Book
The Ego and the Id
Das Ich und das Es
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.
What it shows
- 1907
Sigmund Freud introduced Unconscious sense of guilt
Freud first spoke of an unconscious consciousness of guilt in his 1907 paper on obsessive actions and religious practices. In Das Ich und das Es (1923) he made it a central clinical problem, behind the negative therapeutic reaction; in 1924 he linked it with a need for punishment, and in 1930 with the discontents of civilisation.
- 1920
Sigmund Freud introduced Life drive
In Jenseits des Lustprinzips Freud gathers the sexual drives and the drives of self-preservation into the life drives, Eros, which strive to combine living substance into ever larger unities, and sets them against the death drives. Das Ich und das Es builds the second drive theory on this pair.
- 1923
Sigmund Freud introduced Structural model
Finding that much of the ego and its defences is itself unconscious, Freud in Das Ich und das Es replaces the division by consciousness with three agencies, id, ego and super-ego, and in the New Introductory Lectures (1933) gives the model its best-known diagram.
- 1923
Sigmund Freud introduced Id
Freud took the word das Es from Georg Groddeck, who had it from Nietzsche, and in Das Ich und das Es made it the name of the unconscious reservoir of the drives, out of which the ego is differentiated at its surface under the influence of the outside world.
- 1923
Sigmund Freud introduced Super-ego
Das Ich und das Es introduces the super-ego (Über-Ich), at first as another name for the ego ideal, and derives it from the identifications with the parents that bring the Oedipus complex to an end, which makes it the heir of that complex.
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- 1923
Sigmund Freud developed Ego
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.
- 1921
Sigmund Freud developed Identification
After describing narcissistic identification with the lost object in melancholia (1917), Freud devotes a chapter of Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse to identification as the earliest emotional tie to another person, distinguishing three forms of it; in 1923 he holds that the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes.
- 1924
Sigmund Freud developed Oedipus complex
In Das Ich und das Es Freud sets out the complete Oedipus complex, positive and negative, rooted in bisexuality; in Der Untergang des Ödipuskomplexes he describes how in the boy the threat of castration makes the complex founder, its object-cathexes giving way to identifications that form the super-ego.
- 1923
Super-ego derives from Oedipus complex
Freud calls the super-ego the heir of the Oedipus complex: when the complex is given up, the parental authority is introjected into the ego and forms its nucleus, taking over the father's severity and perpetuating his prohibition of incest.