The Ego and the Id

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.