The Id

Sigmund Freud expounded on his 1920 treatise, Beyond the Pleasure Principle with a formalized elaboration in 1923 called, The Ego and the Id. While Beyond the Pleasure Principle focused on Eros (creativity, harmony, sexual connection, reproduction, and self-preservation) and Thanatos (destruction, repetition, aggression, compulsion, and self-destruction), The Ego and the Id focused on the Id, Ego, and Superego. As an aside, note the similarities of Thanatos to Thanos, as depicted in the Infinity Gauntlet. In German, the Id, Ego, and Superego respectively correspond to the It, the I, and the Over-I. Please notice how Eros somewhat aligns to the confabulatory Right Brain while Thanatos somewhat aligns to the confabulatory Left Brain. Even so, remember that Freud’s Psychic Apparatus is not neuroscience, as there is no correspondence to somatic structures in the brain; it is pure psychology. Freud’s final apparatus consisted of the Id, Ego, and Superego. Although somewhat outdated, I find it an excellent model for practical application in understanding and perfecting our daily interactions (kind of like how we use the OSI Model to explain networking, even though we functionally use the TCP/IP Model). Let’s take a look at these 3 aspects, on the next page.

THE ID

The Id is primal. It is pure desire and need fulfillment. The Id is amoral and has no concept of and is not bound by good, evil, values, etc. It seeks immediate fulfillment, via the Pleasure Principle. It wants what it wants, and it wants it now and will do anything to get it. We are born with the Id active and this unconscious biological aspect is dominant from ages 0-2.

TECHNIQUE: You cannot reason with the Id. The Id must be dominated or it will dominate you. The Id focuses on the present with little concern for the past or the future. It responds to clear, direct, simple stimuli. Have you ever seen a parent attempting to reason with an 18-month-old child (40, 50, and 60 year old children are also quite common), because they mistake the child’s conditioned responses for intellectual reasoning, only to become frustrated because the child will not “listen to reason”. They are not listening to reason because they do not have the capacity to reason, at least not in the same way an adult does. Trying to reason with the unreasonable is foolish.

--Charles