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WorkSigmund Freud

The Ego and the Id

The short book that divides the mind into id, ego and super-ego, and pictures the ego as a rider who cannot rein in his horse.

by Sigmund Freud86 passages held

  • German, the original language
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Original title
Das Ich und das Es
First published
(aged 67)
Original language
German

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Overview

Sigmund Freud had spent two decades dividing the mind into what is conscious and what is not, and by the early 1920s his own patients had broken the scheme. In analysis they ran into resistances they could neither feel nor name; some got worse every time treatment brought them relief, as if a sense of guilt they knew nothing about refused to let them recover. The forces doing the resisting and the punishing had to belong to the self, yet they were plainly unconscious. The book replaces the old map with three agencies. The Es, "the It", a word Freud took from the physician Georg Groddeck, is the reservoir of the drives; the Ich, "the I", is the part that faces the world and controls movement, like a rider who must curb a stronger horse and often ends up steering it where it already wanted to go; and the Über-Ich, the super-ego, is the voice of the parents taken inside, which the child sets up as it gives up its first loves, and which watches and judges the ego from within. Freud calls the ego a poor creature serving three masters — the world, the id and the super-ego — and the place where anxiety is felt. He presents the book as a continuation of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and its last chapters bring that book's drives of life and death into the new structure. It was published on 24 April 1923. In English the terms arrived in Latin: Joan Riviere's translation of 1927 was called The Ego and the Id, and later critics such as the psychologist Louis Breger argued that the plainness of Freud's German had been lost in the process.

Key concepts

How, according to Freud, does a thought become conscious?

By being joined to words. Freud recasts the question as how something becomes preconscious, and answers: through connection with the corresponding word-presentations. These are memory traces of words once heard, and like all memories of perceptions they can become conscious again. An unconscious idea works on material that stays unrecognised; it is the link to words that brings it within reach of awareness.

Why does Freud say the ego is partly unconscious?

Because the resistance met in treatment comes from the ego, yet the patient neither feels it nor can name it. If something belonging to the self can be unconscious without being repressed, then the old division of the mind into conscious and unconscious no longer matches the division between the self and what it pushes away. A new map is needed, and this is its starting point.

Why is the ego called the seat of anxiety?

Because the ego is the only agency that can feel anxiety, and it faces danger from three directions: from the outside world, from the strength of the id's drives, and from the severity of the super-ego. Anxiety is the ego's response to each threat.

What does Freud mean by fusion and defusion of the drives?

Fusion means that life and death drives are mixed in almost every impulse: sadism, for instance, puts destructiveness at the service of sexuality. Defusion means the mixture comes apart, so that destructive drives act more freely. Freud suggests that regression in illness, as in obsessional neurosis where love turns into hate, involves such a defusion.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

A Rider on a Stronger Horse

Who, inside a person, is doing what? Freud's patients had broken his old map of the mind, and this book draws the new one.

The forces that resist treatment belong to the self, yet patients know nothing of them, so the line between conscious and unconscious can no longer divide self from repressed. Freud borrows Groddeck's 'It' for the reservoir of drives, and lets the ego grow out of it at the surface that faces the world, first of all as a body-ego. The ego controls movement but borrows its strength from the id, like a rider on a stronger horse, and serves three masters: the world, the id and the super-ego.

  • ego
  • id
  • consciousness
  • perception
  • preconscious
  • unconscious
  • resistance
  • philosophy of mind
  • language
  • thought

Enter a dialogue

The Parents Inside

Where does the voice that judges us come from, and why can it be unconscious? Freud's answer is that the self is built from the people it once loved.

When a love must be given up, Freud suggests, the ego often takes on the features of the lost person, so that character is a record of abandoned attachments. The most important of these settlements ends the Oedipus complex: the child takes the parents into itself as the super-ego, which keeps their authority and grows harsher than they were. That is how a sense of guilt can be unconscious, why some patients worsen as they improve, and why some offenders commit a crime to give guilt a reason.

  • superego
  • ego ideal
  • identification
  • conscience
  • morality
  • guilt
  • unconscious guilt
  • melancholia
  • object relations

Enter a dialogue

Love and Death Within the Self

What happens to the two great drives of Beyond the Pleasure Principle once they are placed inside the new map? Freud follows them into the ego and the super-ego.

Life and death drives, Freud argues, appear almost always mixed, and illness can come from their separating. Love and hate can change into each other, which suggests a neutral, displaceable energy behind both. The ego is the true seat of anxiety. It fears the outside world, the drives, and the super-ego, and the fear of death, which no one has experienced, is in his reading the ego's dread of being abandoned by the super-ego, as the child once feared losing the protecting parents.

  • death drive
  • eros
  • drive theory
  • ambivalence
  • sublimation
  • narcissism
  • libido
  • anxiety
  • pleasure principle

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
86
distinct concepts
114
by passages held, corpus-wide
#538

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “consciousness” and “unconscious”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 18 pairings. 84 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
consciousnessunconscious12
psychoanalysisunconscious12
egoid9
egounconscious9
consciousnesspsychoanalysis6
egopsychoanalysis6
identificationsuperego5
egosuperego4
idpsychoanalysis4
consciousnessego3
egoidentification3
idsuperego3
identificationpsychoanalysis3
psychoanalysissuperego3
drive theoryego2
idunconscious2
ididentification1
superegounconscious1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1900 The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung)

    Begun from his own dreams in the 1890s and enlarged in edition after edition, this is where Freud sets out the method of interpretation that his later books apply to slips of the tongue, jokes and myths.

     DE
  2. 1901 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens)

    The dream book's method carried into waking life; its slips and forgettings became the opening part of the lectures Freud later gave to beginners in Vienna.

     DE
  3. 1905 Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten)

    Freud's only book-length study of comedy, and the one most built from borrowed material: puns, anecdotes and Jewish jokes, each taken apart in turn.

     DE
  4. 1907 Frühe Schriften zu Religion und Dichtung

    Two early excursions from the clinic, gathered here in one volume: the seed of Freud's later books on religion, and his short account of where a writer's stories come from.

     DE
  5. 1910 Zur Theorie des Unbewußten

    Four theoretical papers written between 1910 and 1915 and gathered here in one volume, on the road from the dream book to the metapsychological essays of 1915 — the last of the four is one of those essays.

     DE
  6. 1913 Spätere Schriften zu Dichtung und Mythos

    Two essays from 1913 and 1917, gathered here in one volume, that show Freud the reader of Shakespeare and Goethe: the dream-book method applied to a stage motif and to the first page of a famous autobiography.

     DE
  7. 1913 Totem and Taboo (Totem und Tabu)

    The first of Freud's books on society and religion, where he moves from the patient to the human species; Group Psychology, The Future of an Illusion and his last book, on Moses, all build on its story of the murdered father.

     DE
  8. 1914 On Narcissism: An Introduction (Zur Einführung des Narzißmus)

    A short essay written as Jung was breaking with Freud, and the hinge between his early theory of the drives and the later picture of ego and super-ego.

     DE
  9. 1915 Instincts and their Vicissitudes (Triebe und Triebschicksale)

    The paper that opens Freud's 1915 theoretical series by defining its basic term; the companion essays on repression and on the unconscious build on it.

     DE
  10. 1915 Schriften aus dem Weltkrieg

    Freud's direct responses to the First World War, gathered in one volume on this site: a long essay of 1915 on disillusionment and death, and a short one of 1916 on transience and mourning.

     DE
  11. 1915 The Unconscious (Das Unbewußte)

    Freud's fullest account of what he meant by the unconscious, written in wartime Vienna eight years before The Ego and the Id redrew his map of the mind.

     DE
  12. 1917 Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse)

    Freud's own introduction to his work, and the closest thing he wrote to a textbook: his books on dreams and on everyday slips retold for listeners, then carried on into a general theory of neurosis.

     DE
  13. 1919 The 'Uncanny' (Das Unheimliche)

    A rare venture by Freud into aesthetics, a field he says psychoanalysts seldom feel drawn to, written in 1919 beside the first draft of Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

     DE
  14. 1920 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips)

    The hinge of Freud's later work: the 1920 book that introduces the death drive, followed within three years by the new map of the mind in The Ego and the Id.

     DE
  15. 1921 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse)

    The bridge between Freud's speculations on prehistory and his new model of the mind: its chapter on a "grade in the ego" sets out the ego ideal that The Ego and the Id would rename two years later.

     DE
  16. 1923 The Ego and the Id (Das Ich und das Es) you are here DE
  17. 1924 Späte Schriften zur Ich-Psychologie

    Three short papers of the mid-1920s, gathered here in one volume, in which Freud tests the model of The Ego and the Id on psychosis, on memory and on laughter.

     DE
  18. 1926 Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (Hemmung, Symptom und Angst)

    Written three years after The Ego and the Id, it rebuilds the theory of neurotic symptoms in that book's terms, starting from the difference between a symptom and an inhibition, a restriction the ego places on itself.

     DE
  19. 1927 The Future of an Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion)

    Freud's most direct case against religion, written fourteen years after Totem and Taboo had traced it to the murdered father, and the opening of the late cultural writings that continue in Civilization and Its Discontents.

     DE
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