The forces in your mind
In Freudian terms, these forces are the Id, the Ego, and the Superego. They are not, of course, specific parts of your brain like the cortex or the cerebellum. Think of them as poetic concepts or analogies, or as facets of your personality.
The Id (Latin for it) is the “I want” part of your unconscious. It operates on the pleasure principle - it is interested only in seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. It has no sense of time - everything, for the Id, is in the present. The Id wants what it wants right now; it doesn’t care to save for a rainy day or to eat the ice cream after the vegetables. It also means that if something worked once for you, no matter how long ago, your Id is going to encourage you to keep right on using that same ploy, even though it may not be a bit appropriate for your present circumstances.
For example: perhaps when you were in kindergarten, you didn’t like riding the school bus. And perhaps if you dawdled around long enough, your mother would get the car out and drive you to school herself.
Well, your Id doesn’t know that you are now 35, and that when you put off paying those bills or getting rid of that trash or writing that report, you’re going to wind up in the bankruptcy court, or in trouble with the board of health, or out of a job, as the case may be. Anyway, nobody (probably including your mother) is going to give you a free ride. Your Id doesn’t know that, but you do - don’t you?
Which brings us to the Ego (Latin for I).
A baby, psychologically speaking, is all Id. The Id is the source of all psychic energy, and as personality develops, part of its energy is used to form the Ego.
This is the “What’s Best” part of you - the part that is, we trust, in touch with reality; the part that decides to cut down a little on the martinis and save for next year’s vacation (you would have to fight your Id on this), to get out of teaching and into the supermarket business, or vice versa; to get married or divorced or have a child or not have one - all for more or less rational reasons.
The Ego is partly conscious and partly unconscious; a lot of our decisions are strongly influenced by things going on in our heads of which we are not aware. It operates on the reality principle - it is capable of postponing immediate gratification in favor of a long- range goal. Not that the Ego always decides on postponement, of course. Any time you decide anything at all, whether or not it’s a sensible decision, that’s your Ego functioning. The Id acts on impulse; the Ego makes decisions.
The Superego (Above – I) is the “I Should” part of your mind. It is your conscience, if you like to think about it that way, except that it operates at an unconscious as well as a conscious level. Depending upon how you were brought up, it may be chatting to you about going to church, giving up smoking, eating an apple a day, keeping a kosher kitchen, or never leaving your hands so idle that the devil will find work for them to do.
Now you may, over the years, have consciously changed your mind about some of these precepts (most of which were built into you before you were five or six years old) but your Superego may still be making you feel guilty about them.
Your Superego may be right, of course; maybe you’re simply getting overly self-indulgent as the years go by. (If you’ve been reading many of the popular psychology books, you probably are!)
On the other hand, it may be wrong; your Superego tends not to want you to have any fun at all.
If it’s too well-developed, you may have trouble making up your mind about anything at all, because your Superego keeps saying, “Well you should - but on the other hand, maybe you should also –“.
If everything is going along all right, if you have what is known in the psych. business as a “well-integrated personality,” you’ll feel pretty good most of the time, you’ll be reasonably efficient and happy, and you won’t be aware (except perhaps when you’re dreaming) that all these forces are down in there slugging it out with each other.
All three forces are necessary to your personality. Don’t think of the Id, for instance, as “bad” because it is, by normal standards, selfish or self-centered, interested only in looking for pleasure and avoiding pain. The Id is the basic, rock-bottom basis of personality, the source of the other facets, and therefore absolutely necessary. It keeps trying to express itself, and if things go well, it keeps getting squashed - but only partially squashed - by the Superego. All this creates a healthy tension.
You didn’t think tension was healthy? Well, if you didn’t have some, you would be in the position of a piece of flotsam (or worse yet, jetsam), at the mercy of the wind and waves.
So much, for the time being, for unconscious forces and a healthy balance. If things are not going along so smoothly - well, we’ll get to that later, in the chapter on “Mental Disorders.”
Now we come to a more controversial topic - critical stages of personality development. We believe that critical stages exist, all right; John’s version appears in another chapter. However, we think the Freudian version is somewhat unconvincing. For one thing he assumed that personality was set in the first few years of life, and that all neurotic problems which appeared later had their basis in something that happened in those first few years.
For another thing, Freud’s delineation of critical stages seems to apply much more closely to men than to women, to people of his era rather than ours, to Western society rather than to the world in general. It probably fits Freud himself best of all – he used to spend the last half hour of each day analyzing himself and checking the validity of his ideas by seeing how well they fit his own feelings and inhibitions.
