Original subtitles

Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id

Before the book begins, a

few words from our channel.

It's late.

The house is quiet.

And somewhere inside your head, someone is going over your day again.

Word by word.

It isn't your mother.

It isn't your boss.

You never hired it, and you can't fire it.

It remembers what you blurted out at dinner, and the tone you used.

You promised yourself, not this time.

And you did it again.

And now it's back, calm as anything.

So whose voice is that? And if it's yours, why is it never on your side?

A hundred years ago, a doctor heard that voice every day, in other people.

Then he noticed something even stranger.

Some of them got worse exactly when they should have been getting better.

Tell them, look, you're improving, and they'd slide right back, as if something

inside them didn't want them to heal.

He wrote, plainly, that he knew of no stronger obstacle to getting well.

This book is his attempt to figure it out.

In less than two hours, he has to tell you who talks to you at night and what

it wants from you.

It won't be easy. He warns you himself on the first pages. A lot of readers

will stop right here because it sounds like nonsense.

But the ones who didn't stop changed the world.

When he died, a great poet wrote that he was no longer a person, but a whole

climate we think in.

You live in it too, even if you've never read a line of his.

It starts quietly with one simple question.

What does it actually mean to be aware of something?

Don't rush.

The voice will come.

If it makes you think of something, tell us in the comments.

Enjoy listening.

The

following

discussions continue lines of thought begun in my essay, Beyond the Pleasure

Principle. published in 1920, toward which, as I mentioned there, I

personally felt a certain benevolent curiosity.

They take up those thoughts, connect them with various facts of analytic

observation, and try to derive new conclusions from this union. But they

borrow nothing new from biology, and for that reason they stand closer to

psychoanalysis than Beyond does.

They bear the character of a synthesis rather than of a speculation, and they

seem to have set themselves a lofty aim.

I know, however, that they stop at the roughest outlines, and I am quite

content with this limitation.

In doing so, they touch on matters that have not yet been the subject of

psychoanalytic treatment, and they cannot avoid brushing against certain

theories put forward by non-analysts or by former analysts in the course of

their retreat from analysis.

I have always been ready, in other cases, to acknowledge my debts to other

workers. But in this instance, I feel burdened by no such debt of gratitude.

If psychoanalysis has not hitherto done justice to certain things, this has

never been because it overlooked what others had achieved or wished to deny

its importance, but because it follows a particular path that had not yet led so

far. And finally, when it has arrived there, things appear to it differently

from the way they appear to others.

Section 1.

Consciousness and the Unconscious

In

this

introductory section, there is nothing new to be said, and it is impossible to

avoid repeating what has often been said before.

The division of the psychical into what is conscious and what is unconscious is

the fundamental premise of psychoanalysis. And it alone gives

psychoanalysis the possibility of understanding the pathological processes

in mental life, which are as common as they are important, and of finding them

a place in science.

To put it once more, and in a different way, psychoanalysis cannot situate the

essence of the psychical in consciousness, but must regard

consciousness as a quality of the psychical.

which may be present in addition to other qualities or may be absent.

If I could imagine that everyone interested in psychology would read this

essay, I should also be prepared to find that at this point already some of my

readers would stop short and go no further.

For here is the first shibboleth of psychoanalysis.

To most people with a philosophical education, the idea of something

psychical that is not also conscious is so inconceivable that it seems to them

absurd and refutable by mere logic.

I believe this is only because they have never studied the relevant phenomena of

hypnosis and of dreams, which, quite apart from the pathological, compel such

a view.

Their psychology of consciousness, however, is also incapable of solving

the problems of dreams and of hypnosis.

Being conscious is, in the first place, a purely descriptive term, resting on

perception of the most immediate and certain kind.

Experience then shows us that a psychical element, an idea for example,

is not as a rule conscious for any length of time.

On the contrary, it is characteristic that the state of consciousness passes

off rapidly.

An idea that is conscious now is no longer so a moment later, although it

can become so again under certain conditions that are easily brought

about. In the meantime, it was, we do not know what.

we can say that it was latent, and by this we mean that it was capable of

becoming conscious at any moment.

If we say that it was unconscious, we shall also be giving a correct

description.

Here, then, unconscious coincides with latent and capable of becoming

conscious. The philosophers, it is true, would object.

No, the term unconscious does not apply here.

So long as the idea was in a state of latency, it was not anything psychical

at all.

Were we to contradict them at this point, we should find ourselves in a

dispute about words from which nothing could be gained.

But we have arrived at the term or concept of the unconscious along another

path, by working over experiences in which mental dynamics play a part.

We have found, that is, we have been obliged to assume, That very powerful

mental processes or ideas exist, and here a quantitative, that is, an

economic factor, first comes into consideration, which can have all the

effects on mental life that ordinary ideas have, including effects that can,

in their turn, become conscious as ideas, though they themselves do not

become conscious.

It is unnecessary to repeat here in detail what has so often been set out

before.

Suffice it to say that at this point, psychoanalytic theory steps in and

asserts that such ideas cannot become conscious because a certain force

opposes it, that otherwise they could become conscious, and that one would

then see how little they differ from other acknowledged psychical elements.

This theory is rendered irrefutable by the fact that, in the technique of

psychoanalysis, means have been found by whose help the opposing force can be

removed, and the ideas in question made conscious.

The state in which they were before being made conscious we call repression,

and we assert that the force which brought about the repression and

maintained it is perceived as resistance during the work of analysis.

We obtain our concept of the unconscious, therefore, from the theory

of repression.

The repressed is for us the prototype of the unconscious.

We see, however, that we have two kinds of unconscious.

The one which is latent but capable of becoming conscious, and the one which is

repressed and which is not, in itself and without more ado, capable of

becoming conscious.

Our insight into psychical dynamics cannot fail to affect our terminology

and description.

The latent, which is unconscious only descriptively and not in the dynamic

sense, we call preconscious.

We restrict the term unconscious to the dynamically unconscious repressed, so

that we now have three terms, conscious, preconscious, and unconscious.

whose meaning is no longer purely descriptive.

The preconscious, we suppose, stands much closer to the conscious than the

unconscious does, and since we have called the unconscious psychical, we

shall do so all the more readily with the latent preconscious.

But why do we not rather remain in agreement with the philosophers and

consistently separate the preconscious as well as the unconscious from the

conscious psychical?

The philosophers would then propose that we describe the preconscious and the

unconscious as two kinds or stages of the psychoid, and harmony would be

restored. But endless difficulties of exposition would follow.

And the one important fact, that these psychoids agree with what is

acknowledged to be psychical on almost every other point, would be pushed into

the background for the sake of a prejudice, a prejudice dating from a

time when these psychoids, or the most significant of them, were still unknown.

Now, we can manage quite comfortably with our three terms, conscious,

preconscious, and unconscious, so long as we do not forget that in the

descriptive sense, there are two kinds of unconscious, but in the dynamic

sense, only one.

For some purposes of exposition, this distinction can be neglected.

For others, it is, of course, indispensable.

We have, after all, grown fairly used to this ambiguity of the unconscious and

have got on well enough with it.

As far as I can see, it cannot be avoided.

The distinction between conscious and unconscious is in the end a question of

perception, which must be answered yes or no.

And the act of perception itself tells us nothing about the reason why

something is perceived or is not perceived.

We have no right to complain that the dynamic factor finds only an ambiguous

expression in the phenomenon.

In the further course of psychoanalytic work, however, it turns out that even

these distinctions are inadequate and, for practical purposes, insufficient.

Among the situations that show this, let the following be singled out as the

decisive one.

We have formed the idea of a coherent organization of mental processes in a

person, and we call this his ego.

It is to this ego that consciousness is attached.

The ego controls the approaches to motility, that is, to the discharge of

excitations into the external world.

It is the mental agency which exercises control over all its own part processes,

which goes to sleep at night, and which even then still applies the censorship

to dreams.

From this ego, too, proceed the repressions, by means of which certain

mental strivings are to be excluded not only from consciousness, but also from

other forms of effectiveness and activity.

In analysis, what has been set aside by repression stands opposed to the ego,

and analysis is faced with the task of removing the resistances that the ego

displays against concerning itself with the repressed.

Now, we observe during analysis that the patient runs into difficulties when we

set him certain tasks.

His associations fail when they should be approaching the repressed.

We then tell him that he is under the sway of a resistance, but he knows

nothing of it.

And even if he should guess, from his feelings of unpleasure, that a

resistance is now at work in him, he does not know how to name it or describe

it. Since, however, this resistance certainly proceeds from his ego and

belongs to it, we find ourselves in an unforeseen situation.

We have found in the ego itself something that is also unconscious, that

behaves exactly like the repressed, that is, produces powerful effects without

itself becoming conscious, and that requires a special piece of work before

it can be made conscious.

The consequence of this discovery for analytic practice is that we fall into

endless obscurities and difficulties if we cling to our habitual way of

expressing ourselves and try, for instance, to trace neurosis back to a

conflict between the conscious and the unconscious.

From our insight into the structural conditions of mental life, we must

substitute another antithesis for this one, the antithesis between the coherent

ego and the repressed that has been split off from it.

The consequences for our conception of the unconscious, however, are even more

significant. The dynamic view had brought us the first correction, the

structural.

Section 2 The Ego and the Id

We would like to learn more about the ego, now that we know that the ego too

can be unconscious in the proper sense.

Until now, the only guide we have had during our investigations has been the

mark of being conscious or unconscious, and we have lately seen how ambiguous

this can be.

Now, all our knowledge is invariably bound up with consciousness, even the

unconscious we can come to know only by making it conscious.

But wait, how is that possible?

What does it mean to make something conscious?

How can that come about?

We already know where our point of departure must lie.

We have said that consciousness is the surface of the mental apparatus.

That is, we have ascribed it as a function to a system which, spatially,

is the first one reached from the external world.

Spatially, moreover, not only in the sense of function, but this time also in

the sense of anatomical dissection.

Our investigations, too, must take this perceiving surface as their starting

point.

All perceptions that come from without, sense perceptions, are conscious from

the outset, and so is what we call sensations and feelings coming from

within. But what of those inner processes which we may sum up, roughly

and inexactly, as thought processes?

Do they, which take place somewhere in the interior of the apparatus as

displacements of mental energy on the way to action, advance to the surface

that causes consciousness to arise?

Or does consciousness come to them?

We notice that this is one of the difficulties that arise when one tries

to take the spatial, topographical idea of mental events seriously.

Both possibilities are equally unthinkable.

It must be some third thing that is the case.

Elsewhere, I have already put forward the assumption that the real difference

between an unconscious and a preconscious idea, or thought, consists

in this.

The former is carried out on some material that remains unknown, whereas

in the latter, the preconscious one, a connection with word presentations is

added. Here, for the first time, an attempt is made to give marks for the

two systems, the preconscious and the unconscious, other than their relation

to consciousness.

The question, how does something become conscious, would thus be more usefully

put as, how does something become preconscious?

And the answer would be, through being connected with the corresponding word

presentations.

These word presentations are memory residues. They were once perceptions,

and like all memory residues, they can become conscious again.

Before we go further into their nature, something dawns on us like a new

insight. Only something that was once a conscious perception can become

conscious, and anything arising from within, apart from feelings, that seeks

to become conscious must try to transform itself into external

perceptions.

This becomes possible by means of memory traces.

We think of the memory residues as contained in systems which lie directly

adjacent to the system perception consciousness, so that their cathexes

can easily extend from within to the elements of that system.

One thinks here at once of hallucination, and of the fact that the

most vivid memory is always distinguished both from hallucination

and from external perception.

But just as quickly, the explanation presents itself that when a memory is

revived, the cathexis remains in the memory system, whereas a hallucination,

which cannot be distinguished from perception, may arise when the cathexis

does not merely spread over from the memory trace to the perception element,

but passes over to it entirely.

Verbal residues derive essentially from auditory perceptions.

so that the preconscious system is thereby given, as it were, a special

sensory source.

The visual components of the word presentation, being secondary and

acquired through reading, may be left aside for the moment.

And so too may the motor images of words, which, except in the deaf and

dumb, play the part of auxiliary signs.

The word, after all, is properly the memory residue of the word that has been

heard.

It must not occur to us, for the sake of simplification perhaps, to forget the

importance of optical memory residues, those of things, or to deny that thought

processes can become conscious through a reversion to visual residues, and that

in many people this seems to be the favored method.

The study of dreams and of preconscious fantasies, as observed by J. Verendak,

can give us an idea of the peculiar character of this visual thinking.

We learn that, as a rule, it is only the concrete subject matter of the thought

that becomes conscious, whereas no visual expression can be given to the

relations which particularly characterize thought.

Thinking in pictures is therefore only a very imperfect form of becoming

conscious.

It also stands, in some way, closer to unconscious processes than does thinking

in words, and it is unquestionably older than the latter.

both ontogenetically and phylogenetically.

If, then, this is the way in which something that is in itself unconscious

becomes preconscious, the question of how we make something repressed

preconscious can be answered, by supplying, through the work of analysis,

such preconscious intermediate links.

Consciousness thus remains where it is, but neither has the unconscious risen up

into consciousness.

Whereas the relation of external perception to the ego is quite

transparent, that of internal perception to the ego calls for special

investigation. It raises once more the doubt whether we are really right in

referring all consciousness to the one superficial system, perception

consciousness. Internal perception yields sensations of processes taking

place in the most diverse, and certainly also in the deepest strata of the mental

apparatus.

Little is known about them.

Those belonging to the pleasure-unpleasure series may still be

regarded as the best example of them.

They are more primordial, more elementary than those arising from

without, and they can come about even in states of clouded consciousness.

They are multilocular, like external perceptions.

They may come from different places at the same time and may thus have

different and even opposite qualities.

Sensations of a pleasurable character have nothing inherently compelling about

them, whereas unpleasurable ones have it in the highest degree.

They press for change, for discharge, and that is why we interpret unpleasure

as implying a heightening and pleasure a lowering of energetic cathexis.

If we call what becomes conscious as pleasure and unpleasure a quantitative

and qualitative something-other in the course of mental events, The question is

whether this something-other can become conscious where it is, or whether it

must first be conveyed to the system perception.

Clinical experience decides for the latter.

It shows that this something-other behaves like a repressed impulse.

It can exert driving force without the ego noticing the compulsion.

Only resistance to the compulsion.

A holding up of the discharge reaction at once makes this something other

conscious as unpleasure. In the same way as tensions arising from need, pain too

can remain unconscious.

Pain, that intermediate thing between external and internal perception, which

behaves like an internal perception even when it comes from the external world.

It remains true then that sensations and feelings too become conscious only by

reaching the system perception.

If the way forward is barred, they do not come into being as sensations,

although the something other that corresponds to them in the course of

excitation is the same.

We then speak, in a condensed and not entirely correct manner, of unconscious

feelings, keeping up an analogy with unconscious ideas which is not

altogether justified.

The difference, in fact, is that for an unconscious idea, connecting links must

first be created before it can be brought into consciousness.

Whereas with feelings, which are themselves transmitted directly, this

does not occur.

In other words, the distinction between conscious and preconscious has no

meaning where feelings are concerned.

The preconscious here drops out, and feelings are either conscious or

unconscious.

Even when they are attached to word presentations, they do not owe their

becoming conscious to them, but become so directly.

The part played by word presentations now becomes perfectly clear.

By their mediation, internal thought processes are made into perceptions.

It is as if the proposition were to be proved that all knowledge has its origin

in external perception.

When thinking is hypercathected, thoughts are actually perceived, as if

from without, and are for that reason held to be true.

After this clarification of the relations between external and internal

perception and the superficial system perception consciousness, we can go on

to work out our idea of the ego.

We see it starting out from the system perception as its nucleus and beginning

by embracing the preconscious, which adjoins the memory residues. But the

ego, as we have learned, is also unconscious.

Now I think we shall gain a great deal by following the suggestion of a writer

who, from personal motives, vainly protests that he has nothing to do with

strict and lofty science.

I mean Georg Grotek, who never tires of insisting that what we call our ego

behaves essentially passively in life, and that, as he puts it, we are lived by

unknown and uncontrollable forces.

We have all had impressions of the same kind, even though they may not have

overwhelmed us to the exclusion of all others.

and we need not hesitate to find a place for Grotic's insight in the structure of

science. I propose to take it into account by calling the entity that

starts out from the system perception and begins by being preconscious, the

ego, and by following Grotic in calling the other part of the mind, into which

this entity extends and which behaves as though it were unconscious, the id.

We shall soon see whether we can derive any advantage from this view for

purposes of description and understanding.

An individual is now for us a psychical id, unknown and unconscious, upon whose

surface rests the ego, developed from the perception system as its nucleus.

If we try to represent this pictorially, we shall add that the ego does not

envelop the id entirely, but only to the extent that the system perception forms

its surface, rather as the germinal disc sits upon the egg.

The ego is not sharply separated from the id.

Towards its lower part, it merges into it.

But the repressed also merges into the id, and is simply a part of it.

The repressed is sharply cut off from the ego only by the resistances of

repression. Through the id, it can communicate with the ego.

We see at once that almost all the distinctions we have described at the

prompting of pathology relate only to the superficial layers of the mental

apparatus, the only ones known to us.

We might sketch a drawing of these relations, though its outlines are meant

only to serve as an illustration and lay no claim to any particular

interpretation.

We might add, perhaps, that the ego wears an auditory cap and, as the

evidence of brain anatomy shows, on one side only.

It sits on the ego askew, so to speak.

It is easy to see that the ego is that part of the id which has been altered by

the direct influence of the external world, through the mediation of

perception consciousness.

It is, in a sense, a continuation of the differentiation of the surface.

The ego also strives to bring the influence of the external world to bear

upon the id and its intentions and endeavors to put the reality principle

in the place of the pleasure principle, which reigns without restriction in the

id. For the ego, Perception plays the part that in the id falls to instinct.

The ego represents what may be called reason and good sense, in contrast to

the id, which contains the passions.

All this corresponds to familiar popular distinctions, but it is to be understood

as holding true only on average or in an ideal sense.

The functional importance of the ego is expressed in the fact that, normally,

control over the approaches to motility is granted to it.

In its relation to the id, it is thus like a rider who has to hold in check

the superior strength of the horse, with this difference, that the rider tries to

do so with his own strength while the ego uses borrowed forces.

The analogy can be carried a little further.

Just as a rider, if he does not want to be parted from his horse, often has no

choice but to guide it where it wants to go, so too the ego is in the habit of

turning the id's will into action as though it were its own.

Another factor, besides the influence of the system, perception, seems to have

played a part in bringing about the formation of the ego and its separation

from the id.

A person's own body, and above all its surface, is a place from which external

and internal perceptions may arise at the same time.

It is seen like any other object, but to the touch it yields two kinds of

sensation, one of which may be equivalent to an internal perception.

Psychophysiology has discussed at sufficient length the manner in which a

person's own body comes to stand out from the world of perception.

Pain, too, seems to play a part in this, and the way in which we gain new

knowledge of our organs during painful illnesses is perhaps a model of the way

in which we arrive at the idea of our own body in general.

The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego.

It is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface.

If we look for an anatomical analogy for it, we can best identify it with the

cortical homunculus of the anatomist, which stands on its head in the cerebral

cortex, sticks its heels up in the air, faces backwards, and, as we know,

carries the speech area on its left-hand side.

The relation of the ego to consciousness has been discussed repeatedly, yet there

are some important facts here that call for fresh description.

accustomed as we are to carry a social or ethical scale of values about with us

wherever we go we are not surprised to hear that the doings of the lower

passions take place in the unconscious but we expect that the higher a mental

function ranks on this scale the more easily it will find secure access to

consciousness here however psychoanalytic experience disappoints us

On the one hand, we have evidence that even subtle and difficult intellectual

work, which ordinarily requires strenuous reflection, can equally be

carried out preconsciously, without ever reaching consciousness.

Such cases are quite beyond doubt. They occur, for example, during sleep, and

show themselves when a person, immediately after waking, knows the

solution to a difficult mathematical or other problem with which he has

struggled in vain the day before.

Far more disconcerting, however, is another experience.

We learn in our analyses that there are people in whom self-criticism and

conscience, mental activities that is to say of the very highest value, are

unconscious, and being unconscious produce the most important effects.

The fact that resistance remains unconscious during analysis is therefore

by no means the only situation of its kind.

But this new discovery, which compels us, in spite of our better critical

judgment, to speak of an unconscious sense of guilt, bewilders us far more.

and sets us fresh riddles, especially when we gradually come to suspect that

in a great number of neuroses, such an unconscious sense of guilt plays an

economically decisive part and puts the most powerful obstacles in the way of

recovery. If we wish to return to our scale of values, we must say not only

what is deepest in the ego, but what is highest in it, too, can be unconscious.

It is as if we were being shown, in this way, what we said earlier about the

conscious ego.

namely that it is first and foremost a body ego.

Section 3.

The Ego and the Super-Ego If the ego were merely that part of

the id which has been modified by the influence of the perceptual system, the

representative of the real external world in the mind, we should be dealing

with a simple state of affairs.

but there is something further to be added.

The considerations that led us to assume the existence of a grade within the ego,

a differentiation within the ego which may be called the ego ideal or superego,

have been set out elsewhere.

They still hold good.

That this part of the ego has a less firm connection with consciousness is

the novelty which calls for explanation.

At this point, we must cast our net somewhat wider.

We succeeded in explaining the painful disorder of melancholia by supposing

that an object, which was lost, has been set up again inside the ego.

That is, that an object cathexis has been replaced by an identification.

At that time, however, we did not yet appreciate the full significance of this

process, and did not know how common and how typical it is.

Since then, we have come to understand that this kind of substitution plays a

great part in shaping the ego.

and contribute substantially to building up what is called its character.

At the very beginning, in the individual's primitive oral phase,

object cathexis and identification are no doubt indistinguishable from each

other. Later on, we can only suppose that object cathexis proceed from the

id, which feels erotic trends as needs.

The ego, which to begin with is still feeble, becomes aware of the object

cathexis and either acquiesces in them or tries to fend them off by the process

of repression. When it happens that a sexual object has to be given up, or is

meant to be given up, there quite often ensues in its place the alteration of

the ego, which must be described as a setting up of the object inside the ego,

as occurs in melancholia.

The exact nature of this substitution is as yet unknown to us.

It may be that by this introjection, which is a kind of regression to the

mechanism of the oral phase, the ego makes it easier for the object to be

given up, or makes that possible at all.

It may be that this identification is the sole condition under which the id

can give up its objects.

At any rate, the process, especially in the early phases of development, is a

very frequent one, and it makes it possible to suppose that the character

of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object cathexes, and that it contains

the history of those object choices.

It must, of course, be admitted from the outset that there are varying degrees of

capacity for resistance, which decide how far a person's character fends off

or accepts these influences from the history of his erotic object choices.

In women who have had many experiences in love, one fancies that one can easily

trace the vestiges of their object cathexes in the traits of their

character. We must also take into account the possibility of object

cathexis and identification occurring simultaneously.

that is, of an alteration in character taking place before the object has been

given up.

In that case, the alteration in character could outlive the object

relation and, in a certain sense, preserve it.

From another point of view, it may be said that this transformation of an

erotic object choice into an alteration of the ego is also a method by which the

ego can gain control over the id and deepen its relations with it.

though admittedly at the cost of a far-reaching compliance with the id's

experiences.

When the ego assumes the features of the object, it is forcing itself, so to

speak, upon the id as a love object, and trying to make good the id's loss by

saying, look, you can love me too, I am so like the object.

The transformation of object libido into narcissistic libido, which takes place

here, evidently implies an abandonment of sexual aims, a desexualization.

and is thus a kind of sublimation.

Indeed, the question arises, and deserves careful consideration, whether

this is not the universal road to sublimation, whether all sublimation

does not take place through the mediation of the ego, which begins by

changing sexual object libido into narcissistic libido, and then, perhaps,

goes on to give it another aim.

Whether this transformation may not also give rise to other vicissitudes of the

instincts, For instance, whether it may not bring about a diffusion of the

various instincts that are fused together is a question that will occupy

us later.

Although it is a digression from our aim, we cannot avoid letting our

attention dwell for a moment on the ego's object identifications.

If they gain the upper hand and become too numerous, unduly powerful, and

incompatible with one another, a pathological outcome will not be far

off. It may come to a splitting of the ego, as the separate identifications

become cut off from one another by resistances, and perhaps the secret of

the cases of so-called multiple personality is that the different

identifications seize hold of consciousness in turn.

Even when things do not go so far as this, there remains the question of

conflicts between the various identifications into which the ego comes

apart.

Conflicts which, after all, cannot always be described as purely

pathological.

But whatever the character's later capacity for resisting the influences of

abandoned object cathexis may turn out to be, the effects of the first

identifications, made at the earliest age, will be general and lasting.

This leads us back to the origin of the eco-ideal. For behind it, there lies

hidden the first and most important identification of the individual, his

identification with the father of his own personal prehistory.

This is apparently not in the first instance the consequence or outcome of

an object cathexis.

It is a direct and immediate identification, and takes place earlier

than any object cathexis.

But the object choices belonging to the first sexual period and relating to the

father and mother seem, in the normal course of things, to find their outcome

in an identification of this kind, and thus to reinforce the primary one.

Nevertheless, these relations are so complicated that it becomes necessary to

describe them in more detail.

There are two factors responsible for this complication, the triangular

character of the Oedipus situation and the constitutional bisexuality of each

individual.

In its simplified form, the case of a male child takes the following shape.

At a very early age, the little boy develops an object cathexis for his

mother, which originates in relation to the mother's breast.

and is the prototype of an object choice on the anaclytic model.

The boy deals with his father by identifying himself with him.

For a time, these two relationships proceed side by side, until the boy's

sexual wishes in regard to his mother become more intense, and he perceives

that his father is an obstacle to them.

From this, the Oedipus complex arises.

His identification with his father then takes on a hostile coloring.

and changes into a wish to get rid of his father in order to take his place

with his mother.

From then on, his relation to his father is ambivalent.

It seems as if the ambivalence inherent in the identification from the beginning

had become manifest.

An ambivalent attitude towards his father and an object relation of a

purely affectionate kind towards his mother make up the content of the simple

positive Oedipus complex in a boy.

Along with the demolition of the Oedipus complex, the boy's object cathexis of

his mother must be given up.

Its place may be filled by one of two things, either an identification with

his mother or an intensification of his identification with his father.

We are accustomed to regard the latter outcome as the more normal. It permits

the affectionate relation to the mother to be in a measure retained.

In this way, the dissolution of the Oedipus complex would consolidate the

masculinity in the boy's character.

In a precisely analogous way, the outcome of the Oedipus attitude in a

little girl may be an intensification of her identification with her mother, or

the setting up of such an identification for the first time, a result which will

fix the child's feminine character.

These identifications are not what we should have expected, since they do not

introduce the abandoned object into the ego, but this alternative outcome may

also occur.

And it is easier to observe in girls than in boys.

Analysis very often shows that a little girl, after she has had to relinquish

her father as a love object, will bring her masculinity into prominence and

identify herself not with her mother but with her father, that is, with the

object that has been lost.

This will clearly depend on whether the masculinity in her disposition is strong

enough, whatever that may consist in.

It would appear, therefore, that in both sexes, the relative strength of the

masculine and feminine sexual dispositions is what determines whether

the outcome of the Oedipus situation shall be an identification with the

father or with the mother.

This is one of the ways in which bisexuality takes a hand in the

vicissitudes of the Oedipus complex.

The other way is even more important, for one gets the impression that the

simple Oedipus complex is by no means its commonest form.

but rather represents a simplification or schematization, which, to be sure, is

often enough justified for practical purposes.

Closer study usually discloses the more complete Oedipus complex, which is

twofold, positive and negative, and is due to the bisexuality originally

present in children.

That is to say, a boy has not merely an ambivalent attitude towards his father

and an affectionate object choice towards his mother, but at the same

time, he also behaves like a girl and displays an affectionate feminine

attitude towards his father.

and a corresponding jealous and hostile attitude towards his mother.

It is this intrusion of bisexuality that makes it so difficult to see clearly

into the relations of the primitive object choices and identifications, and

still more difficult to describe them intelligibly. It may even be that the

ambivalence displayed in the relations to the parents should be attributed

entirely to bisexuality, and that it is not, as I have just represented it,

developed out of identification in consequence of rivalry.

In my view, it is advisable, in general, and quite particularly where neurotics

are concerned, to assume the existence of the complete Oedipus complex.

Analytic experience then shows that, in a number of cases, one or the other of

its constituents dwindles away until hardly a perceptible trace remains, so

that a series emerges with the normal, positive Oedipus complex at one end and

the inverted, negative one at the other, while the intermediate members exhibit

the complete form with the two components taking an unequal share.

When the Oedipus complex goes under, the four trends contained in it will combine

in such a way as to produce a father identification and a mother

identification. The father identification will hold fast to the

mother as object of the positive complex, and at the same time replace

the father as object of the inverted complex, and the same will hold mutatis

mutandis for the mother identification.

The differing strength with which the two identifications are stamped will

mirror the inequality of the two sexual dispositions.

Thus, the broadest general outcome of the sexual phase governed by the Oedipus

complex may be taken to be a precipitate in the ego, consisting in the

establishment of these two identifications, somehow reconciled with

each other.

This modification of the ego retains its special position.

It confronts the other contents of the ego as an ego ideal, or superego.

The superego, however, is not simply a residue of the earliest object choices

of the id.

It also has the significance of an energetic reaction formation against

them. Its relation to the ego is not exhausted by the admonition, you ought

to be like this, like your father.

It also comprises the prohibition, you may not be like this, like your father.

That is, you may not do everything that he does.

Some things remain his prerogative.

This double face of the ego ideal derives from the fact that the ego ideal

was enlisted for the repression of the Oedipus complex.

Indeed, it owes its very existence to that upheaval.

Repressing the Oedipus complex was clearly no easy task.

Since the parents, and especially the father, were recognized as the obstacle

to the fulfillment of the Oedipal wishes, the infantile ego fortified

itself for this work of repression by setting up that same obstacle within

itself. It borrowed, so to speak, the strength to do so from the father.

and this alone was an act of extraordinarily far-reaching

consequence.

The superego will preserve the character of the father, and the stronger the

Oedipus complex was, and the more swiftly its repression took place, under

the influence of authority, religious teaching, schooling, and reading, the

more severely will the superego later rule over the ego, as conscience, or

perhaps as an unconscious sense of guilt. Where it draws the strength for

this dominion from, the compulsive character that expresses itself as a

categorical imperative,

is a question on which I shall later put forward a conjecture.

If we consider once more the origin of the superego as we have described it, we

recognize it as the outcome of two highly significant biological factors,

the long period of childhood helplessness and dependence in human

beings, and the fact of their Oedipus complex, which we have traced back to

the interruption of libidinal development by the latency period, and

so to the diphasic onset of their sexual life.

This last peculiarity, which appears to be specifically human, has been

represented by one psychoanalytic hypothesis as a legacy of the

development towards civilization that was forced upon mankind by the Ice Age.

The separation of the superego from the ego is therefore nothing accidental.

It represents the most significant features of the development both of the

individual and of the species.

Indeed, by giving lasting expression to the influence of the parents, it

perpetuates the existence of the factors to which it owes its origin.

Psychoanalysis has been reproached countless times for taking no interest

in what is higher, moral, and suprapersonal in human beings.

The reproach was doubly unjust, historically as well as

methodologically.

Historically, because from the very beginning, the impetus to repression was

ascribed to the moral and aesthetic trends in the ego.

methodologically because people refused to see that psychoanalytic research

could not appear like a philosophical system with a complete and finished

edifice of doctrine, but had to make its way step by step towards an

understanding of the complexities of the mind by analytically dissecting normal

and abnormal phenomena alike.

So long as we had to concern ourselves with the study of what is repressed in

mental life, we had no need to share the trembling anxiety over the fate of what

is higher in human beings.

Now that we are venturing on the analysis of the ego, we can give an

answer to all those whose moral sense has been shaken and who have complained

that there must surely be a higher nature in man.

Certainly there is.

And this is that higher nature, the ego ideal or superego, the representative of

our relation to our parents.

As little children, we knew these higher beings, admired them, feared them.

and later we took them into ourselves.

The ego ideal is therefore the heir of the Oedipus complex, and thus the

expression of the most powerful impulses and the most important libidinal

vicissitudes of the id.

By setting it up, the ego has mastered the Oedipus complex and, at the same

time, subjected itself to the id.

Whereas the ego is essentially the representative of the external world, of

reality, the superego stands over against it as the advocate of the

internal world, of the id.

Conflicts between the ego and the ideal will, as we are now prepared to find,

ultimately reflect the contrast between what is real and what is psychical,

between the external world and the internal world.

Whatever biology and the vicissitudes of the human species have created and left

behind in the id is taken over by the ego through the formation of the ideal.

and experienced afresh by it individually.

Because of the way it was formed, the ego ideal has the most abundant links

with the phylogenetic acquisitions of each individual, his archaic heritage.

What belonged to the lowest depths in the mental life of the individual

becomes, through the formation of the ideal, what is highest in the human mind

by our scale of values.

It would be a vain endeavor, however, to try to localize the ego ideal, even in

the way we have localized the ego.

or to fit it into any of the analogies by which we have tried to picture the

relation between the ego and the id.

It is easy to show that the ego ideal satisfies every demand that is made of

the higher nature in man.

As a substitute formation for the longing for a father, it contains the

germ from which all religions have grown.

The judgment of one's own inadequacy, as the ego measures itself against its

ideal, produces the humble religious feeling to which the longing believer

appeals. As development proceeds, teachers and authorities carry on the

father's role.

Their commands and prohibitions remain powerful in the ego ideal, and now, as

conscience, exercise moral censorship.

The tension between the demands of conscience and the actual performance of

the ego is felt as a sense of guilt.

Social feelings rest on identifications with others on the basis of a shared ego

ideal.

Religion, morality, and social feeling. These chief elements of what is higher

in man were originally one and the same.

According to the hypothesis put forward in Totem and Taboo, they were acquired

phylogenetically from the father complex, religion and moral restraint

through the mastering of the Oedipus complex proper, and social feelings

through the necessity of overcoming the rivalry that still remained among the

members of the younger generation.

In all these moral acquisitions, the male sex seems to have taken the lead.

and cross inheritance has passed the possession on to women as well.

Even today, social feelings arise in the individual as a superstructure built

over jealous impulses of rivalry against brothers and sisters.

Since the hostility cannot be satisfied, an identification with the former rival

is established.

Observations of mild cases of homosexuality support the conjecture

that this identification, too, is a substitute for an affectionate object

choice that has taken the place of the aggressive and hostile attitude.

With the mention of phylogenesis, however, new problems arise, from whose

answers one would like to shrink back timidly.

But there is no help for it. The attempt must be ventured, even though one fears

it will lay bare the inadequacy of our whole endeavor.

The question is this.

Who was it in those days that acquired religion and morality from the father

complex? The ego of primitive man?

or his id?

If it was the ego, why do we not simply speak of inheritance in the ego?

If it was the id, how does that agree with the character of the id?

Or is it wrong to carry the differentiation into ego, superego, and

id back into such early times?

Or should we not honestly admit that our whole conception of the processes of the

ego contributes nothing to an understanding of phylogenesis and cannot

be applied to it?

Let us first answer what is easiest to answer.

The differentiation between ego and id must be attributed not only to primitive

man, but to far simpler living creatures, since it is the necessary

expression of the influence of the external world.

The superego, according to our account, arose precisely out of those experiences

that led to totemism.

The question whether it was the ego or the id that underwent those experiences

and made those acquisitions soon collapses of its own accord.

The very next consideration tells us that the id cannot live through or

experience any external fate except by way of the ego, which represents the

external world to it.

Yet one cannot speak of direct inheritance in the ego.

It is here that the gulf opens up between the real individual and the

concept of the species.

Nor should one take the distinction between ego and id too rigidly, or

forget that the ego is a specially differentiated part of the id.

The experiences of the ego seem at first to be lost to inheritance.

But when they are repeated often enough, and with sufficient strength in many

individuals in successive generations, they transform themselves, so to speak,

into experiences of the id, whose impressions are preserved by

inheritance. Thus, the hereditary id harbors within it the residues of

countless ego existences.

And when the ego draws its superego out of the id, it is perhaps only bringing

to light again older forms of the ego and granting them a resurrection.

The history of how the superego came into being makes it understandable that

early conflicts of the ego with the object cathexis of the id can be

continued in conflicts with their heir, the superego.

If the ego has not succeeded well in mastering the Oedipus complex, the

cathexis of energy belonging to that complex, which springs from the id, will

come into operation once more in the reaction formation of the ego ideal.

The abundant communication between this ideal and these unconscious instinctual

impulses will solve the riddle of how the ideal itself can, to a great extent,

remain unconscious and inaccessible to the ego.

The struggle which once raged in deep ristrata, and which was not brought to

an end by swift sublimation and identification, is now carried on in a

higher region, as in Kalbach's painting of the Battle of the Huns.

Section 4.

The Two Kinds of Instinct We have already said that if our division

of the mental being into an id, an ego, and a superego signifies an advance in

our insight, it must also prove itself a means towards a deeper understanding and

a better description of the dynamic relations within mental life.

We have also already made it clear to ourselves that the ego stands under the

special influence of perception, and that, roughly speaking, one may say that

perceptions have the same significance for the ego as the instincts have for

the id.

At the same time, however, the ego, too, is subject to the influence of the

instincts, just as the id is, of which it is, after all, only an especially

modified part.

Concerning the instincts, I recently developed a view in Beyond the Pressure

Principle, which I shall hold to here and make the basis of the discussions

that follow.

According to it, we have to distinguish two kinds of instincts, of which one,

the sexual instincts or eros, is by far the more conspicuous and the more

accessible to knowledge.

It comprises not only the uninhibited sexual instinct proper and the

instinctual impulses derived from it, which are inhibited in their aim or

sublimated. but also the instinct of self-preservation, which we must ascribe

to the ego, and which, at the beginning of our analytic work, we had good reason

to set in opposition to the sexual object instincts.

To point out this second kind of instinct caused us difficulties.

At last we came to regard sadism as its representative.

On the basis of theoretical considerations, supported by biology, we

put forward the hypothesis of a death instinct.

whose task is to lead organic, living matter back into the lifeless state,

while Eros pursues the aim of complicating life by bringing together,

in ever wider combinations, the living substance scattered into particles, and

of course of preserving it in doing so.

Both instincts behave in this conservatively, in the strictest sense,

since both strive to restore a state of things that was disturbed by the

emergence of life.

The emergence of life would thus be the cause of the continuation of life, and

at the same time also of the striving towards death, and life itself a

struggle and a compromise between these two trends.

The question of the origin of life would remain a cosmological one, while the

question of the purpose and intention of life would be answered dualistically.

To each of these two kinds of instinct, a special physiological process, of

building up and of breaking down, would be assigned.

In every particle of living substance, both kinds of instinct would be at work,

but in unequal proportions, so that one substance might take on the chief

representation of eros.

In what way instincts of the two kinds combine, blend, and alloy with one

another would still be quite beyond our power to imagine.

But that this happens regularly and on a large scale is an assumption we cannot

dismiss in our present context.

As a result of the union of single-celled elementary organisms into

multicellular living beings, it would have become possible to neutralize the

death instinct of the single cell and to divert its destructive impulses onto the

external world by way of a special organ.

This organ would be the musculature, and the death instinct would now express

itself, though probably only in part, as an instinct of destruction directed

against the external world and other living beings.

Once we have accepted the idea of a fusion of the two kinds of instinct, the

possibility of a more or less complete defusion of them also forces itself upon

us. In the sadistic component of the sexual instinct, we would have before us

a classic example of a purposeful fusion of instincts, and in sadism that has

become independent as a perversion, the model of a defusion, though one not

carried to the extreme.

A view then opens up for us onto a large field of facts which has not yet been

considered in this light.

We recognize that the instinct of destruction is regularly placed in the

service of eros, for purposes of discharge.

We suspect that the epileptic fit is a product and sign of a diffusion of

instincts, and we come to understand that, among the effects of some severe

neuroses, for example the obsessional neuroses, the diffusion of instincts and

the emergence of the death instinct deserve special consideration.

Generalizing hastily, we might conjecture that the essence of a

regression of libido, for example from the genital to the sadistic anal phase,

rests on a diffusion of instincts, just as, conversely, the advance from the

earlier phase to the definitive genital one is conditioned by an accession of

erotic components.

The question also arises whether the ordinary ambivalence which we so often

find intensified in the constitutional disposition to neurosis may not be

regarded as the result of a diffusion.

But ambivalence is so primary a phenomenon that it must rather be

considered a fusion of instincts that has never been completed.

Our interest will naturally turn to the questions whether illuminating relations

cannot be found between the structures we have assumed, the ego, the superego,

and the id, on the one hand, and the two kinds of instinct on the other.

And further, whether we can assign to the pleasure principle, which governs

mental processes, a fixed position in relation to the two kinds of instinct

and to the differentiations within the mind.

But before we enter upon this discussion, we have to dispose of a

doubt that is directed against the way the problem is framed.

There is indeed no doubt about the pleasure principle, and the division of

the ego rests on clinical justification.

But the distinction between the two kinds of instinct seems not sufficiently

secure, and it is possible that facts of clinical analysis may cancel its claim.

One such fact seems to exist.

For the opposition between the two kinds of instinct, we may substitute the

polarity of love and hate.

We are in no difficulty about finding a representative of Eros.

On the other hand, we are very glad to be able to point in the instinct of

destruction, to which hate shows the way, to a representative of the death

instinct. which is so hard to grasp. Now, clinical observation teaches us not

only that hate is the unexpectedly regular companion of love, that is,

ambivalence, and not only that it is often its forerunner in human

relationships, but also that under many kinds of circumstances, hate turns into

love, and love into hate.

If this transformation is more than a mere succession in time, that is, more

than one replacing the other, then the ground is clearly cut away from under a

distinction as fundamental as that between erotic instincts and death

instincts, which presupposes physiological processes running in

opposite directions.

Now, the case in which one first loves a person and then hates them, or the

reverse, because that person has given one cause to do so, clearly has nothing

to do with our problem.

Nor has the other case, in which a state of being in love that is not yet

manifest first expresses itself through hostility and aggressive tendencies.

For here, the destructive component may have hurried on ahead in the object

cathexis until the erotic one joined it.

But we know of several cases from the psychology of the neuroses in which the

assumption of a transformation seems more plausible.

In persecutory paranoia, The patient fends off an excessively strong

homosexual attachment to a particular person in a certain way, and the result

is that this most beloved person becomes a persecutor, against whom the patient's

often dangerous aggression is directed.

We are entitled to interpolate that, in a phase before this, love had been

transformed into hate.

In the genesis of homosexuality, and also of the desexualized social

feelings, analytic investigation has only recently taught us of the existence

of violent feelings of rivalry that lead to aggressive tendencies, and only after

these have been overcome does the formerly hated object become the loved

one or the object of an identification.

The question arises whether in these cases we must assume a direct

transformation of hate into love.

For here we are dealing with purely internal changes, in which no alteration

in the behavior of the object plays any part.

Analytic investigation of the process in the paranoid transformation, however,

makes us familiar with the possibility of another mechanism.

An ambivalent attitude is present from the outset, and the transformation takes

place by means of a reactive displacement of cathexis, energy being

withdrawn from the erotic impulse and added to the hostile one.

Not the same thing, but something similar happens when the hostile rivalry

that leads to homosexuality is overcome.

The hostile attitude has no prospect of satisfaction, and therefore, for

economic reasons, that is, it is replaced by a loving attitude, which

offers a better prospect of satisfaction, that is, of discharge.

So we need not assume in any of these cases a direct transformation of hate

into love, which would be incompatible with the qualitative difference between

the two kinds of instinct.

We notice, however, that in calling upon this other mechanism for the

transformation of love into hate, we have tacitly made another assumption,

which deserves to be stated aloud.

We have proceeded as though there existed in mental life, whether in the

ego or in the id we leave undecided, a displacable energy which, indifferent in

itself, can join a qualitatively differentiated erotic or destructive

impulse and increase its total cathexis.

Without assuming such a displaceable energy, we cannot manage at all.

The only question is where it comes from, what it belongs to, and what it

signifies.

The problem of the quality of instinctual impulses and of how that

quality is preserved through the various vicissitudes of the instincts is still

very obscure and has hardly yet been tackled. In the sexual component

instincts, which are especially accessible to observation, one can

establish a few processes that belong within the same framework.

For example, that the component instincts communicate with one another

in a certain sense, that an instinct arising from one particular erotogenic

source can give up its intensity to reinforce a component instinct from

another source, that the satisfaction of one instinct can take the place of

satisfaction for another, and more of the same kind, all of which must give

one courage to venture assumptions of a certain sort.

In the present discussion, too, I can offer only an assumption, not a proof.

It seems plausible that this displacable and indifferent energy, which is

probably active both in the ego and in the id, proceeds from the narcissistic

store of libido, and is therefore desexualized eros.

The erotic instincts appear to us, after all, altogether more plastic, more

readily diverted and displaced than the destructive instincts.

One can then go on, without strain, to assume that this displaceable libido

works in the service of the pleasure principle, in order to avoid blockages

and to facilitate discharges.

In this, a certain indifference as to the path by which the discharge takes

place, so long as it takes place at all, is unmistakable.

We know this trait as characteristic of the cathectic processes in the id.

It is found in erotic cathexes, where a peculiar indifference with regard to the

object is developed.

and quite especially in the transferences in analysis, which must be

carried out regardless of the persons concerned.

Rank has recently given some fine examples of neurotic acts of revenge

being directed against the wrong people.

Such behavior on the part of the unconscious calls to mind the comic

anecdote of the three village tailors, one of whom was to be hanged because the

village's only blacksmith had committed a capital crime.

Punishment must be had, even if it does not fall upon the guilty.

It was in the displacements of the primary process in the dream work that

we first noticed this same looseness.

There it was the objects, and in the case now before us, it would be the

paths of discharge, that are considered only in the second place.

It would be like the ego to insist on greater exactness in the choice both of

the object and of the path of discharge.

If this displacement energy is desexualized libido, It may also be

called sublimated, for it would still hold fast to the chief aim of eros, that

of uniting and binding, insofar as it serves to establish that unity by which,

or by the striving towards which, the ego is distinguished.

If we include thought processes in the wider sense among these displacements,

then the work of thinking, too, is supplied by the sublimation of erotic

mode of force.

Here we once more come up against the possibility, touched on earlier, that

sublimation regularly takes place through the mediation of the ego.

We recall the other case, in which this ego deals with the first object cathexes

of the id, and surely with later ones as well, by taking their libido into the

ego and binding it to the alteration of the ego brought about by identification.

This transformation into ego-libido naturally involves an abandonment of

sexual aims, a desexualization.

In any case, this gives us insight into an important function of the ego in its

relation to eros.

By getting hold of the libido of the object cathexis in this way, setting

itself up as the sole love object, and desexualizing or sublimating the libido

of the id, the ego works against the aims of eros and places itself in the

service of the opposing instinctual impulses.

Another portion of the id's object cathexis it has to put up with, to go

along with, so to speak.

We shall come later to speak of another possible consequence of this activity of

the ego.

An important amplification would now have to be made to the theory of

narcissism. At the very beginning, all libido is accumulated in the id, while

the ego is still in the process of formation or is feeble.

The id sends out part of this libido into erotic object cathexes.

Whereupon the ego, now grown stronger, tries to get hold of this object libido

and to force itself upon the id as a love object.

The narcissism of the ego is thus a secondary one, withdrawn from the

objects.

Again and again, we find that the instinctual impulses we are able to

trace reveal themselves as derivatives of eros.

Were it not for the considerations put forward in Beyond the Pleasure

Principle, and finally for the sadistic contributions to Eros, we should find it

hard to hold fast to our fundamental dualistic view.

But since we are compelled to do so, we cannot help gaining the impression that

the death instincts are essentially mute, and that the clamor of life

proceeds for the most part from Eros, and from the struggle against Eros.

It is impossible to dismiss the view that the pleasure principle serves the

id as a compass in its struggle against the libido, which introduces

disturbances into the course of life.

If it is the constancy principle, in Fechner's sense, that governs life, so

that life would then be a gliding into death, then it is the claims of eros, of

the sexual instincts, which, in the form of instinctual needs, hold up the

falling of the level and introduce fresh tensions. The id?

guided by the pleasure principle, that is to say, by the perception of

unpleasure, defends itself against them in various ways.

In the first place, by yielding as swiftly as possible to the demands of

the non-desexualized libido.

That is, by striving for the satisfaction of the directly sexual

trends. In a far more thoroughgoing way, by ridding itself, in one particular

form of satisfaction in which all the component demands converge, of the

sexual substances.

which are, so to speak, saturated vehicles of the erotic tensions.

The ejection of the sexual substances in the sexual act corresponds, in a certain

sense, to the separation of soma and germplasm, hence the likeness of the

condition that follows complete sexual satisfaction to dying, and, in the lower

animals, the coincidence of death with the act of procreation.

These creatures die of reproduction.

Inasmuch as, once eros has been eliminated through satisfaction, the

death instinct has a free hand to carry out its purposes.

Finally, as we have heard, the ego eases the id's work of mastery by sublimating

portions of the libido for itself and its own ends.

Section 5.

The Dependencies of the Ego

The intricacy of the material may excuse the fact that none of the headings quite

corresponds to the contents of the chapters, and that we keep reaching back

to matters already dealt with whenever we wish to study new relations.

Thus, we have said repeatedly that the ego is formed to a great extent out of

identifications, which take the place of abandoned catechesis by the id.

that the first of these identifications regularly behave as a special agency

within the ego and stand apart from the ego as the superego, while later on the

ego, as it grows stronger, may become more resistant to the influences of such

identifications. The superego owes its special position in the ego, or in

relation to the ego, to a factor that must be considered from two sides.

First, that it is the first identification, one which took place

while the ego was still feeble. And second, that it is the heir of the

Oedipus complex, and so introduced the most momentous objects into the ego.

It stands, in a certain sense, in the same relation to the later alterations

of the ego as the primary sexual phase of childhood stands to the later sexual

life after puberty.

Although it is accessible to all later influences, it nevertheless preserves

throughout life the character conferred on it by its origin in the father

complex, namely the capacity to stand apart from the ego and to master it.

It is the monument to the ego's former weakness and dependence, and it

continues its dominion even over the mature ego.

Just as the child was under a compulsion to obey its parents, so the ego submits

to the categorical imperative of its superego.

But its derivation from the first object catechesis of the id, that is, from the

Oedipus complex, signifies still more for the superego.

As we have already shown, it brings the superego into relation with the

phylogenetic acquisitions of the id and makes it a reincarnation of earlier ego

formations which have left their precipitates behind in the id.

Thus, the superego is always close to the id and can act as its representative

in dealings with the ego.

It reaches deep down into the id and for that reason is farther from

consciousness than the ego is.

We shall best appreciate these relations if we turn to certain clinical facts,

which have long ceased to be a novelty.

but still await their theoretical working out.

There are certain people who behave in a quite peculiar fashion during the work

of analysis.

When one speaks hopefully to them or expresses satisfaction with the progress

of the treatment, they seem dissatisfied, and their condition

invariably grows worse.

At first, one takes this for defiance and an attempt to prove their

superiority to the physician.

Later, one comes to a deeper and juster view.

One becomes convinced not only that such people cannot endure any praise or

appreciation, but that they react in a contrary way to the progress of the

treatment. Every partial solution that ought to result, and in other people

does result, in an improvement or a temporary suspension of symptoms

produces in them, for the moment, an intensification of their illness.

They get worse during the treatment instead of getting better.

They exhibit what is known as a negative therapeutic reaction.

There is no doubt that something in these people sets itself against their

recovery and that its approach is dreaded as though it were a danger.

We say that in these people, it is not the will to recovery, but the need for

illness that has the upper hand.

If we analyze this resistance in the usual way and subtract from it the

attitude of defiance towards the physician and the fixation to the

various forms of gain from illness, the greater part of it is still left over.

and this reveals itself as the most powerful of all obstacles to recovery,

more powerful than the familiar ones of narcissistic inaccessibility, a negative

attitude towards the physician, and clinging to the gain from illness.

In the end, we come to see that we are dealing with what may be called a moral

factor, a sense of guilt, which finds its satisfaction in the illness and

refuses to give up the punishment of suffering.

We are justified in holding fast once and for all to this rather disheartening

explanation. But as far as the patient is concerned, this sense of guilt is

mute. It does not tell him he is guilty.

He does not feel guilty. He feels ill.

This sense of guilt expresses itself only as a resistance to recovery, which

is extremely difficult to overcome.

It is also particularly difficult to convince the patient that this motive

lies behind his continuing to be ill.

he will hold fast to the more obvious explanation that treatment by analysis

is not the right means of helping him.

What has been described here corresponds to the most extreme instances, but it

may well come into consideration to a lesser degree in very many cases,

perhaps in all the more severe cases of neurosis.

Indeed, more than this, it may be precisely this factor, the attitude of

the ego ideal, that decisively determines the severity of a neurotic

illness. We shall therefore not shy away from a few further remarks on the way in

which the sense of guilt expresses itself under different conditions.

The normal conscious sense of guilt, or conscience, presents no difficulties to

interpretation. It is based on the tension between the ego and the ego

ideal, and is the expression of a condemnation of the ego by its critical

agency.

The well-known feelings of inferiority and neurotics are presumably not far

removed from it.

In two very familiar maladies, the sense of guilt is overpoweringly conscious.

In them, the ego ideal displays a particular severity and often rages

against the ego in a cruel fashion.

Alongside this agreement, the two conditions, obsessional neurosis and

melancholia, show differences in the attitude of the ego ideal which are no

less significant.

In obsessional neurosis, or in certain forms of it, the sense of guilt is over

-loud but cannot justify itself to the ego.

Consequently, the patient's ego rebels against the imputation of guilt and asks

the physician to support it in repudiating these feelings of guilt.

It would be foolish to give in to it, for doing so would be of no avail.

Analysis then shows that the superego is being influenced by processes that have

remained unknown to the ego.

It is, in fact, possible to discover the repressed impulses which are at the

bottom of the sense of guilt.

Here, the superego has known more about the unconscious id than the ego has.

In melancholia, the impression that the superego has seized hold of

consciousness is even stronger.

But here, the ego ventures no objection.

It admits its guilt and submits to the punishment.

We understand this difference.

In obsessional neurosis, what was in question were objectionable impulses

which remained outside the ego.

In melancholia, however, the object at which the superego's wrath is aimed has

been taken into the ego through identification.

It is certainly not self-evident why the sense of guilt should reach such

extraordinary strength in these two neurotic disorders, but the main problem

of the situation lies elsewhere.

We shall postpone discussing it until we have dealt with the other cases.

those in which the sense of guilt remains unconscious.

This is to be found essentially in hysteria, and in states of the

hysterical type.

Here the mechanism by which it remains unconscious is easy to guess.

The hysterical ego fends off the distressing perception with which the

criticism of its superego threatens it, in the same way in which it is in the

habit of fending off an unendurable object cathexis, by an act of

repression.

It is the ego, then, that is responsible for the sense of guilt remaining

unconscious.

We know that, as a rule, the ego carries out repressions in the service and at

the behest of its superego.

But here is a case in which it has turned that same weapon against its

stern master.

In obsessional neurosis, as we know, the phenomena of reaction formation

predominate. Here, the ego succeeds only in keeping at a distance the material to

which the sense of guilt refers.

One may go further and venture the hypothesis that a great part of the

sense of guilt must normally remain unconscious, because the origin of

conscience is intimately bound up with the Oedipus complex, which belongs to

the unconscious.

If anyone were inclined to put forward the paradoxical proposition that the

normal man is not only far more immoral than he believes, but also far more

moral than he knows,

Psychoanalysis, on whose findings the first half of the assertion rests, would

have no objection to raise against the second half either.

It came as a surprise to find that an intensification of this unconscious

sense of guilt can turn a person into a criminal.

But that is undoubtedly the case.

In many criminals, especially youthful ones, it is possible to detect a

powerful sense of guilt which existed before the deed, and is therefore not

its result but its motive, as though it were felt as a relief to be able to

fasten this unconscious sense of guilt onto something real and immediate.

In all these situations, the superego shows its independence of the conscious

ego and its intimate relations with the unconscious id.

Now, in view of the importance we have ascribed to the preconscious residues of

words in the ego, the question arises whether the superego, when it is

unconscious, consists of such word presentations or of what else it

consists. The modest answer will be that the superego cannot possibly disown its

origin in things heard either. It is, after all, a part of the ego and remains

accessible to consciousness by way of these word presentations, that is,

concepts and abstractions.

but the cathectic energy is supplied to these contents of the superego not by

auditory perception, by instruction, or by reading, but by sources in the id.

The question, whose answer we had postponed, runs, How does it come about

that the superego manifests itself essentially as a sense of guilt, or,

better, as criticism, the sense of guilt being the perception in the ego that

corresponds to this criticism?

and that in doing so, it develops such extraordinary harshness and severity

towards the ego.

If we turn first to melancholia, we find that the excessively strong superego,

which has seized hold of consciousness, rages against the ego with merciless

violence, as if it had taken possession of the whole of the sadism available in

the individual.

Following our view of sadism, we should say that the destructive component has

entrenched itself in the superego and turned against the ego.

What now holds sway in the superego is, as it were, a pure culture of the death

instinct. And, in fact, it often enough succeeds in driving the ego into death,

if the ego does not fend off its tyrant beforehand by the changeover into mania.

The reproaches of conscience in certain forms of obsessional neurosis are just

as distressing and tormenting, but here the situation is less transparent.

It is noteworthy that, in contrast to the melancholic, The obsessional

neurotic, in fact, never takes the step of self-destruction. He is as if immune

against the danger of suicide and far better protected against it than the

hysteric. We can see that it is the preservation of the object that

guarantees the safety of the ego.

In obsessional neurosis, through a regression to the pregenital

organization, it has become possible for the love impulses to be transformed into

impulses of aggression against the object.

Here again, the destructive instinct has been set free and seeks to annihilate

the object, or at least it appears as though there were such an intention.

The ego has not taken up these tendencies.

It struggles against them with reaction formations and precautionary measures,

and they remain in the id.

The superego, however, behaves as though the ego were responsible for them, and

at the same time shows us, by the seriousness with which it pursues these

destructive intentions, that what is at work is not a mere appearance brought

about by regression, but an actual substitution of hate for love.

Helpless on both sides, the ego defends itself in vain against the demands of

the murderous id as against the reproaches of the punishing conscience.

It succeeds in holding back at least the crudest actions of both. And the outcome

is first an endless self-torment, and as things develop further, a systematic

tormenting of the object.

wherever it is within reach.

The danger's death instincts are dealt with in the individual in various ways.

In part, they are rendered harmless by being fused with erotic components.

In part, they are diverted outwards in the form of aggression.

While, to a large extent, they no doubt continue their inner work unhindered.

How is it, then, that in melancholia, the superego can become a kind of

gathering place for the death instincts?

From the point of view of instinctual restriction, that is, of morality, one

may say the id is entirely amoral, the ego strives to be moral, and the

superego can be hypermoral and then become as cruel as only the id can be.

It is remarkable that the more a man restricts his aggression towards the

outside world, the more severe and therefore the more aggressive he becomes

in his ego ideal.

To ordinary observation, this looks the other way round.

It sees in the demands of the ego ideal the motive for the suppression of

aggression. But the fact remains as we have stated it.

The more a man masters his aggression, the more his ideal's inclination to

aggression against his ego increases.

It is like a displacement, a turning around upon his own ego.

Even ordinary normal morality has the character of something harshly

restricting and cruelly forbidding.

It is from this, indeed, that the conception arises of a higher being who

punishes inexorably.

I cannot go on to explain these relations further without introducing a

new assumption.

The superego, after all, arose through an identification with the father, taken

as a model.

Every such identification has the character of a desexualization, or even

of a sublimation.

It now seems that when a transformation of this kind takes place, a diffusion of

instincts occurs at the same time.

After sublimation, the erotic component no longer has the power to bind the

whole of the destructiveness that was combined with it, and this is released

in the form of an inclination to aggression and destruction.

It would be from this diffusion that the ideal in general derives its harsh and

cruel character of imperious duty.

Let us dwell for a moment longer on obsessional neurosis.

Here the situation is different.

The diffusion of love into aggression has not been brought about by any work

on the part of the ego, but is the result of a regression that has taken

place in the id.

But this process has extended beyond the id to the superego, which now heightens

its severity towards the innocent ego.

In both cases, however, the ego, which has mastered the libido by means of

identification, would suffer punishment for doing so at the hands of the

superego. through the aggression that was mingled with the libido.

Our ideas about the ego are beginning to grow clearer, and its various relations

to gain and distinctness.

We now see the ego in its strength and in its weaknesses.

It is entrusted with important functions.

By virtue of its relation to the perceptual system, it gives mental

processes an order in time and submits them to reality testing.

By interposing the processes of thought, it secures a postponement of motor

discharges and controls the access to motility.

This last control, it is true, is more formal than real.

In its relation to action, the ego has somewhat the position of a

constitutional monarch, without whose sanction no law can be passed, but who

thinks long and hard before he vetoes any proposal put forward by Parliament.

The ego is enriched by all the experiences of life that come from

without. but the id is its second external world, which it strives to

bring into subjection to itself.

It withdraws libido from the id and transforms the object cathexis of the id

into structures of the ego.

With the help of the superego, in a manner still obscure to us, it draws on

the experiences of past ages stored up in the id.

There are two paths by which the contents of the id can penetrate into

the ego.

The one is direct, The other leads by way of the ego ideal, and, for many

mental activities, it may be decisive by which of the two paths they take place.

The ego develops from perceiving the instincts to controlling them, from

obeying the instincts to inhibiting them.

In this achievement, a large share is taken by the ego ideal, which is,

indeed, partly a reaction formation against the instinctual processes of the

id.

Psychoanalysis is an instrument designed to enable the ego to achieve a

progressive conquest of the id.

But on the other hand, we see this same ego as a poor creature, owing service to

three masters, and consequently menaced by three kinds of danger, from the

external world, from the libido of the id, and from the severity of the

superego. Three kinds of anxiety correspond to these three dangers, for

anxiety is the expression of a retreat from danger.

As a frontier creature, the ego tries to mediate between the world and the id, to

make the id pliable to the world and, by means of its muscular activity, to make

the world fall in with the wishes of the id.

It really behaves like the physician in an analytic treatment, in that, with its

regard for the real world, it offers itself to the id as a libidinal object

and seeks to draw the id's libido onto itself.

It is not only the helper of the id, it is also its submissive slave.

courting the love of its master.

Wherever possible, it tries to remain on good terms with the id.

It clothes the id's unconscious commands with its preconscious rationalizations.

It pretends that the id is showing obedience to the admonitions of reality,

even when the id has remained rigid and unyielding.

It glosses over the id's conflicts with reality and, if possible, its conflicts

with the superego as well.

In its position midway between the id and reality, it is only too often

tempted to become sycophantic, opportunistic, and deceitful.

Rather like a statesman who, though he sees things clearly enough, still wants

to keep himself in the good graces of public opinion.

Between the two classes of instincts, it does not keep itself impartial.

Through its work of identification and sublimation, it lends the death

instincts in the id a hand in mastering the libido.

But in doing so, it runs the risk of becoming the object of the death

instincts and of perishing itself.

In order to be able to give this help, it has had to fill itself with libido.

It thereby becomes itself the representative of Eros.

And from then on, it wants to live and to be loved.

But since its work of sublimation results in a diffusion of the instincts

and a liberation of the aggressive instincts in the superego, its struggle

against the libido exposes it to the danger of maltreatment and death.

When the ego suffers under the aggressiveness of the superego, or even

succumbs to it, its fate is like that of the protista, which are destroyed by the

products of decomposition that they themselves have created.

From the economic point of view, The morality that is at work in the superego

seems to us to be just such a product of decomposition.

Of all the ego's dependent relations, that on the superego is perhaps the most

interesting.

The ego is, after all, the actual seat of anxiety.

Threatened by the three kinds of danger, the ego develops the flight reflex by

withdrawing its own cathexis from the menacing perception.

or from the process in the id that it judges in the same way, and omitting it

as anxiety.

This primitive reaction is later replaced by the erection of protective

cathexes, which is the mechanism of the phobias.

What it is that the ego fears from the external danger, and from the libidinal

danger in the id, cannot be specified.

We know that it is being overwhelmed or annihilated, but it cannot be grasped

analytically. The ego is simply obeying the warning of the pleasure principle.

On the other hand, we can say what lies hidden behind the ego's fear of the

superego, the fear of conscience.

The superior being, which became the ego ideal, once threatened castration, and

this dread of castration is probably the nucleus round which the later fear of

conscience has gathered. It is this dread that persists as the fear of

conscience.

The high-sounding phrase, every fear is ultimately the fear of death, has hardly

any meaning, and at any rate cannot be justified.

It seems to me, on the contrary, perfectly correct to distinguish the

fear of death from fear of an object, or realistic anxiety, and from neurotic

libidinal anxiety.

It presents psychoanalysis with a difficult problem, for death is an

abstract concept with a negative content for which no unconscious correlative can

be found.

It would seem that the mechanism of the fear of death can only be that the ego

relinquishes its narcissistic libidinal cathexis in a very large measure, that

is, that it gives itself up, just as it gives up some other object in other

cases of anxiety.

I believe that the fear of death is something that occurs between the ego

and the superego.

We know that the fear of death makes its appearance under two conditions.

which, moreover, are entirely analogous to the situations in which other kinds

of anxiety develop, as a reaction to an external danger, and as an internal

process, as for instance in melancholia.

Once again, a neurotic manifestation may help us to understand a normal one.

The fear of death in melancholia admits of only one explanation, that the ego

gives itself up because it feels itself hated and persecuted by the superego,

instead of loved.

To the ego, therefore, living means the same as being loved, being loved by the

superego, which here again appears as the representative of the id.

The superego fulfills the same function of protecting and saving that was

fulfilled in earlier days by the father, and later by providence or destiny.

But when the ego finds itself in an excessive real danger, which it believes

itself unable to overcome by its own strength, it is bound to draw the same

conclusion. It sees itself deserted by all protecting forces and lets itself

die. Here, moreover, is once again the same situation that underlay the first

great state of anxiety at birth and the infantile anxiety of longing, the

anxiety due to separation from the protecting mother.

These considerations make it possible, then, to regard the fear of death like

the fear of conscience, as a development of the fear of castration.

The great significance which the sense of guilt has in the neuroses also makes

it conceivable that common neurotic anxiety is reinforced in severe cases by

the generating of anxiety between the ego and the superego, that is, fear of

castration, of conscience, and of death.

The id, to which we finally come back, has no means of showing the ego either

love or hate.

It cannot say what it wants. It has achieved no unified will.

Eros and the death instinct struggle within it.

We have seen with what weapons the one group of instincts defends itself

against the other.

It would be possible to picture the id as under the domination of the mute but

powerful death instincts, which desire to be at peace and, prompted by the

pleasure principle, to put Eros, the mischief-maker, to rest.

But perhaps that might be to undervalue the part played by Eros.

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