Id, ego and superego
It, ego and superego are fundamental concepts in the theory of psychoanalysis with which Sigmund Freud tried to explain human psychic functioning, postulating the existence of a "psychic apparatus" that has a particular structure. He maintained that this apparatus is divided, roughly, into three instances: the id , the ego and the superego , which nevertheless share functions and are not physically separated. In turn, a large part of the psychic contents and mechanisms that operate in each of these entities are unconscious.
While the general idea that the mind is not homogeneous is widely accepted, both within and outside the field of psychology, it is also a controversial idea. In particular, there are detractors of the theory that the psyche is divided into these three components.
Origins and differences in terminology
In some publications in the Spanish language you can find the terms ello, yo and superego in Latin, such as id, ego and superego, respectively. These forms were first adopted by James Strachey in his translation of Freud's work into English, entitled Standard Edition and published between 1953 and 1974. The original terms used by Freud are found in the German language: das Es, das Ich and das Über-Ich —respectively, the it, the I and the superego (literally over me). Freud borrowed the term "das Es" by Georg Groddeck, a German physician to whose unconventional ideas Freud was greatly attracted (Groddeck's translators render the term from English as "the id").
The three instances
In Outline of Psychoanalysis (1940 [1938]), Freud recognized the satisfaction of congenital needs as “the genuine vital purpose of the individual”, which finds a means of expression in the power of the it. The preservation of life and the evasion of dangers are not counted, then, among the competences of such an instance, but rather correspond to the self, in charge, for the same reason, of ensuring that the satisfactions to which it consents do not expose safety. of the individual at excessive risk. For its part, the superego participates in the restriction of such satisfactions and therein lies its most important function.
The id
Its content is unconscious and consists fundamentally of the psychic expression of drives and desires. It is in conflict with the ego and the superego, instances that in Freud's theory have later been split from him. Freud calls this the most primitive province of the mental apparatus, whose content concerns the inherited, the innate or the constitutional and it concerns in particular the drives. The condensation and displacement show that in the id the psychic energy circulates with greater mobility than in the ego and that what most engages that instance is its desire to provide discharge to the excitations that occur inside. In a footnote to Outline of Psychoanalysis (1940 [1938]), James Strachey, translator of Freud's work into English and creator of the Standard Edition, adds that This aspiration that Freud attributes to the id is analogous to what he had described in the Psychology Project, using a terminology closer to that of neurology, referring to the "primordial principle of the activity of neurons.": "neurons try to relieve themselves of quantity."
For Freud, the id constitutes “the core of our being”. It has no direct contact with the outside world and it would be unknowable to us if it were not for the mediation of another instance (the self). It is within it that the drives operate, made up of different proportions of what Freud considers the “two primordial forces”, namely Eros and thanatos. The goal of such drives is none other than to achieve satisfaction, which supposes "precise alterations in the organs with the help of objects from the outside world." However, if the drives of the id were granted satisfaction without delay or prudence, dangerous conflicts with the outside world would often ensue, threatening the survival of the individual. The id does not care about the safety of this: although it has the capacity to develop the elements of the feeling of anxiety, it cannot appreciate them. Freud differentiates “the processes that are possible in the psychic elements assumed within the id and between these (primary process)” and “those that are known to us by a conscious perception within our intellectual and of feelings". Even though the id does not trade directly with the outside world, a world of perception that is its own is reserved for it, since it has to record the fluctuations that occur inside it (level of drive tension) that reach the consciousness in the guise of pleasant or unpleasant sensations. This instance is governed by the pleasure principle, while the others, which are not capable of nullifying it either, limit themselves to modifying it.
The Self
The self is the acting psychic instance that appears as a mediator between the other two. It attempts to reconcile the normative and punitive demands of the superego as well as the demands of reality with the interests of the id in satisfying unconscious desires. He is in charge of developing mechanisms that allow obtaining the greatest possible pleasure, but within the limits that reality imposes. Defense is one of its powers and a large part of its content is unconscious. The incidence of the outside world would alter a portion of the id destined to become the ego, a portion described as "a cortical layer endowed with the organs for receiving stimuli and of the devices for the protection against these” that from then on will take the function of mediating between that other instance and the outside world. The ego would govern the voluntary movements and would be in charge of fighting for the self-preservation of the individual through the avoidance, domination and cancellation of stimuli coming from the outside, as well as through the submission of the drive claims coming from the id, with respect to the which he must determine whether to satisfy them—and, if so, under what conditions—or stifle them. The level of tension within the ego organization would guide its activity, generally perceiving an increase in tension as unpleasant and a decrease as pleasant, although Freud does not fail to indicate that the sensations of pleasure and displeasure are probably not related. directly with the magnitude of the voltage itself, but rather with the rate of its fluctuations. The ego's tendency to avoid displeasure means that anticipating an increase in it leads to the release of a signal of anguish, the circumstance in which this occurs being called danger, whether it is an internal threat — that is, instinctual— or external. During sleep, the self would resign its link with the outside world and "a particular distribution of soul energy" would be found in it.
The ego, “psychic instance that we believe we know better [than the id] and in which we discern ourselves par excellence”, is born on the basis of the cortical layer of the id, which is endowed with the ability to capture stimuli and then push them away, so that you can keep in touch with objective reality. The subjugation of the ego by the external world reveals the circumstances under which its genesis and development occurred, namely, the subjugation to its sphere of influence of increasingly vast portions of the id from the conscious perception of said reality..
Its psychological operation is to raise the resources of this to a higher dynamic level (e.g., to move freely mobile energy into linked energy, as corresponds to the pre-conscious state); and its constructive operation, to interpolate between pulsional demand and action satisfying the activity of thinking, which seeks to collegiate the success of the companies tried through tenant actions, to become present and to value previous experiences. In this way, I decide whether the attempt will lead to satisfaction or should be displaced, or whether the requirement of polishing does not have to be completely suffocated as dangerous (principle of reality).
While the id is only concerned with obtaining pleasure, the ego is concerned with security, since it is concerned with the task of self-preservation, which the id despises. He uses the detachments of anguish as a means to become aware of the dangers that beset him. The association of memory traces with traces of language makes it possible for them to become conscious and, since the quality of the conscious is typical of perceptions, the possibility then arises that the former are mistakenly taken as representations of current objective reality.. To avoid such confusion, the ego uses the reality test, which, however, stops operating during sleep. The ego is threatened first of all by the dangers of objective reality, but also by those coming from the id because hyperintense drive demands can cause damage to the ego comparable to what hypertrophic excitations from the outside world would cause. Although, unlike the latter, it is not possible for them to annihilate it, they can undo its internal organization, so that the id rejoins the ego as a part of its domain. Another reason why the requirements of the id would represent a danger for the ego instance is that -as it could have learned from experience- granting the satisfaction of an instinctual claim that is not per se inadmissible for the self it can, however, imply risks in the outside world and, in this way, such a claim comes to be considered dangerous. The self must, therefore, strengthen itself against two threats: on the one hand, an external world that could end it and, on the other, a very demanding internal world.
The Superego
The superego is the moral instance, judging ego activity. For Freud, it arises as a result of the resolution of the Oedipus complex and constitutes the internalization of parental norms, rules and prohibitions. Just as the ego would originate from the id, the superego would later be born within it, consisting of the ego. relict of the stage in which the individual has not yet overcome childhood helplessness and is still closely dependent on their parental figures, whose designs are incorporated into the constitution of this third instance. Significant amounts of aggressiveness find a use different from being directed outwards when, from the establishment of the superego, they remain adhered to the ego itself, where they bring out their self-destructive potentialities, to the point that the retention of aggression would be unhealthy or pathogenic since the destructive drive obstructed would then exert its effects from the mechanism back towards one's own person.
The superego is the part that counteracts the id, it represents moral and ethical thoughts received from culture. It consists of two subsystems: the "moral conscience" and the ego ideal. "Moral conscience" refers to the capacity for self-evaluation, criticism, and reproach. The ego ideal is an ideal self-image consisting of approved and rewarded behaviors.[citation needed]
The superego in classical Freudian teaching is an instance that is not present from the beginning of the subject's life, but arises as a consequence of the internalization of the father figure as a result of the resolution of the Oedipus complex.
After Freud, the origin of the instance has been discussed. Melanie Klein, for example, postulates the existence of a superego in the infant. For the psychoanalytic current that follows the orientation of Jacques Lacan, it will instead be relevant to reinforce Freud's idea about the moment of the emergence of the superego, granting it to castration, the resolution of the Oedipus complex and the function paternal a foundational character of the subject with its three instances, as well as a determining role of its structural position.[citation required]
Relation of the instances among themselves and with the unconscious and the preconscious
Over the id, the quality of the unconscious has absolute dominance. The correspondence between the unconscious and it would be even closer than that between the preconscious and me. At the beginning of life, the psychic apparatus only has one id and it is the stimuli from the outside world that end up altering that sector of it that will end up becoming the ego. This will have to incorporate some of the contents originally belonging to the id, now transposed to the preconscious state, while other materials will become the nucleus of the id, preserving its unconscious character and its inaccessibility. However, the development of the ego is marked by the transfer to the unconscious of contents that it had already assimilated, and also before some new impressions it will withdraw, leaving them the possibility of imprinting an imprint only on the id. It is this portion of the id that deserves the name the repressed. Both of the parcels of the id (the "core of the id" and "the repressed") overlap, respectively and approximately, with the original congenital and what has been acquired during the development of the ego.
Despite this theoretical tripartition of the mental apparatus, Freud considers an action of the ego correct only in those cases in which he simultaneously manages to reconcile the demands of the id, the superego and objective reality, which is why he mentions in The ego and the id the three "vassalages of the ego". The author argues that the relationship between the ego and the superego of a certain individual owes its nature to that which preceded it between the child and his parents, who, in addition to the idiosyncratic peculiarities of their own ideals, transmit to their son "the influence, propagated by them, of family tradition, race and people, as well as the requirements of the respective social environment". Nor is the superego configured on the basis of the exclusive contribution of what is bequeathed by the parents, but it will also be nourished by what other authority figures offer it, as well as values that enjoy social approval. Freud finds a point of confluence between the id and the superego inasmuch as both include the influence of the past, although it is not, of course, the same past, but rather the inherited past, in the first case, and the past assumed by others, in the latter case. the second. At this same point, the self would distance itself from the other two instances by responding in the first place to what is experienced by the individual himself or, in other words, what is contingent.
For Freud, little could be learned from the study of normal cases characterized by a well-defined separation between the ego and the id, sustained thanks to resistances or counterinvestments, and by the joint work between the ego organization and the superego. Instead, only conflict states would shed light, in which the unconscious material belonging to the id threatened to burst into consciousness and the ego had to defend itself against such an assault. However, such states do not occur exclusively within the framework of pathological disturbances, but rather continuously take place during sleep, which is why dreams, which Freud recognizes as psychic acts, constitute a privileged object of study for the investigation psychoanalytic.
The ego, vassal of objective reality, of the id and of the superego, must pay tribute to its three lords and simultaneously preserve its autonomy and organization. The pathological states could be explained by means of the expedient that in such cases the ego would be partially or totally weakened and unable to assume its obligations. Subduing the drive requirements that the id seeks to impose on it is probably the thorniest task that the ego instance has to undertake, and it allocates significant amounts of energy used to sustain the counter-investments. On the other hand, there is also the possibility that it is the superego that has become intolerably demanding, to the point that the ego does not lose strength to carry out other tasks. The id and the superego tend to ally themselves to the detriment of their subject, who, to avoid becoming disorganized, must try not to detach himself from the outside world, a link that can appear affected or even suppressed when those two become too strong. The dream, a temporary state of a psychotic nature, subsumes the self in the incoherence of internal reality at the moment in which it allows itself to resign its ties with the exterior.
The psychology of the self
After Freud, a number of prominent psychoanalytic theorists began to work on the functionalist version of Freud's I. The greatest effort was put into detailing the various functions of the I and how they deteriorate in psychopathology. Several central functions of the I-reality: impulse-control, judgment, have been proven to affect tolerance, defense, and synthetic functioning. An important conceptual revision to Freud's structural theory was made when Heinz Hartmann argued that the healthy I includes a sphere of its autonomous functions, which are independent of mental conflict. Memory, motor coordination, and reality-testing, such as, can function without the intrusion of emotional conflict. According to Hartmann, psychoanalytic treatment aims to expand the conflict-free sphere of ego functioning. Thus, making psychoanalysis facilitate adaptation, that is, a more effective mutual regulation of the Self and the environment.
David Rapaport systematized Freud's structural model and Hartmann's revisions. Rapaport argued that the central tenet of Freudian theory was that mental processes are motivated and shaped by the need to release stress. Freud's work that Rapaport clarified portrayed the mind organized into drives and structures. The drives respond to the energy of the retained libido and are oriented towards a rapid discharge, the immediate satisfaction of desires. Since it is rare that desires can be fulfilled immediately in reality, the mind develops mechanisms to delay satisfaction, or to achieve it through detours or sublimations. Therefore, the energy of the drive is contained by the relatively stable mental structures that encompass the Ego. Rapaport defined structures as mental organizations with a slow rate of change, compared to drives.
Arlow and Brenner argued that Freud's earlier theory of conscious, preconscious, and unconscious systems of mind should be abandoned, and the structural model should be used as the sole psychoanalytic theory of mind.
Psychological authors of the Self have recently moved in several directions. Some, such as Charles Brenner, have argued that the structural model should be abandoned and psychoanalysts should focus exclusively on understanding and treating mental conflict. Others, such as Frederic Busch, have increasingly sophisticated the concept of the Self.
Ego psychology is often confused with self psychology, which stresses the strength and cohesion of a person's sense of self. Although some ego psychologists write about the self, they generally distinguish the self from the self. They define the Self as an encompassing agency of mental functions, while the Self is an internal representation of how a person perceives himself. In ego psychology, the emphasis is placed on understanding the functioning of the ego and its conflicting relationships of identification, Superego, and reality, rather than on a subjective sense of self.
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