This part of the mind turns on long-term thinking. The superego is not concerned with instant gratification like the id. Aligning with your ego ideal leads to feelings of pride, value and accomplishment. This is the inner vision of your best self. The ego ideal is the other side of the superego. When the id says I don’t want to go to bed, the superego says ‘you must go to bed, and what is more, you must brush your teeth as well’. If we fail to adhere to this moral code, the superego punishes us with feelings of guilt and shame.
It is the moral code internalised from our parents and society. The conscience is the integrated shoulds and should-nots of our culture. It has two parts: the conscience and the ego ideal. The superego is the counterbalance to the id in the psyche. Where the id is ‘I want’, the superego is ‘I should’. If you want it badly enough, you will do it
The original German term ‘das Es’ is neuter. Everything else is irrelevant.Īccording to psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, there is a quirk to the original German word for the id that got lost in translation. What society thinks doesn’t matter reality doesn’t matter. The organising principle of the id is the pleasure principle-it works by what feels good.
These impulses contradict each other but they are both coming from the same place. Take for example a hungover person who wants to drink and also wants not to move. You can have contradictory impulses existing side by side without cancelling each other out. The id is not organised according to logic. It contains libido which is the primary instinctual energy. Its voice is loud when you are hungry, when you are horny or anytime you see red. You can think of the id as the animal in you. Down here all the physiological, animal drives, impulses and instincts run wild. This part of the mind is all nature and no nurture. It is the only one of the three parts we are born with. “There is nothing in the id that could be compared with negation…nothing in the id which corresponds to the idea of time” The conflicting interests of these three are the driving force of all human conflicts. Each part has its own nature and role within the mind. The superego is a bit above and a bit below-partly conscious and partly unconscious. The ego is above the water the id is beneath. On the other hand, everything beneath the surface is unconscious. The part of the iceberg above water corresponds to the conscious parts of the mind. The iceberg is a common illustration of this triple structure of the mind. These are originally Latin terms meaning ‘I’, ‘it’ and ‘upper-I’. According to the father of psychology Sigmund Freud, there are three parts of the human psyche: the ego, the id and the superego.