Freud argued that the human psyche is structured into three parts: the Id, the Ego, and the Superego, which are strongly associated with consciousness, preconsciousness, and unconsciousness. The ego is the “coherent organization of mental processes.” (630) The ego represents reality. The id acts on impulse, and is concerned with itself. If an opportunity of pleasure arises, the id takes advantage of it without a second thought. The id is the primitive component of a person’s personality, as it is responds to instincts and is present at birth. Freud explains the relationship between the ego and the id by stating that the ego “in its relation to the id is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse.” (636) The id is exclusively associated with the unconscious, while the ego and superego are both related to all three forms of consciousness. The superego is where we draw our internalized social rules and feelings of guilt. It instills a sense of discipline and responsibility. The function of the superego is to control the impulses that come from the id, mainly aggression and sex.
Freud believed that a majority of what shapes the way we experience things, i.e. underlying emotion, beliefs, impulses, are not available to us at a conscious level. Most of what drives us is hidden within our unconscious, and the things that we are aware of only make up a very small part of our personality. He states that we will have endless difficulty if we continue to derive neuroses from conflicts between the conscious and unconscious, and instead we should strive to connect the unconscious with conscious. The unconscious is essentially repressed, and the ego provides resistance against these unconscious thoughts in order to “exclude certain trends in the mind.” (630) Freud argues that dreams occasionally have a role in connecting the unconscious mind with the conscious mind because dreams reflect our unconscious thoughts. For example, sometimes when we wake up from a dream we can have a sense of how to solve a problem that was unresolved before going to sleep, illustrating how unconscious thoughts might influence or interact with conscious ones.
For Freud, a healthy and ideal mind would probably have a strong ego and an equally weaker superego and id. Since the ego is most in tune with reality, it would make sense that the ego would be the strongest. The superego is very involved moral conscience and rigid values, while on the other side of the spectrum, the id is very involved with impulses and passions. According to Freud, if the superego and the id were two extremes, the ego would be the happy medium. This balance would allow for values and passions to influence the way a person experiences life, but would also keep them grounded enough to be reasonable and rational.
I think it's interesting to look at how the definitions of an ideal person change by author. Freud makes an ideal person seem very rational. There is a specific combination of super ego, ego, and id that leads to delicate balance of pleasure and reason. It seems like the texts we have been reading have all been slowly building up to this rational description of how balancing thoughts can create an ideal person.
ReplyDeleteI think Emma's understanding of the balance of thoughts establishing an ideal person is very interesting, especially from the context of the various philosophers and thinkers we have discussed in class. However, Freud doesn't simply describe an individual from a tripartite structure of his conscious and unconscious mind. Freud makes clear that a person is also composed of his or her relationships with the surrounding environment and with others. Although at a superficial level this is true, humans are impacted by nature and nurture, there is to an extent where the composition of being is based on solely innate sexual tendencies. The id, ego and superego all feed into Freud's perception of pleasure which he believes motivates people to do certain things. Freud's evidence though empirical looks at modern psychology myopically and without consideration of other factors.
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