super-ego model that framed psychoanalytic and much psychodynamic clinical thinking for decades. Clinically pertinent material includes the unconscious resistance that prompted the revision (Ch. I), the body-ego and the role of pain in learning the body (Ch. II), the extension of 'Mourning and Melancholia' to identification with lost objects (Ch. III), and in Ch. V the negative therapeutic reaction, the contrast between obsessional neurosis, hysteria and melancholia, the observation that the obsessional patient seldom attempts suicide while the melancholic is in danger of it, the turn into mania as escape from the super-ego, and a theory of the fear of death. Freud's mechanisms are theoretical constructs inferred from analytic practice, not measured findings; present them as his account. His anatomical analogies (the 'cortical homunculus', the auditory lobe) are illustrations he himself says have no special applicability.

• Ch. I, paragraph beginning 'In the further course of psycho-analytic work'

  A patient's associations fail near the repressed; the resistance comes from the ego, yet the patient does not know it, which leads Freud to an unconscious portion of the ego.

  Psychology Unconscious Physicians Doctors
• Ch. I, discussion of hypnosis and dreams

  Freud says philosophers who think unconscious mental life absurd have not studied hypnosis and dreams, which require the concept.

  Dreams Nightmares Psychology Unconscious
• Ch. II, paragraphs on the body and the body-ego

  The body's surface yields both external and internal perceptions; the way painful illness teaches us about our organs is offered as a prototype of how we come to know our own body.

  Mind Body
• Ch. III, opening paragraphs

  Freud recalls his explanation of melancholia as the reinstatement of a lost object within the ego and generalizes it to the formation of character.

  Melancholia Depression Grief
• Ch. V, paragraphs on the negative therapeutic reaction

  Patients worsen as treatment progresses; after subtracting defiance and the advantages of illness, Freud identifies an unconscious sense of guilt that finds atonement in suffering.

  Physicians Doctors Neurosis Anxiety Psychiatry History
• Ch. V, comparison of obsessional neurosis, hysteria and melancholia

  In melancholia the super-ego rages against the ego and may drive it to death unless it escapes into mania; the obsessional patient, by contrast, almost never attempts suicide and is better protected than the hysteric.

  Melancholia Depression Suicide Mania Hysteria Neurosis Anxiety
• Ch. V, closing paragraphs on the fear of death

  Freud rejects the slogan that every fear is fear of death, then explains the fear of death in melancholia as the ego abandoning itself when it feels hated by the super-ego, relating it to birth anxiety and separation from the mother.

  Death Dying Melancholia Depression Neurosis Anxiety

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Write a dialogue between Plato's Socrates and Freud about the rider-and-horse and charioteer images: who holds the reins, by what right, and with whose strength?

• Essay

  Freud says the ego-ideal 'answers in every way to what is expected of the higher nature of man'. Write an essay that sets out his argument fairly, then asks whether explaining where conscience comes from settles whether it tells the truth.

• Classroom

  Draw your own diagram of id, ego and super-ego from Chapters II and V without looking at Freud's figure, then compare it with his description and list what your picture gets wrong.

Further Reading

• Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Sigmund Freud

  The 1920 essay whose instinct theory The Ego and the Id takes for granted.

• Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, Sigmund Freud

  Freud's 1926 revision of his theory of anxiety within the structural model.

• The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, Anna Freud

  The 1936 book that founded ego psychology on her father's structural model.

• Freud: A Life for Our Time, Peter Gay

  Places the book in Freud's life, including his illness of 1923.

• Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, Philip Rieff

  A searching study of Freud as a moral thinker and of what his theory does to conscience and religion.

• Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, Paul Ricoeur

  A philosopher's close reading of Freud's metapsychology, including the structural model.