The human being that emerges from psychoanalysis is not a human being that is at peace with itself. It is a human being that is divided, split, that is in conflict with itself and that doesn't know itself completely. There is a kind of, in a way, a new vision of what it is to be human that emerges through psychoanalysis which recognizes conflict as fundamental.
Freud's fundamental view of humans is that they are incessantly at war with themselves inside their own mind. So that model of conflict and of division within, of a sort of fractured self, is fundamentally important. Freud has two models of the mind.
In the first model he distinguishes between perception consciousness, what he calls the pre-conscious, and the unconscious. In the second model he distinguishes between the ego, the id, and the superego. The id...
refers to the cluster of drives that push for immediate satisfaction. It's governed by the pleasure principle. It wants things here and now, regardless of the consequences. And if it doesn't get it, then it screams or has a tantrum. So if the id's associated with the drives and with getting satisfaction, however, in whatever form, then the ego has to sort of deal with that and say, you can't do it that way, but maybe you can do it this way.
It's a sort of negotiating agency. And then you've got the superego on the other side, which is to do with conscience and law, which says no, you know, no, you can't try and do anything ever. You've got to be perfect.
You've got to be all right. And so the ego's got to sort of mediate that too. It's about how to make these two, the sort of the law and the drives, how to make that livable. One of the difficulties in the later model of ego, id and superego, and one of the reasons why it doesn't just map onto the earlier model of conscious, unconscious, preconscious, is that Freud thought that a part of the ego was also unconscious to itself.
So there could be, as it were, something going on in the ego that's repressing thoughts, and yet that very fact or that very process might be unconscious within the ego. He thought of the ego as split between a conscious and an unconscious part. And then he also realized that when as a result of identifications with our parents we form ideals that we want to match, ideals of ourselves, these agencies are not all conscious. So that the unconscious is actually spread over the whole area of the mind.
Sometimes I think we can oversimplify it by thinking about these sort of three little figures running about in our minds. It represents normal childish desires and pleasures and to demonize those by calling it a devil I don't think is a good idea. And with the superego as an angel I think it's even more problematic because many of the demands of the superego are quite tyrannical and nonsensical. People talk about it as conscience, a kind of internalized version of conscience, but that makes it sound rather sanitized.
So one of the features of the superego is that it seems to be the voice of conscience and morality but it's actually a passionately sadistic and hating voice in my ear telling me what to do. You know the idea of the superego being something quite potentially perverse that it's an agency that can even get enjoyment for making the person suffer from watching them fail to live up to an ideal for instance. What Freud was saying was that people fall ill of their moral ideals.
And we ought to question their moral ideals. But the superego is sort of built out of the orders and the instructions and the diktats and the words of your primary carers. And you should and you shouldn't and you must and you mustn't.
etc and so the kind of exact words and beliefs and ideals of your parents are what your superego is built out of. Let's take an example. Take a person who, a man whose job was outside.
in the street, say he was a merchant at a market store. He developed panic attacks when going into work, and only in the summer, and in the end he couldn't go into work at all in the summer. What emerged in the analysis was that he was told as a young boy when he became interested in girls and used to look, you mustn't stare at a woman.
Now in the summer, lots of slightly clad, very pretty young women, girls came to his market stall and he found it impossible not to look. So to fulfill this moral demand of the super ego, of which he wasn't aware, not initially, all he could do in the end was to avoid the situation completely. So he was unable to work because of his strict super ego. If people have a sort of moral ideal. that doesn't enable them to live, then they're going to suffer.
In a way, any symptom, any psychological symptom, would be an example of the ego breaking down. So, you know, whether it's a phobia or an obsession with hand-washing or an inability to go to work or depression. All those things are signs that the ego just isn't coping and isn't managing to find a suitable compromise. The second model of the mind that Freud came up with, the one that distinguishes between the ego, the it and the superego, which also became the most popular one, has... advantages and disadvantages.
The disadvantages, and I think Freud himself noticed that towards the end of his life, is that it gives pride of place to the ego. Freud draws the analogy between a horse and a rider and the ego and the id. The id is a horse, you know, a strong animal full of energy and the rider tries to rein in the horse to die. directed along a pathway that the rider chooses. And more often than not, they say that works.
However, sometimes the horse has a mind of its own and it chooses its own way. And the ego, the rider, just follows and pretends that it's going where it wants to go, where it's the horse that's making the decision. And this gives us a bit of a problem with the ego because our egos are often giving us a false idea about who we are and what we can see.
The ego is always a bit of a hokey construction. It's always a bit silly, it's always, you know, just trying to make everything okay and make everything look good. It's a bit like politicians saying we don't want to be seen to da-da-da-da.
You know, they don't mind actually doing it, they don't want to be seen to do it. the ego is something a bit like that. So some of the things that the ego might bring when someone comes is a story about themselves. A typical one would be, I had a very happy childhood, my mother...
and father got on very well. It's a story that with a question may prove to not be the whole story and it's the ego. Its job has been to censor some of these darker aspects of people's lives.
There's no idea of propping up the ego it's just you know stop the ego being so silly stop it being such a politician and be a bit more realistic about the fact that you might want to do bad things you might fail to live up to your ideals it might be very difficult to be human but try with that and stop trying to be a robot.