The Ego and the Id

by Sigmund Freud

it consequently stands in a closer relation to psycho-analysis than does Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

on this occasion I feel myself under no such obligation.

The division of mental life into what is conscious and what is unconscious is the fundamental premise on which psycho-analysis is based;

psycho-analysis cannot accept the view that consciousness is the essence of mental life, but is obliged to regard consciousness as one property of mental life, which may co-exist along with its other properties or may be absent.

To most people who have had a philosophical education the idea of anything mental which is not also conscious is so inconceivable that it seems to them absurd and refutable simply by logic.

Experience shows, next, that a mental element (for instance, an idea) is not as a rule permanently conscious.

a state of consciousness is characteristically very transitory; 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.

Thus “unconscious” in this sense of the word coincides with “latent and capable of becoming conscious.”

very powerful mental processes or ideas exist—here a quantitative or economic factor comes into question for the first time—which can produce in the mind all the effects that ordinary ideas do (including effects that can in their turn become conscious as ideas) without themselves becoming conscious.

such ideas cannot become conscious because a certain force is opposed to them, that otherwise they could become conscious,

The state in which the ideas existed before being made conscious is called by us repression, and we assert that the force which instituted the repression and maintains it is perceived as resistance during the work of analysis.

We see, however, that we have two kinds of unconscious—that which is latent but capable of becoming conscious, and that which is repressed and not capable of becoming conscious in the ordinary way.

That which is latent, and only unconscious in the descriptive and not in the dynamic sense, we call preconscious; the term unconscious we reserve for the dynamically unconscious repressed,

in the descriptive sense there are two kinds of unconscious, in the dynamic sense there is only one.

the distinction between conscious and unconscious is in the last resort a question of a perception which must be either affirmed or denied, and the act of perception itself tells us nothing of the reason why a thing is or is not perceived.

We have formulated the idea that in every individual there is a coherent organization of mental processes, which we call his ego.

goes to sleep at night, though even then it continues to exercise a censorship upon dreams. From this ego proceed the repressions, too, by means of which an attempt is made to cut off certain trends in the mind not merely from consciousness but also from their other forms of manifestation and activity.

his associations fail when they ought to be getting near to the repressed.

We have come upon something in the ego itself which is also unconscious, which behaves exactly like the repressed, that is, which produces powerful effects without itself being conscious and which requires special work before it can be made conscious.

it is still true that all that is repressed is Ucs, but not that the whole Ucs is repressed.

And after all, a consciousness of which one knows nothing seems to me a good deal more absurd than an unconscious mind.

Even knowledge of the Ucs can only be obtained by making it conscious.

real difference between a Ucs and a Pcs idea (thought) consists in this: that the former is worked out upon some sort of material which remains unrecognized, whereas the latter (the Pcs) has in addition been brought into connection with verbal images.

These verbal images are memory-residues; they were at one time perceptions, and like all memory-residues they can become conscious again.

most vivid memory is always distinguishable both from a hallucination and from an external perception;

a hallucination which is not distinguishable from a perception can arise when the cathexis does not merely extend over from the memory-trace to the Pcpt-element, but passes over to it entirely.

The essence of a word is after all the memory-trace of a word that has been heard.

Consciousness remains where it is, therefore; but, on the other hand, the Ucs does not rise up into the Cs.

Internal perceptions yield sensations of processes arising in the most diverse and certainly also in the deepest strata of the mental apparatus.

These sensations are multilocular, like external perceptions; they may come from different places simultaneously and may thus have different or even opposite qualities.

Sensations of a pleasurable nature are not characterized by any inherently impelling quality, whereas “painful” ones possess this quality in a high degree. The latter impel towards change, towards discharge, and that is why we interpret “pain” as implying a heightening and pleasure a lowering of energic cathexis.

It shows us that this undetermined element behaves like a repressed impulse. It can exert driving force without the ego noticing the compulsion. Not until there is resistance to the compulsion, and blocking of the discharge-reaction, does the undetermined element instantly become conscious as “pain.”

In the same way that tensions arising from physical need can remain unconscious, so also can physical pain—a thing intermediate between external and internal perception, which acts like an internal perception even when its source is in the external world.

whereas with Ucs ideas connecting-links must be forged before they can be brought into the Cs, with feelings, which are themselves transmitted directly, there is no necessity for this. In other words: the distinction between Cs and Pcs has no meaning where feelings are concerned;

Even when they are connected with verbal images, their becoming conscious is not due to that circumstance, but they become so directly.

The ego is not sharply separated from the id; its lower portion merges into it.

The repressed is only cut off sharply from the ego by the resistances of repression; it can communicate with the ego through the id.

We might add, perhaps, that the ego wears an auditory lobe—on one side only, as we learn from cerebral anatomy. It wears it crooked, as one might say.

It is easy to see that the ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world acting through the Pcpt-Cs: in a sense it is an extension of the surface-differentiation. Moreover, the ego has the task of bringing the influence of the external world to bear upon the id and its tendencies, and endeavours to substitute the reality-principle for the pleasure-principle which reigns supreme in the id. In the ego perception plays the part which in the id devolves upon instinct. The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains the passions.

ego uses borrowed forces.

The body itself, and above all its surface, is a place from which both external and internal perceptions may spring.

Pain seems also to play a part in the process, and the way in which we gain new knowledge of our organs during painful illnesses is perhaps a prototype of the way by which in general we arrive at the idea of our own body.

The ego is first and foremost a body-ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but it is itself the projection of a surface.5 If we wish to find an anatomical analogy for it we can easily identify it with the “cortical homunculus” of the anatomists, which stands on its head in the cortex, sticks its heels into the air, faces backwards and, as we know, has its speech-area on the left-hand side.

If we come back once more to our scale of values, we shall have to say that not only what is lowest but also what is highest in the ego can be unconscious. It is as if we were thus supplied with a proof of what we have just asserted of the conscious ego: that it is first and foremost a body-ego.

It may be that, by undertaking this introjection, which is a kind of regression to the mechanism of the oral phase, the ego makes it easier for an object to be given up or renders that process possible.

this transformation of an erotic object-choice into a modification of the ego is also a method by which the ego can obtain control over the id and deepen its relations with it—at the cost, it is true, of acquiescing to a large extent in the id’s experiences.

various identifications seize possession of consciousness in turn. Even when things do not go so far as this, there remains the question of conflicts between the different identifications into which the ego is split up, conflicts which cannot after all be described as purely pathological.

At a very early age the little boy develops an object-cathexis of his mother, which originally related to the mother’s breast and is the earliest instance of an object-choice on the anaclitic model; his father the boy deals with by identifying himself with him. For a time these two relationships exist side by side, until the sexual wishes in regard to the mother become more intense and the father is perceived as an obstacle to them; this gives rise to the Oedipus complex.7

Its place may be filled by one of two things: either an identification with the mother or an intensified identification with the father.

In this way the passing of the Oedipus complex would consolidate the masculinity in the boy’s character.