The I and the id
The I and the It is a work by Sigmund Freud that was published in 1923. In it Freud developed a model of the psyche and its functioning.
The soul life is accordingly determined by the relationships between three instances which emerge step by step from one another: the id , the ego and the superego . This genetic structural model of the psyche is usually referred to as the second topic , i.e. the second spatial model, in contrast to the first topic that Freud presented in his dream interpretation of 1900.
The id contains the psychic representations of the organic instincts which urge immediate gratification. It also contains the repressed: ideas that were previously conscious. The id is cut off from the outside world; under the influence of the outside world, the ego arises from it . The ego controls access to the outside world through perception and motor skills and, based on thinking, tries to achieve a realistic satisfaction of id needs. The super-ego develops from the ego through identification with the parents . The super-ego directs its aggression against the ego and criticizes it; the ego reacts to this with feelings of guilt, which are often unconscious.
The repression or defense does not take place, as Freud had earlier assumed, between consciousness as the repressing authority and the unconscious as the repressed. Rather, the instances that carry out the repression are the ego and the super-ego; both instances are partially unconscious.
Freud elaborated this model in two papers: in the new series of lectures on the introduction to psychoanalysis from 1933 and in the outline of psychoanalysis from 1939/40.
The resulting three-level model is still of great importance for the formation of psychoanalytic theories, despite all further developments and criticism.
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Overview
At first Freud assumed that the repression took place between the conscious and the unconscious . This view has proven to be untenable for him. The repressing authority is by no means consciousness, but the ego, and the ego is essentially unconscious. The unconscious is therefore not a subsystem of the psychic apparatus, but a quality of the psychic that can apply to all subsystems. This view compels Freud to revise his previous ideas about the structure of mental life. (Part I, "Consciousness and the Unconscious")
The basis of soul life is the id, the seat of sensations, feelings, passions and object cathexes, all of which are unconscious. The sensations of the id are based on the instincts ; the instincts urge immediate satisfaction without regard to the outside world. The influence of the outside world leads to the ego differentiating itself from the id. The ego represents the outside world in relation to the id; it tries to mediate reasonably between id and the outside world. The ego thinks it controls the id, but it is actually often ruled by it. The id is also the place of the repressed: of ideas that were once present and conscious in the ego, which were then pushed off from the ego into the id and thus unconscious and which are prevented from returning to the ego and again by the ego's continuous resistance to repression to become aware. (Part II, "The I and the It")
The third instance of the psychic apparatus, the superego, develops out of the ego. It arises through identification with both parents at the end of the oedipal phase , i.e. around the age of five. The identification consists in the fact that the ego assimilates itself to objects that are occupied by the id. With this alignment, the ego offers itself to the id as a substitute object. This narcissistic twist enables the ego to repress the id's libidinal relationships with parents. The erotic ties to the parents are thereby preserved in an unconscious form, the aggressive relationships to them are transformed into the aggression of the superego against the ego. The super-ego is thus the representative of the early instinctual relationships with the parents and thus the representative of the id in relation to the ego. The super-ego is at the same time a reaction to the libidinal and aggressive instinctual impulses, i.e. a strengthening of opposing attitudes, with the task of fighting the instinctual relationships with the parents. (Part III, "The ego and the superego (ego ideal)")
The id is based on two types or groups of drives: the eros and the death drive . The energy of eros is called "libido" by Freud, the energy of the death instinct has no special name for him. The libido again takes two different forms: it is directed either towards objects or towards the ego. Freud equates the libidinal cathexis of objects with sexuality; he calls the libidinal cathexis of the ego narcissism ; in this second form the libido is desexualized. The death instinct also appears in two forms. Primarily he is out to self-destruct; only secondarily is it diverted to external objects; this diversion comes about through the mixture with the sexual instincts, that is, with object-related libido. The death instinct strives to ultimately bring the living back to an inanimate state. The ego transforms the id's directly sexual object-oriented libido into the ego-directed libido into desexualized narcissistic libido. With this tendency to desexualize, the ego combats eros; to that extent it is in the service of the death instinct. For the id, eros is a source of increasing tension and thus of displeasure; the id combats the disturbances caused by eros by urging rapid instinctual satisfaction; Here it is based on the pleasure principle, the striving to avoid discomfort. The id is also in the service of combating eros and thus the death instinct. (Part IV, "The two types of drives")
The ego has three different dependencies: on the id, on the outside world and on the superego. He faces three types of danger and reacts to them with three types of fear. With neurotic fear it reacts to the dangers that threaten it from the libido of the id, with real fear it reacts to dangers from the outside world, and with conscience fear (the feeling of guilt) it reacts to the danger that comes from the superego threatens. The relationship between the ego and the superego is shaped by the aggression of the superego against the ego and by the ego's feeling of guilt towards the superego. The aggression of the superego is the heir to the aggression of the id against the parents in the oedipal phase and thus a descendant of the death instinct. The feeling of guilt is a modification of a real fear: the ego's fear of being abandoned by parents; the fear of being abandoned is in turn based on the fear of castration. The feeling of guilt is partly unconscious, it then expresses itself as a need for punishment. In psychoanalytic therapy, the unconscious feeling of guilt manifests itself in the fact that the patient clings to the punishment of suffering and therefore does not get well; the unconscious feeling of guilt is one of the reasons for the negative therapeutic reaction , for the aggravation of the suffering in the course of the treatment. (Part V, "The Dependencies of the Self")
Consciousness and the unconscious (part I)
The distinction between the conscious and the unconscious is fundamental to psychoanalysis. The descriptive concept of the unconscious has two meanings. On the one hand, it refers to ideas that are currently not in consciousness, but which can become conscious at any time. It also refers to ideas that are prevented from becoming conscious by a force, by the resistance of the ego. Freud calls the first kind of unconscious the preconscious . Only the second type of unconscious, the not only descriptively but also dynamically unconscious, is the unconscious in the sense of psychoanalysis.
The repression and with it the neurosis does not take place, as Freud had initially assumed, in the relationship between a repressing consciousness and a repressed unconscious . Rather, the repressing authority is the ego, and it applies to this ego that it is essentially unconscious. Resistance to the abolition of repression arises from the ego, and the ego is largely unconscious of this resistance. Accordingly, there is a third type of unconscious in addition to the preconscious and the repressed. This eliminates the possibility of using the opposition of the conscious and the unconscious to differentiate between the different areas of the soul. To process this insight, Freud outlines a new conception of the psychic apparatus.
The I and the It (Part II)
Freud assumes that the psychic apparatus consists of different parts - "instances" or "systems" - and he explains the relationships between the parts of the apparatus with the help of a spatial model, a topik (from the Greek word topos for: "place" ). In Das Ich und das Es he illustrates this topic with the help of a drawing. Freud had already presented another spatial model of the psychic in 1900 in the Interpretation of Dreams ; the structural model developed in the ego and the id is therefore often referred to as the second topic .
The psychic individual is an id to which an ego sits superficially. The concept of It accepts Freud expressly from Georg Groddeck ; In Groddeck, the substantiated personal pronoun is intended to indicate that we are “lived” by unknown, uncontrollable powers. For Freud, the id is "a quantitative-qualitative different in the mental process" (p. 291), it is unconscious, the pleasure principle reigns unreservedly in it. The id includes the sensations and feelings that emanate from the instincts; it is the ancestral seat of the instinctual energy, including the libido; all ego libido is secondary. The object occupations proceed from the id. Since the drives are in conflict with one another, the id is the place of conflicting sensations, feelings and object cathexes. The id is also the place of the repressed (in the drawing "Vdgt"), that is, of ideas that are prevented from becoming conscious by the resistance of the ego.
From the id, under the influence of the outside world, the ego has differentiated. The id is not sharply demarcated from the ego. The exception is the repressed, here there is a barrier between the ego and the id, the resistance to repression (shown in the diagram by a double line); on the other hand, the repressed flows together with the rest of the id, which is why the latter can communicate with the ego via the id. The ego contains the two systems of perception-consciousness (in the drawing: "W-Bw.") And the preconscious (in the drawing: "Vbw"); the preconscious consists primarily of acoustic word memories; the awareness of the repressed takes place in that the repressed ideas are first connected with word ideas. The vertical dotted lines in the drawing are supposed to represent the remnants of memory. The ego wears a crooked “ear cap” (p. 293; represented in the drawing by an attached box labeled “acoustic”). For the crooked positioning, Freud refers to the evidence of brain anatomy and thus connects his topics of the psychic with neuro-anatomy; he is probably thinking of the Wernickesche Sprachzentrum .
The ego develops on the basis of perception, not only of the outside world, but also of the inside world; Only through this double orientation of perception can it fulfill its task of mediating between the external world and the id. The sensations existing in the id are perceived and consciously conscious of the ego as sensations of pleasure and discomfort. The ego strives to bring the outside world to bear in relation to the id and to put the reality principle in place of the pleasure principle . It is crucial that it controls access to muscle movements. However, the id is stronger than the ego; the ego is in the habit of “translating the id's will into action as if it were its own” (p. 294).
“The functional importance of the ego is expressed in the fact that it is normally given control over the accesses to motility . In relation to the id it is like the rider who is supposed to curb the superior power of the horse, with the difference that the rider tries to do this with his own strength, the ego with borrowed. This parable carries a little further. Like the rider, if he does not want to part with the horse, there is often nothing left but to lead it where it wants to go, so the ego also tends to translate the id's will into action as if it were its own. "
The ego does not only develop through perception. The body and, above all, its surface are also decisive for the creation of the ego. The ego is "the projection of a surface", comparable to the somatosensory cortex of neuroanatomy ("brain men"):
“The ego is above all a physical one, it is not just a surface being, but the projection of a surface itself. If one looks for an anatomical analogy for the same, one can most likely identify it with the "brain man" of the anatomists, who stands upside down in the cerebral cortex, sticks his heels up, looks back and, as is known, carries the language zone on the left. "
The ego and the superego (ego ideal) (part III)
The third instance of the psychic apparatus, the superego, develops from the ego . It is a “piece of the ego” (p. 296) that opposes the ego. Freud this instance had in earlier works as ego ideal and ideal ego called; in the ego and the id he introduces the term superego ; here he uses all three terms side by side and as synonyms for each other. What is new is the thought that the superego (or ego ideal) is partly unconscious.
The source of the superego is the object cathexes of early childhood. Under Objects understands Freud persons or body parts or objects to which the drives are aimed to find them their satisfaction. These objects are “occupied” in the sense that the psychic energy, for example the libido, is directed towards these objects and is thereby bound. The earliest object cathexes are the sexual instinctual relationships with parents and siblings; the occupation of the mother begins with the mother's breast. These sexual occupations go hand in hand with aggressive relationships with the competing parent. The ego comes into conflict with these object cathexes which are carried out by the id; through this conflict it gets into a crisis, the Oedipus complex , which Freud dates from the third to the fifth year of life; the child overcomes this crisis through certain modifications of the ego: through identification with the parents. The super-ego consists of these identifications.
Two forms of identification come into play in the emergence of the superego: primary and secondary identification.
The primary identification with the father or with the parents already takes place in the oral phase, i.e. in infancy. Their model is oral incorporation, introjection ; Object occupation and identification cannot yet be distinguished here. These early identifications are ambivalent, affectionate and hostile at the same time. In overcoming the Oedipal crisis, the primary identifications are reinforced.
Secondary identifications consist in converting previous object occupations into identifications. Such a transformation occurs above all when the object is a "lost object" (p. 296), when it has to be given up. By making itself similar to the lost objects, the ego offers itself, in a narcissistic twist, to the id as a substitute object; it transforms the libido of the id into a desexualized narcissistic libido and thus sublimates . Secondary identifications do not always result in the object occupations being completely withdrawn; the identifications can “in a certain sense conserve” the object relationships (p. 297), for example by the fact that the object cathexes are repressed and remain in this form. At the end of the oedipal phase, such a transformation of object cathexes into identifications takes place for the first time. This mechanism is also decisive for the later development of the ego; but then it no longer only influences the development of the superego, but also of the ego; for example, what is called the character of the ego is a precipitate of all abandoned object cathexes.
In the so-called “complete Oedipus complex”, both parents are sexually cathected and both are understood as rivals and therefore aggressively cathected. The identifications enable the child to abandon these two instinctual relationships. However, this does not simply make the object occupations disappear. The libidinal cathexis of the parent objects is suppressed and is thus preserved. The aggressive cathexis is transformed into the aggression of the superego against the ego.
For boys, the result usually looks like this:
- Identification with the father,
- thereby repressing and unconsciously preserving the libidinal relationship with the mother
- as well as replacing the aggressive relationship with the father with the aggression of the fatherly component of the superego against the ego;
- at the same time identification with the mother,
- thereby repressing and unconsciously preserving the libidinal relationship with the father
- and replacing the aggressive relationship with the mother with the aggression of the maternal component of the superego against the ego.
The strength of the two identifications depends on the nature of the innate bisexuality , namely on how strong the two innate sexual predispositions are. Here an innate factor comes into play in the development of the superego.
The superego is thus a holdover from the id's first object choices. At the same time, however, the super-ego has the meaning of an energetic reaction formation against these object choices, it fights them. The super-ego admonishes the ego: “ You should be like this (like the father) ”, and at the same time it includes the prohibition: “ You must not be like the father , that is, do not do everything he does; some things are reserved for him. "(p. 301 f.)
The super-ego appears to the ego as a representative of the parent authorities, and thus as a representative of the instinctual relationships to them, as an “advocate of the inner world, of the id” (p. 303). The struggle of the ego with the id - against the libidinal and aggressive object cathexes - does not come to an end through the identifications; it continues in a higher region. Freud compares this with Kaulbach's painting of the Battle of the Huns, in which the dead warriors continue to fight in the sky above the battlefield. The superego is the origin of conscience, religion, morality and social feelings; the lowest - the instinctual ties to the parents - thus becomes the source of the highest.
But the id also contains certain experiences of the ego which have been repeated over the generations and which are passed on. If the ego draws its super-ego from the id - from the early object cathexes - it may only bring older ego-forms to the fore again.
The two types of drives (Part IV)
The id is subject to the influence of the instincts, just as the ego is exposed to the influence of perceptions and thus the outside world. It is true that not only the id is subject to the influence of the instinct, but also the ego and the super-ego. The effects of the instincts are thus distributed over the entire psychic apparatus, the id only represents the main point of action.
Freud ties in with the drive theory presented in Beyond the Pleasure Principle of 1920, according to which there are two main groups of drives, the eros (in Beyond the Pleasure Principle usually called the life drive ) and the death drive . Eros strives to form larger and larger units; to it belong the sexual instincts and the instincts of self-preservation. The death instinct, on the other hand, aims to dissolve the units and to transform the living into an inorganic state. Both instincts are conservative: both strive to restore an earlier state. Each of these two types of drive is assigned a special physiological process: the life drive is built up, the death drive is decayed. These two types of instinct are effective in all living things, starting with the unicellular organisms.
The two instincts can mix and match. The death instinct is primarily directed inwards and aims at self-destruction. Because of the mixture with the eros it is partly diverted outwards and turns into aggression and destruction. The separation of the two instincts leads to the death instinct strengthening; With sadism, for example, one has to do with an unmixed death drive, understood not as a partial sexual drive, but as perversion.
An objection to this drive theory could be that cases of the transformation of love into hate can be observed, for example in the emergence of paranoia, or the reverse process, for example the transformation of rivalry into love in the emergence of homosexuality; Such a possibility of transformation would speak against the thesis of the qualitative difference between the two types of instinct. In fact, according to Freud, in such cases one is not dealing with the transformation of one type of instinct into the other. Rather, the relationship was ambivalent from the start; The apparent transformation actually consists in the fact that energy is withdrawn from one type of drive and energy is supplied to the other type of drive.
Freud therefore assumes that there is an energy in the ego and in the id that can be shifted between the two types of drive, whereby one type of drive is strengthened and the other weakens. He suspects that this is a narcissistic, i.e. desexualized and sublimated libido. He assumes that this displaceable libido is in the service of the pleasure principle, that it serves to avoid an increase in arousal and to ensure rapid dissipation of tension. In the cathexis in the id it is immaterial in which way the discharge takes place and on which objects; This is especially true for the transfers in the analysis, which must be carried out in any case, regardless of the specific people. The ego, on the other hand, pays more attention to the ways in which excitation is discharged and to the selection of the object. The narcissistic displacement energy serves to establish the unity of the ego and is therefore in the service of eros, the tendency to unite.
The decisive question in the context of the treatise is how the different areas of psychic life relate to the two types of instincts and how the pleasure principle, which governs psychological life, relates to the two types of instincts and to the instances of the psychic apparatus.
The relationship of the ego to eros is characterized by the fact that the ego offers itself to eros as an object of love and thus de-sexualises the libido of the id. In this way the ego works contrary to the purposes of eros; it is at the service of the death instinct. At the beginning, while the ego is still in the process of being formed, all libido is accumulated in the id, and the id sends out part of this libido to erotic object relations. When the ego gains strength, it takes hold of this object libido and imposes itself on the id as a love object. So the narcissism of the ego is always secondary.
For the id's relationship to eros it is crucial that the sexual instincts function as a kind of troublemaker. They constantly introduce new tensions into the id and thus prevent the level of instinctual impulses in the id from sinking and pleasure from developing. The id combats the disturbances caused by eros and makes use of the pleasure principle. The id pursues its goal through accelerated indulgence against the demands of the non-desexualized libido as well as through the fact that it gets rid of sexual substances during the sexual act, the saturated carriers of erotic tension. The id places the pleasure principle at the service of the death instinct.
The Dependencies of the Self (Part V)
Psychoanalysis is supposed to make the progressive conquest of the id possible for the ego. At the same time, however, it regards the ego as a “poor thing” (p. 322), which is dependent on three kinds: on the superego, on the outside world and on the id. The relationship of the ego to the superego is shaped by the ego's feeling of guilt , brought about by the superego's criticism of the ego. This feeling of guilt is to a large extent unconscious, even in normal people; it expresses itself in the need to be punished and to suffer, in psychoanalytic therapy in the striving not to get well. In the relationship between the outside world and the id, the ego tries to mediate. It tries to subordinate the id to the demands of the outside world: through the reality principle, the de-sexualization of the libido and the transformation of object cathexes into identifications. However, in relation to the id, the ego is at the same time "a submissive servant who woos his master's love" (p. 322) and who for this purpose overrides his unconscious commandments with his rationalizations . The three dependencies correspond to three dangers and three types of anxiety: the neurotic libido anxiety in relation to the id; the real fear in relation to the outside world, z. B. the fear of being abandoned; the fear of conscience (the feeling of guilt) in relation to the superego. Castration was once threatened by the authorities who became superego; the source of the fear of conscience is therefore the fear of castration. The ego is the real place of fear.
Further development of the topic
Freud further developed his model of the psyche in the works after "Das Ich und das Es".
The new series of lectures
In 1933 Freud published a fictional series of lectures entitled New Series of Lectures Introducing Psychoanalysis . The 31st lecture is entitled The Decomposition of the Psychic Personality . Its content largely coincides with the explanations published ten years earlier in Das Ich und das Es . In the 31st lecture, even more than there, he ties in with earlier work on the unconscious and on the drives and integrates them into the id-ego-superego model. The most important clarifications and changes in relation to the ego and the id are summarized below.
The relationship between the instincts and the id is more clearly defined by Freud in the 31st lecture than in the ego and the id . One now learns that the id is “ultimately open to the somatic” (p. 511); “There it takes in the instinctual needs that find their psychological expression in it, but we cannot say in which substrate” (p. 511). At this point, the instinctual needs are understood as something physical that lies outside the id; the id itself contains the psychological representatives of these physical instinctual needs, the "instinctual representations", as he called it in earlier works. The “substrate” in which the instincts find their expression was described in The I and the It as “sensations” and “feelings”. The id therefore consists on the one hand of the psychological drive representations - unconscious sensations and feelings with a tension character that urgently urge immediate discharge - and on the other hand of the repressed, i.e. of ideas that were previously conscious and which are prevented from doing so again by the repression resistance of the ego to become aware.
Freud also ascribes a number of characteristics to the id which he ascribed to the unconscious in the context of the first topic. Above all, he emphasizes that the logical laws of thought do not apply in the id, especially the principle of contradiction , and that the id knows no negation, without which the principle of contradiction cannot be formulated. In the id there is nothing that corresponds to the concept of time: wishful impulses are virtually immortal.
As far as the ego is concerned, Freud particularly points out that it presses for the synthesis of its contents, for summarization and unification - a trait that is completely absent from the id.
In the 31st lecture, Freud distinguishes between various functions of the super-ego more clearly than in The Ego and the Id: the observing, the forbidding, the judgmental and the punishing function. In Das I und das Es he equated the superego with the ego ideal; In the 31st lecture a distinction is made between the two. The super-ego, it is now said, “is also the bearer of the ego ideal, against which the ego measures itself, which it strives for, whose claim to ever further perfection it strives to fulfill. There is no doubt that this ego ideal is the precipitate of the old parent's conception, the expression of the admiration for that perfection which the child ascribed to them at that time. "(503)
Parents follow the rules of their own super-ego in bringing up their children, that is, they act on the basis of their identification with their own parents. The child's super-ego is therefore not built according to the model of the parents, but according to that of the parental super-ego and thus becomes the bearer of tradition.
Repression is carried out by the super-ego, either by itself or by the obedient ego on its behalf.
The purpose of psychoanalysis is to
“To strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the superego, to expand its field of perception and to expand its organization so that it can acquire new parts of the id. Where it was, I should be.
It's cultural work like draining the Zuydersee . "
In the 31st lecture there is a graphic representation of the structure of the psychic personality, a further development of the diagram from the ego and the id .
- Again the perception system or consciousness is represented, in the drawing with W-Bw. designated. This forms the interface to the outside world. (See also section The I and the Id (Part II) )
- The superego, which was missing in the first drawing, has now found its place next to the ego; downwards it plunges into the id, which indicates the origin of the superego from the early childhood emotional ties to the parents.
- The id is now opened downwards in the drawing to indicate the opening to the somatic , to the physical aspect of the instincts.
- In addition to the preconscious and the conscious, the unconscious is now represented in the drawing; it is separated from the preconscious by a double dotted horizontal line. The new structural scheme indicates that the id is by no means to be equated with the unconscious: the unconscious comprises not only the id, but also large parts of the ego and the superego.
According to Freud, the drawing he called "undemanding" has a flaw:
“It is certainly difficult to say today to what extent the drawing is correct; in one point it is certainly not. The space occupied by the unconscious id would have to be incomparably larger than that of the ego or the preconscious. Please improve that in your mind. "
The demolition of psychoanalysis
In the Abstract of Psychoanalysis (written in 1939, published in 1940) Freud undertakes a comprehensive attempt to integrate the theoretical structure he developed into the three-instance model of id, ego and superego. He ties in with the presentations in The I and the Id and in the new series of lectures . Important details and innovations are summarized below.
The id contains two kinds of elements: the innate - the psychic expression of the organic drives - and the acquired, namely the repressed. In the id, the excitements tyrannically urge immediate discharge, regardless of the dangers that threaten from the outside world (“primary process”).
The two basic instincts, which are called "Eros" and "Destruction", correspond to the opposition of attraction and repulsion that prevails in the inorganic. As an early source of his instinctual dualism, Freud refers to the Greek natural philosopher Empedocles , for whom the cosmos is based on the primal contrast between love and hate.
On the question of libido - the energy of eros - Freud makes two statements that are difficult to reconcile:
- At the beginning of the development of the individual, all libido is stored up in the undifferentiated ego (thesis of the secondary character of narcissism).
- At the beginning the entire available amount of libido is stored in the ego (thesis of the primary character of narcissism).
The ego is often divided in its relationship to the outside world. Perceptions that trigger fear are both denied and acknowledged by the ego. The model case is fetishism : the fetishist denies the perception of the woman's lack of penis and forms a substitute object for the missing organ, namely the fetish; at the same time, however, he registers the absence of the penis and therefore feels fear of castration. However, this splitting of the ego is not a specialty of the fetishists, it is also found in the so-called normal. Freud thus draws a further line of conflict in the psychic apparatus; next to the
- Struggle between the I and the id
- between the superego and the ego
- as well as between eros and destruction
occurs now
- a split within the ego related to its main function, the perception of the outside world.
Freud had already ascribed the repression activity to the ego in Das I und das Es ; it is based on its unconscious “resistance to repression”. In the outline of psychoanalysis , he explains that this expression is actually not entirely correct. With this he alludes to the distinction between "defense" and "repression": "Defense" is the general name for all techniques that the ego uses to ward off instinctual claims. "Repression" denotes a special defense mechanism that consists of a conscious content is made unconscious.
The superego gets an even stronger sociological accent in the outline of psychoanalysis than in the two earlier presentations of the second topic. In the superego, he now explains, not only the personal nature of the parents has an effect, but also the influence of family, racial and folk traditions as well as the requirements of the respective social milieu represented by the parents.
Overall, the ego represents the power of the present, while the id and super-ego represent the power of the past; the id represents the organic past, the superego the cultural past.
The therapeutic process is also described in outline by Freud in the categories of id, ego and superego. An individual then goes into therapy when the ego can no longer cope with the tasks that are set to him by the outside world, i.e. due to a weakness of the ego. This weakness does not only apply to the relationship to the outside world; the energy of the ego is consumed in vain attempts to ward off the id's claims, and its activities are inhibited by strict prohibitions of the super-ego.
The psychoanalyst comes to the aid of the weakened ego. He concludes a contract with the patient: full sincerity of the patient against the discretion and professional ability of the analyst. Here the analyst allies himself with the patient's ego against the instinctual claims of the id and the claims of conscience of the super-ego. At the beginning of the treatment the analyst strengthens the patient's ego by expanding his self-knowledge. At this stage, during the positive transference , the patient puts the analyst in place of his superego. This enables the analyst to heal through suggestion ; the successes achieved in this way, however, quickly evaporate as soon as the positive transference changes into the negative transference.
This is the beginning of the most important and longest phase of the analysis. The analyst's task now is to overcome the resistance that the patient's ego exerts against the claims of the id. In doing so, the analyst relies on the upward tendency of the id, that is, on the fact that the unconscious drive claims want to become conscious. This leads to a change in the alliance structure: the doctor now allies himself with the patient's id against the patient's ego.
Classification of the script
The I and the It appeared in April 1923; Freud had been engaged in this work since July 1922 at the latest.
Representations of the first topic with consciousness as the repressing authority can be found in the draft of a psychology from 1895, in the seventh chapter of the dream interpretation from 1900 and in the metapsychological writings of 1915.
The idea that the psyche consists of two parts, the repressing and the repressed, was represented from the beginning by Freud: the repressed strives to become effective in some way, and the repressing force tries to prevent it from doing so. Freud initially assumed that what is repressing is consciousness or the ego, which he also initially understood as conscious. Freud first pointed out the possibility that essential parts of the ego could be unconscious in 1920 in Beyond the Pleasure Principle .
Freud explicitly refers to Georg Groddeck for the origin of the term Es ; he suspects that Groddeck followed Nietzsche's example, but he is wrong. Freud's conceptions of the id have not changed after the ego and the id.
The thesis that the narcissistic libido is always based on a transformation of object libido is presented for the first time in this work. His views on this question have changed. The libido can either occupy the objects or the ego; the first form of libido is called "object libido" by Freud, the second "narcissistic libido" or "ego libido". The question then becomes: Is all libido initially narcissistic libido and is it then shifted to objects? Or is it initially object libido and is it later partially withdrawn from the objects and directed towards the ego? To put it another way: is the narcissistic libido primary or secondary? In his 1914 work on the introduction of narcissism , Freud wrote that the libido initially occupies the ego and is passed on from here to the objects. He reinforced this view of the primary character of the narcissistic libido in the third edition of the Three Essays on Sexual Theory of 1915, as well as in Beyond the Pleasure Principle of 1920. In Das Ich und das Es , that is, 1923, however, he takes the opposite position: the narcissistic Libido is always secondary. That looks like a clear change of position. However, about a year later in the biography of 1925 he writes that the ego remains the great reservoir of libido from which the object cathexes are sent, and also in the Abstract of Psychoanalysis , which was written in 1938 and published in 1940, it says that the entire libido is initial stored up in the self. Whether these views can be reconciled is controversial among Freud experts.
The concept of I was in use in philosophy long before Freud; you can find it at Berkeley , Kant and Fichte . Freud used the term in earlier writings partly for a certain part of the psyche, as then also in The I and the Id , but partly for the human being as a whole including his body. Freud's more thorough exploration of the ego began in 1909 with the development of the narcissism hypothesis, important works on the ego are the Schreber analysis Psychoanalytical Remarks on an autobiographical case of paranoia (1911), the work on the introduction of narcissism (1914) and the treatise Das Unconscious (1915).
Freud was primarily concerned with self-criticism and the associated feeling of guilt in connection with obsessional neurosis . In his work Obsessions and Religious Exercises (1909) he states that self-reproach can also be unconscious. In the narcissism work of 1914 he developed the hypothesis that there could be a special psychic authority in the ego that has the task of observing the ego and measuring it against the ego ideal or ideal ego. In mass psychology and analysis of the ego , he drops the distinction between the observing authority and the ideal; the instance itself is called the ego ideal here . In Das Ich und das Es the super-ego appears at the beginning as a correspondence to the ego ideal, later in the text its warning and prohibiting function is emphasized. After Das I und das Es , the concept of the ego ideal disappears almost completely from Freud's writings. In 1933, however, he was briefly mentioned again, namely in the 33rd lecture of the New Series of Lectures on the Introduction to Psychoanalysis . The super-ego, it is said there, is also “the bearer of the ego ideal by which the ego measures itself and whose claim it tries to fulfill. There is no doubt that this ego ideal is the precipitate of the old parent's conception, the expression of admiration for the perfection that the child ascribed to them at the time. "
Freud first described the mechanism of replacing an object cathexis with an identification in the Leonardo study in order to explain a certain type of homosexuality, namely when the boy replaces his love for his mother by identifying with her ( a childhood memory of the Leonardo da Vinci , 1908). In his work Trauer und Melancholie (1917), he used this mechanism to explain the origin of melancholy . In Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyze (1921) further explanations of the different types of identification followed. Freud's final view of the origin of the super-ego from the child's earliest object relationships can only be found in The I and the Id .
literature
expenditure
Sigmund Freud: The I and the It .
- International Psychoanalytischer Verlag, Leipzig 1923 (first print)
- In: Ders .: Collected Works, Vol. 13. Imago, London 1940, pp. 237–289
- In: Ders .: Study edition, Vol. 3. Psychology of the Unconscious . Fischer Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2000, ISBN 3-596-50360-4 , pp. 273-330 (with editorial foreword and notes on the history of the term; cited above after this edition)
- In: Ders .: The I and the It. Metapsychological writings. Introduction Alex Holder. Fischer Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1994 and more often, ISBN 3-596-10442-4
Secondary literature
- Nadine Amar, Gérard Le Gouès, Georges Pragier (eds.): Surmoi. Volume II: Les développements postfreudiens. Presses universitaires de France, Paris 1995, ISBN 2-13-046406-8
- Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel : L'idéal du moi. Essai psychoanalytique sur la maladie d'idéalité. Tchou, Paris 1975; New edition under the title La maladie d'idéalité. Essai psychanaltytique sur l'idéal du moi . Paris, Editions universitaires 1990, ISBN 2-7113-0397-7 (German: Das Ichideal. Psychoanalytical essay on the 'illness of ideality'. Translated by Jeannette Friedeberg. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1981, ISBN 3-518-07578-0 )
- Jean-Luc Donnet: Surmoi. Volume I: Le concept freudien et la règle fondamentale. Presses universitaires de France, Paris 1995, ISBN 2-13-045481-X
- Anna Freud : The ego and the defense mechanisms. Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, Vienna 1936. - Reprints: Kindler, Munich 1964, ISBN 3-463-18001-4 ; Fischer Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1983, ISBN 3-596-42001-6
- Georg Groddeck : The Book of It. Psychoanalytic letters to a friend . Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, Leipzig 1923. - New edition published by Samuel Müller and Wolfram Groddeck. Vol. 1: Text volume. Vol. 2: Manuscript edition, materials and letters . Stroemfeld, Basel 2004, ISBN 3-87877-831-7
- Heinz Hartmann : ego psychology and the problem of adaptation. Klett: Stuttgart 1960 (reprint from Psyche , 14th year 1960)
- Heinz Hartmann: Essays on ego psychology. Selected problems in psychoanalytic theory. Hogarth, London 1964 (German: Ich-Psychologie. Studies on psychoanalytic theory . Translated by Marianne von Eckardt-Jaffé. Klett, Stuttgart 1972. A revised version of this translation by Dora Hartmann and Lottie M. Newmann was published by Klett in 1972. Edition of this revised translation was published by Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1997, ISBN 3-608-91847-7 )
- Melanie Klein : On the development of psychological functioning (1958). In: Dies .: Collected Writings III: 1946-1963. Frommann-Holzboog, Stuttgart a. Bad Cannstatt 2000, ISBN 3-7728-1673-8 , pp. 369-386
- Heinz Kohut : The analysis of the self. International University Press, New York 1971 (German: Narcissism. A theory of the psychoanalytic treatment of narcissistic personality disorders . Translated by Lutz Rosenkötter. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1973, several editions, ISBN 3-518-27757-X )
- Max Schur : The id and the regulatory principles of mental functioning. International Universities Press, New York 1966 (German. The id and the regulatory principles of psychic events. Translated by Käte Hügel. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1973, several editions, ISBN 3-596-27338-2 )
Web links
- Full text in textlog.de
- Jean-Luc Donne: The Ego and the Id. ( Memento of January 24, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) On: enotes.com
Individual evidence
- ↑ Footnote in Chapter II: " G. Groddeck , Das Buch vom Es. Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag 1923". In: Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 13. Imago, London 1940, p. 251.
- ↑ Page numbers in round brackets refer here and in the following to Freud: Das Ich und das Es . In: Ders .: Study Edition, Vol. 3
- ↑ Footnote of the editors in: Sigmund Freud: Das Ich und das Es . In: Ders .: study edition, vol. 3 , p. 293, footnote 2
- ↑ Collected Works, Vol. 13. Imago, London 1940, pp. 253f.
- ↑ Page numbers in round brackets in this section refer to: Freud: New series of lectures for the introduction to psychoanalysis . In: Ders .: study edition, vol. 1 . Fischer Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2000, pp. 448–610
- ↑ Approximately in The Displacement of 1915; see. Freud: The repression . In: Ders .: Study Edition, Vol. 3 . Fischer Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2000, p. 109; similar in instincts and instinctual fates from the same year.
- ↑ See, for example, the work The Unconscious from 1915.
- ↑ Collected Works, Vol. 15. ("New Series of Lectures for Introduction to Psychoanalysis"), Imago, London 1944, p. 85.
- ↑ ibid., P. 85
- ↑ Cf. Freud: Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety (1926) . In: Ders .: study edition, vol. 6 . Fischer Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2000, pp. 227–308, here: pp. 300–302.
- ↑ a b Cf. on this and the following the editorial foreword to Das Ich und das Es , in: Sigmund Freud: Studienausgabe, Vol. 3. , pp. 275–281.
- ↑ Cf. on the criticism of Freud's appeal to Nietzsche: Bernd Nitzschke: it thinks, IT guides. In: Psychoanalysis - Texts from Social Research 7, 2003, pp. 255–262, http://www.werkblatt.at/nitzschke/text/esdenkt.htm
- ↑ See Appendix II of the editors of Das Ich und das Es in the study edition, Vol. 3 entitled The Great Reservoir of Libido , pp. 327-330; see. also the article "Narcissism, primary, secondary" in: Jean Laplanche, Jean-Bernard Pontalis: The vocabulary of psychoanalysis. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1975, pp. 320-323.
- ↑ See article Ich in: Joachim Ritter, Karlfried Gründer (ed.): Historical Dictionary of Philosophy, Vol. 4 . Schwabe, Basel 1976, pp. 2-18
- ↑ Sigmund Freud: Study Edition, Vol. 1 . Fischer Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2000, p. 503