Concept
Ego
In Freud's structural model, the agency that mediates between the drives of the id, the demands of the super-ego and the external world. It is the part of the id modified by perception and consciousness, 'first and foremost a bodily ego', and governs motility, reality-testing and defence, much of it unconsciously. Freud had used 'das Ich' throughout his work for the self or the defending part of the personality; Das Ich und das Es (1923) made it one agency among three. Ego psychology later centred psychoanalysis on its functions.
Development
1923
developed by Sigmund Freud
Freud had spoken of the ego since the 1890s as the agency that repels incompatible ideas; in Das Ich und das Es it becomes one of three agencies, a part of the id modified by the outside world, largely unconscious, first and foremost a bodily ego, and a 'poor creature' serving three masters: the id, the super-ego and reality.
In The Ego and the Id (1923);New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1933)
Relations
- 1923 developed by Sigmund Freud
Freud had spoken of the ego since the 1890s as the agency that repels incompatible ideas; in Das Ich und das Es it becomes one of three agencies, a part of the id modified by the outside world, largely unconscious, first and foremost a bodily ego, and a 'poor creature' serving three masters: the id, the super-ego and reality.
Works
- 1923
The book in which Freud sets out his structural model of the mind. Since much of the ego is itself unconscious, the division conscious/unconscious is not enough. Freud distinguishes the id, a term he takes from Georg Groddeck, as the reservoir of the drives; the ego, the part of the id modified by the influence of the external world, first and foremost a bodily ego; and the super-ego or ego ideal, formed by identification with the parents as the heir of the Oedipus complex. He restates the dualism of life drives and death drives, discusses fusion and defusion of the drives, the unconscious sense of guilt and the negative therapeutic reaction, and ends with the ego as a poor creature serving three masters: the external world, the libido of the id and the severity of the super-ego.
- 1933
New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse) is a book of seven further lectures by Sigmund Freud, issued in Vienna by the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag in December 1932 with the imprint date 1933. Numbered XXIX to XXXV, they continue the Introductory Lectures of 1916–17. Although they are written in the form of lectures, they were never delivered; their purpose is to bring Freud's account of psychoanalysis up to date with his later theory. They deal with revisions of the theory of dreams; dreams and occultism; the dissection of the psychical personality into id, ego and super-ego, which closes with the maxim "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" (where id was, there ego shall be); anxiety and the life of the drives, including the revised view that the ego is the seat of anxiety; femininity; explanations, applications and orientations; and the question of a Weltanschauung, in which Freud holds that psychoanalysis belongs to the scientific world view.
See also
People
References
- The Ego and the Id1923Evidence for a relation
- New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis1933Evidence for a relation