Conscious, Unconcsious, Preconscious

By Sigmund Freud

Id. Ego, Super-ego

[The id is]...a chaos, a cauldron of seething excitement. We suppose that it is somewhere in direct contact with somatic processes, and takes over from them instinctual needs and gives them mental expression, but we cannot say in what substratum this contact is made. These instincts fill it with energy, but it has no organisation and no unified will, only an impulsion to obtain satisfaction for the instinctual needs, in accordance With the pleasure-principle. The laws of logic — above all, the law of contradiction — do not hold for processes in the id. Contradictory im­pulses exist side by side without neutralising each other or drawing apart; at most they combine in compromise formations under the over­powering economic pressure towards discharging their energy. There is nothing in the id which can be compared to negation, and we are aston­ished to find in it an exception to the philosophers' assertion that space and time are necessary forms of our mental acts. In the id there is noth­ing corresponding to the idea of time, no recognition of the passage of time, and (a thing which is very remarkable and awaits adequate atten­tion in philosophic thought) no alteration of mental processes by the passage of time. Conative impulses which have never got beyond the id, and even impressions which have been pushed down into the id by re­pression, are virtually immortal and are preserved for whole decades as though they had only recently occurred. They can only be recognised as belonging to the past, deprived of their significance, and robbed of their charge of energy, after they have been made conscious by the work of analysis, and no small part of the therapeutic effect of analytic treatment rests upon this fact.

It is constantly being borne in upon me that we have made far too lit­tle use of our theory of the indubitable fact that the repressed remains unaltered by the passage of time. This seems to offers us the possibility of an approach to some really profound truths. But I myself have made no further progress here.

Naturally, the id knows no values, no good and evil, no morality. The economic, or, if you prefer, the quantitative factor, which is so closely bound up with the pleasure — principle, dominates all its processes. In­stinctual cathexes seeking discharge, — that, in our view, is all that the id contains. It seems, indeed, as if the energy of these instinctual im­pulses is in a different condition from that in which it is found in the other regions of the mind. It must be far more fluid and more capable of being discharged, for otherwise we should not have those displacements and condensations, which are so characteristic of the id and which are so completely independent of the qualities of what is cathected...

As regards a characterization of the ego, in so far as it is to be distin­guished from the id and the super-ego, we shall get on better if we turn our attention to the relation between it and the most superficial portion of the mental apparatus, which we call the perceptual-conscious system. This system is directed on to the external world, it mediates perceptions of it, and in it is generated, while it is functioning, the phenomenon of consciousness. It is the sense-organ of the whole apparatus, receptive, moreover, not only of excitations from without but also of such as pro­ceed from the interior of the mind. One can hardly go wrong in regard­ing the ego as that part of the id which has been modified by its proxim­ity to the external world and the influence that the latter has had on it, and which serves the purpose of receiving stimuli and protecting the or­ganism from them, like the cortical layer with which a particle of living substance surrounds itself. This relation to the external world is decisive for the ego. The ego has taken over the task of representing the external world for the id, and so of saving it; for the id, blindly striving to gratify its instincts in complete disregard of the superior strength of outside forces, could not otherwise escape annihilation. In the fulfilment of this

function, the ego has to observe the external world and preserve a true picture of it in the memory traces left by its perceptions, and, by means of the reality-test, it has to eliminate any element in this picture of the external world which is a contribution from internal sources of excita­tion. On behalf of the id, the ego controls the pathof access to motility, but it interpolates between desire and action the procrastinating factor of thought, during which it makes use of the residues of experience stored up in memory. In this way it dethrones the pleasure — principle, which exerts undisputed sway over the processes in the id, and substi­tutes for it the reality — principle, which promises greater security and greater success.

The relation to time, too, which is so hard to describe, is colmmuni-cated to the ego by the perceptual system; indeed it can hardly be doubted that the mode in which this system works is the source of the idea of time. What, however, especially marks the ego out in contradis­tinction to the id, is a tendency to synthesise its contents, to bring to­gether and unify its mental processes which is entirely absent from the id. When we come to deal presently with the instincts in mental life, I hope we shall succeed in tracing this fundamental characteristic" of the ego to its source. It is this alone that produces that high degree of or­ganisation which the ego needs for its highest achievements. The ego ad­vances from the function of perceiving instincts to that of controlling them, but the latter is only achieved through the mental representative of the instinct becoming subordinated to a larger organisation, and find­ing its place in a coherent unity. In popular language, we may say that the ego stands for reason and circumspection, while the id stands for the untamed passions...

The proverb tells us that one cannot serve two masters at once. The poor ego has a still harder time of it; it has to serve three masters, and has to do its best to reconcile the claims and demands of all three. These demands are always divergent and often seem quite incompatible; no wonder that the ego so frequently gives way under its task. The three ty­rants are the external world, the super-ego and the id. When one watches the efforts of the ego to satisfy them all, or rather, to obey them all simultaneously, one cannot regret having personified the ego, and es­tablished it as a separate being. It feels itself hemmed in on three sides and threatened by three kinds of danger, towards which it reacts by de­veloping anxiety when it is too hard pressed. Having originated in the experiences of the perceptual system, it is designed to represent the de­mands of the external world, but it also wishes to be a loyal servant of the id, to remain upon good terms with the id, to recommend itself to the id as an object, and to draw the id's libido on to itself. In its attempt to mediate between the id and reality, it is often forced to clothe the commands of the id with its own rationalisations, to gloss over the con­flicts between the id and reality, and with diplomatic dishonesty to dis­play a pretended regard for reality, even when the id persists in being stubborn and uncompromising. On the other hand, its every movement is watched by the severe super-ego, which holds up certain norms of be­haviour, without regard to any difficulties coming from the id and the external world; and if these norms are not acted up to, it punishes the ego with the feelings of tension which manifest themselves as a sense of inferiority and guilt. In this way, goaded on by the id, hemmed in by the super-ego, and rebuffed by reality, the ego struggles to cope with its eco­nomic task of reducing the forces and influences which work in it and upon it to some kind of harmony; and we may well understand how it is that we so often cannot repress the cry: "Life is not easy." When the ego is forced to acknowledge its weakness, it breaks out into anxiety: reality anxiety in face of the external world, normal anxiety in face of the super-ego, and neurotic anxiety in face of the strength of the passions in the id.

You will observe how the super-ego goes down into the id; as the heir to the Oedipus complex it has, after all, intimate connections with the id. It lies further from the perceptual system than the ego. The id only deals with the external world through the medium of the ego, at least in this diagram. It is certainly still too early to say how far the drawing is correct; in one respect I know it is not. The space taken up by the uncon­scious id ought to be incomparably greater than that given to the ego or to the preconscious. You must, if you please, correct that in your imagi­nation.

And now, in concluding this certainly rather exhausting and perhaps not very illuminating account, I must add a warning. When you think of this dividing up of the personality into ego, super-ego and id, you must not imagine sharp dividing lines such as are artificially drawn in the field of political geography. We cannot do justice to the characteristics of the mind by means of linear contours, such as occur in a drawing or in a primitive painting, but we need rather the areas of colour shading off into one another that are to be found in modern pictures. After we have made our separations, we must allow what we have separated to merge again. Do not judge too harshly of a first attempt at picturing a thing so elusive as the human mind. It is very probable that the extent of these differentiations varies very greatly from person to person; it is possible that their function itself may vary, and that they may at times undergo a process of involution. This seems to be particularly true of the most in­secure and, from the phylogenetic point of view, the most recent of them, the differentiation between the ego and the superego. It is also in­contestable that the same thing can come about as a result of mental dis­ease. It can easily be imagined, too, that certain practices of mystics may succeed in upsetting the normal relations between the different regions of the mind, so that, for example, the perceptual system becomes able to grasp relations in the deeper layers of the ego and in the id which would otherwise be inaccessible to it. Whether such a procedure can put one in possession of ultimate truths, from which all good will flow, may be safely doubted. All the same, we must admit that the therapeutic efforts of psycho-analysis have chosen much the same method of approach. For their object is to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the super-ego, to widen its field of vision, and so to extend its organisation that it can take over new portions of the id. Where id was, there shall ego be.