Sigmund Freud Psychoanalysis Theory

The Id. This is the unconscious part, which brings together and maintains an enormous quantity of information removed from early infancy to death. The Id is also the reservoir of both sexual and aggressive drives and instincts;

The attributes of life were at some time evoked in inanimate matter by the action of a force of whose nature we can form no conception. It may perhaps have been a process similar in type to that which later caused the development of consciousness in a particular stratum of living matter. The tension which then arose in what had hitherto been an inanimate substance endeavoured to cancel itself out. In this way the first instinct came into being: the instinct to return to the inanimate state. It was still an easy matter at that time for a living substance to die; the course of its life was probably only a brief one, whose direction was determined by the chemical structure of the young life. For a long time, perhaps, living substance was thus being constantly created afresh and easily dying, till decisive external influences altered in such a way as to oblige the still surviving substance to diverge ever more widely from its original course of life and to make ever more complicated dtours before reaching its aim of death. These circuitous paths to death, faithfully kept to by the conservative instincts, would thus present us to-day with the picture of the phenomena of life. (Freud, SE, XVIII, 38)

The Ego. This is the conscious substrate. It is what we are aware of. The Ego has the function of acting as an intermediary between the Id, Super-Ego and external reality;

Libido is an expression taken from the theory of the emotions. We call by that name the energy, regarded as a quantitative magnitude (though not at present actually measurable), of those instincts which have to do with all that may be comprised under the word 'love'. The nucleus of what we mean by love naturally consists (and this is what is commonly called love, and what the poets sing of) in sexual love with sexual union as its aim. But we do not separate from this - what in any case has a share in the name 'love' - on the one hand, self-love, and on the other, love for parents and children, friendship and love for humanity in general, and also devotion to concrete objects and to abstract ideas. Our justification lies in the fact that psycho-analytic research has taught us that all these tendencies are an expression of the same instinctual impulses. In its origin, function, and relation to sexual love, the 'Eros' of the philosopher Plato coincides exactly with the love-force, the libido of psycho-analysis. (SE, XVIII, 90-91)

The Super-Ego. This is the "censor" of the human mind. It is rational and contains all moral norms; it bitterly opposes the content of the Id, which, on the contrary, is irrational and instinctual.

The last of the three aspects of the psyche is the superego. The superego acts mainly as a conscience, by saying what is right and wrong, but also holds the ego ideal, which is an idealized image of what the ego should be like. The superego evolves from the ego near the end of the phallic stage, which occurs typically between the ages of three to six, but does not become fully developed until after the resolution of the Oedipus complex. At this time, the child is no longer fully dependent or under the control of his parents, but is now controlling himself. Like the id, the superego is unconscious and does not care about the organisms well being or survival. All it cares about is that the ego remains within the boundaries of what is right or wrong, and pressures the ego to do this with feelings of shame, guilt or pride.

#35 Lois Ann S. Salazar ll-Honesty