Let us start with the concept of 'ego'. 'Ego', 'psyche', 'self', 'I',...they all mean basically the same thing with some potential variations in the range and/or focus of meaning of each. Different writers, different psychologists, different theorists may similarly change the range and/or focus of meaning for each of these related concepts.
For example, relative to the term self we can split this concept up to differentiate between:
1. The Potential Self;
2. The Actualizing Self;
3. The Actualized Self;
4. The Alienating Self;
5. The Alienated Self.
We could even add:
6. The 'Being' Self; and
7. The 'Becoming' Self.
When Carl Jung uses the term 'Self', he is referring to what we are calling here in DGB Philosophy-Psychology -- 'The Potential or Genetic Self'. Religiously and/or spiritually speaking, I have no problem calling the Potential and/or Genetic Self -- 'The Essence' or 'The Soul' of the Personality.
The Potential-Genetic Self is the container of the 'existential seeds' of the personality. Some of these 'seeds' may become -- metaphorically speaking -- 'watered' and 'nurtured'. They come alive and become 'existentialized' as active, living, breathing parts of the personality. 'Essence' turns into 'existence'. This is the counter-thesis of Jean-Paul Sartre's famous philosophical statement: 'Existence precedes essence.'
My counter-statement to Sartre then is this: 'Not always does existence precede essence.' Indeed, the two polarities -- essence and existence -- are dialectically interconnected, neither preceding the other, and/or both preceding the other, depending on how you want to look at. It is no different than the 'chicken and egg' argument. The 'egg' is the essence which precedes the 'chicken-to-come or become'. However, the 'egg' in itself has its own existence which was established by both the 'existence' and the 'essence' of a preceding chicken and rooster -- and their sexual activity together -- leading to the fertilized creation of the egg. (Do I have my chicken and rooster sex education 101 down pat, or not?)
Now I am not sure how Hegel would have answered Sartre. But this to me, what I have been describing in the paragraph above, is the logical extension of Hegelian dialectic theory. Or call it DGB Post-Hegelian Dialectic Theory.
Again the whole idea here is that rather than declaring any kind of 'causal-reductionist-unilateral-one-way' statement, we start using the words that you hear many modern-day politicians using such as 'bi-lateral' and 'multi-lateral' and 'pluralistic'.
Relative to the 'existence' vs. 'essence' argument, both 'existence' and 'essence' are viable 'bi-polarities' in the 'game of life' or 'art of living'. Essence is the 'blueprint' of life and it includes the idea of 'intelligent genetic design'; whereas 'existence' is the playing out of an organism's 'essence' and/or its 'alienation' or 'dissociation' from its essence, depending on how the 'game of life' and/or 'art of living' is played out. Do we leave our essence behind and try to be someone who we are not? Or do we play out our essence in all its potential glory (assuming that the essence of man is 'good' which it may or may not be -- or there may be the potential for both 'good' and 'bad', 'altruism' and 'narcissism', 'heroism' and 'cowardism'. Call it the 'roulette wheel' of the personality as different potentials for human action are indeed acted out or restrained, embellished and/or dissociated and suppressed.
This bring us to a 'Jungian dialectical-existential split' between the 'personna' and the 'shadow' which can be compared and contrasted with a similar but different 'Freudian dialectical-existential split' between the 'id' and the 'superego'.
In one way, the classic Freudian model is superior in that it has a third concept involved, a third 'agency' or 'compartment' in the personality -- the 'ego' -- that mediates between the 'instinctual impulses' of the id vs. the 'restraining ethical forces' of the superego. The classic Freudian model is closer than the Jungian model in structure and process to the classic Hegelian triad of: 1. 'thesis' (id), 'anti-thesis' (superego), 'synthesis' (ego creatively coming up with 'compromise-formations'). In the Jungian model, the 'mediating, central ego' is absent but seemingly implied as a synthesizing or integrating force between the shadow and the personna.
Or maybe Jung viewed himself as therapist -- as the synthesizer, or 'associative synthesizer' which, he at least partly was. However, there can be no cogntive-emotional-existential synthesis within a person -- therapist or no therapist involved -- without an 'awareness light' going on in the client/individual (specifically, inside the person's 'Central Ego' by DGB conceptuology and terminology) and then integrating and acting on this processed awareness.
However, the Freudian classic model has some problems too which is at least partly why many 'neo-Freudians', 'post-Freudians', and 'anti-Freudians' eventually abandoned the classic Freudian conceptuology and turned to other similar and/or different models of the personality/the human psyche.
For example, the Jungian concept of 'Self' is some significant ways preferrable to the Freudian concept of 'Id'. Why? Because it quickly becomes confusing what is in the 'id' and what is not. Is it just sexual impulses? Or sexual and violent impulses? By the time Freud wrote 'Beyond The Pleaure Principle' in 1920, it was apparent that both sexual and violent impulses would become included in the 'id' as Freud was in the process of moving in this direction with his polarization of the 'life' and 'death' instinct, and indeed, Freud formalized things 3 years later in his essay, 'The Ego and The Id'.
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Id, ego, and super-ego
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Id, ego, and super-ego are the three parts of the "psychic apparatus" defined in Sigmund Freud's structural model of the psyche; they are the three theoretical constructs in terms of whose activity and interaction mental life is described. According to this model, the uncoordinated instinctual trends are the "id"; the organized realistic part of the psyche is the "ego," and the critical and moralizing function the "super-ego." [1]
Even though the model is "structural" and makes reference to an "apparatus", the id, ego, and super-ego are functions of the mind rather than parts of the brain and do not necessarily correspond one-to-one with actual somatic structures of the kind dealt with by neuroscience.
The concepts themselves arose at a late stage in the development of Freud's thought: the structural model was first discussed in his 1920 essay "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" and was formalized and elaborated upon three years later in his "The Ego and the Id." Freud's proposal was influenced by the ambiguity of the term "unconscious" and its many conflicting uses.
The terms "id," "ego," and "super-ego" are not Freud's own but are latinisations originating from his translator James Strachey. Freud himself wrote of "das Es," "das Ich," and "das Über-Ich"—respectively, "the It," "the I," and the "Over-I" (or "Upper-I"); thus to the German reader, Freud's original terms are more or less self-explanatory. The term "das Es" was borrowed from Georg Groddeck, a German physician to whose unconventional ideas Freud was much attracted.[2] (Groddeck's translators render the term in English as 'the It').
Contents [hide]
1 Id
2 Ego
3 Super-ego
4 Advantages of the structural model
5 In popular culture
6 Notes
7 References
8 Further reading
9 See also
9.1 People
9.2 Related topics
10 External links
[edit] Id
The Id comprises the unorganized part of the personality structure that contains the basic drives. The id acts as a pleasure principle: if not compelled by reality it seeks immediate enjoyment.[3] It is focused on selfishness and instant self-gratification. Personality, as Freud saw it, was produced by the conflict between biological impulses and social restraints that were internalized.[4] [5] The Id is unconscious by definition. In Freud's formulation,
“ It is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality, what little we know of it we have learnt from our study of the dream-work and of the construction of neurotic symptoms, and most of this is of a negative character and can be described only as a contrast to the ego. We all approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations... It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle.
[Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933)]
”
The id stands in direct opposition to the super-ego. [6]
Developmentally, the Id is anterior to the ego; i.e. the psychic apparatus begins, at birth, as an undifferentiated id, part of which then develops into a structured ego. Thus, the id:
“ contains everything that is inherited, that is present at birth, is laid down in the constitution -- above all, therefore, the instincts, which originate from the somatic organisation and which find a first psychical expression here (in the id) in forms unknown to us" [7]. ”
The mind of a newborn child is regarded as completely "id-ridden", in the sense that it is a mass of instinctive drives and impulses, and demands immediate satisfaction. This view equates a newborn child with an id-ridden individual—often humorously—with this analogy: an alimentary tract with no sense of responsibility at either end.
The id is responsible for our basic drives such as food, water, sex, and basic impulses. It is amoral and egocentric, ruled by the pleasure–pain principle; it is without a sense of time, completely illogical, primarily sexual, infantile in its emotional development, and will not take "no" for an answer. It is regarded as the reservoir of the libido or "instinctive drive to create".
Freud divided the id's drives and instincts into two categories: life and death instincts - the latter not so usually regarded because Freud thought of it later in his lifetime. Life instincts (Eros) are those that are crucial to pleasurable survival, such as eating and copulation. Death instincts, (Thanatos) as stated by Freud, are our unconscious wish to die, as death puts an end to the everyday struggles for happiness and survival. Freud noticed the death instinct in our desire for peace and attempts to escape reality through fiction, media, and substances such as alcohol and drugs. It also indirectly represents itself through aggression.
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DGB...cont'd...
Freud moved to the concept of 'id' to at least partly move away from the more 'ambiguous' concept of 'unconscious' which was giving him some trouble. I can certainly see this and have never liked the term 'unconscious'. I've tried to duck around this concept as much as possible by using the term 'subconscious' instead in the appropriate contexts. But the term 'id' can cause some serious semantic difficulties as well -- especially when you add the 'life' and 'death' instinct into the picture. If you say that the wish for 'peace' comes from our 'death instinct' and then you turn around and say that ther wish for 'aggression' also comes from our 'death instinct', then the bipolar contrast between the wish for 'peace' and the wish for 'aggression' has collapsed into some very hazy category in the middle -- the wish for 'death'. That, to me, doesn't make any sense, at least until you start discussing context.
If i am outside demonstrating in a civil protest rally against the American soldiers being in Iraq or the Canadian soldiers being in Afghanastan, and I am demonstrating for 'peace', then this, we could trace back to, with some degree of common sense, my 'life instinct' -- my wish to stop all the deaths over in Iraq and/or Afghanstan.
However, if I say my life is too stressful, I can't take it any more, I can't handle the rat race, and falling behind on my bills, now losing my job, and my wife leaving me, taking the kids -- I need 'peace', I need out of this life, then you could see how 'peace' might be equated with the 'death' instinct -- as a way of 'running away from the overbearing stresses of life'.
But in both these cases, we are playing a kind of 'semantic fitting' game in which we might ask ourselves: Why are we doing this? What have we gained by this? Have we gained any new insights by this activity? Or have we just gone around in circles playing mind-language-meaning-fitting games?
It was the same thing that happened earlier in his career when Freud was stating that an infant sucking on his or her mother's breast was engaging in 'the sexual instinct'. To be sure, boys and girls can start early but I don't think it's quite this early.
And before that there was the issue of what's 'conscious' vs. what's 'unconscious' vs. what's 'preconscious' -- mind-bending semantic distinctions these can be...but do they really even take us any where? It's not quite of the same material as Einstein's Theory of Relativity or Einstein 'splitting the atom'. We'll talk about 'splitting the ego' soon to come but we must remember that we are talking about models and metaphors here with more or less arbitrary boundaries that may be of more or less importance depending on what are we talking about. If we feel like we are a cat chasing its tail, words and what they mean or don't mean racing around in our heads, then we are probably better scrapping what we are doing and moving on to something else that hopefully carries greater importance relative to the existence and/or the pathology of man.
If we are going to keep using the concept of 'id' then we need to keep to its core kernel or essence of meaning. Mainly a container or 'cauldron' of potential 'boiling' biologically and psychologically influenced sexual, aggressive, and/or violent impulses of an unmistakable and uncontroversial type -- not dithering over whether an infant feeding at his or her mother's breast belongs to the class of 'hunger instincts' and/or 'sexual instincts'. Generally speaking, when we are talking about the Id -- or when I am talking about the Id -- I am referring to a more extreme class of sexual and/or aggressive fantasies/impulses than this.
If we are talking about a 'narcissistic transgression and/or neurosis' then we are talking about a narcissitic behavior -- an act of impulsive, unbridled self-assertion from deep within the Id and/or The Self that 'breaks through the floodgates' or is insufficiently restrained by normal, ethical, legal Superego and Ego activities.
If we are talking about an 'anxiety, inhibition, and/or conversion neurosis' (I don't even know how much the term 'conversion neurosis' is used anymore), then we are talking about a person with an 'overactive' Superego and/or Ego that is putting 'too heavy' restraints on the fantasies and/or impulses that are coming out of the Id/Self.
In DGB Philosophy-Psychology, I view the Freudian Id as a portion of the larger Jungian Self (meaning the Potential Self with all its different fantasies, impulses, and drives towards full self-assertion).
In classic Freudian psychology, we have to remember that Freud carried a significant part of his biology-physics background with him into the study of psychology and for Freud the study of the Id was all about the collective influence of genetics, biology, physics, and chemistry on the human psyche through the agency of the Id.
I can work with Freud's concept of the Id -- we all have unrestrained, restrained, and/or over-restrained 'Narcissistic-Dionysian' tendencies within us -- but still The Potential Self in the deepest depths of the personality is larger than the Id.
We all have deep, dark sexual and/or aggressive fantasies, impulses, secrets, possible skeletons in our closet, that can encroach upon the realm of the immoral, the unethical, and/or even the illegal if inappropriately acted upon in the past, the present, or the future. This is the realm of the Id -- or mythologically speaking -- the realm of Narcissus and/or Dionysus -- if extreme enough and evil enough, even Satan.
I keep coming back to a set of lines in a Dylan song...
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And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They'd probably put my head in a guillotine
But it's alright, Ma, it's life, and life only. -- Bob Dylan
Copyright ©1965; renewed 1993 Special Rider Music
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But again, the realm of The Potential Self is not all about immoral, unethical, and/or illegal behavior.
It is also about innate, genetic talents, existential possibilities, romantic possibilities...
This is where Jung's concept of 'The (Suppressed) Shadow' in contradistinction to 'The (Dominant) Personna' is superior to Freud's concept of 'The Id'. Because even 'romantic' or 'affectionate' behaviors can be suppressed even though strictly speaking, they would not be considered to be a part of The Id unless they are re-interpreted and re-defined 'sexually'. In classic Freudian psychology, 'affection' becomes re-interpreted (and in my opinion over-interpreted) 'sexually'. This is where Classic Freudian Psychology is accused of being 'pansexualist' -- over-interpreting the boundaries of what is 'normally' considered to be 'sexual behavior'.
Freud wasn't the only person guilty of 'pansexualism'. Today our North American laws have become pansexualist -- overprotecting the civil rights of women at the expense of underprotecting the civil rights of men in a 21st century rendition and re-enactment of the infamous Freudian 'Seduction Theory' Controversy. And all packaged under the guise of 'equal rights'. This is a huge, huge political, legal, civil, and philosophical can of worms that for the most part is totally being avoided -- swept under the carpet -- under the name of 'political correctness'.
'Political correctness' basically means 'philosophical, democratic, political, legal, and/or civil improprieties (legal and/or ethical-moral transgressions involving, sexual, racial, and/or ethnic pampering, and reverse unequal rights...) that are 'suppressed' from political, journalist, and public scrutiny by the name of 'political correctness' and therefore fail the democratic test of 'transparency'.
Put more succintly, 'political correctness' is basically 'covert group narcissistic transgressions -- supported by the laws, and/or interpreted and applied laws, of the country -- and 'masked under the guise of equal rights'. Put even more succinctly, 'political correctness' represents failures in democracy to address issues of 'legal pathology of normalcy' because of the 'group sensitivities' at stake -- women, blacks, browns, gays, etc. In a nutshell, political correctness is philosophical -- and democratic (and legal) -- incorrectness.
This whole issue was brought back to the forefront by a very alarming and tragic episode at work this past week. I will address this particular event and at least a part of the larger hugely controversial issue in an essay soon to come.
The final point I wish to finish with here is that Jung's concept of 'Shadow' (The dissociated, the suppressed, the disowned, the marginalized...) allows a greater both the psychological theorist and the psychotherapist a greater field of range in 'suppressed' or 'marginalized' human behavior than Freud's concept of 'Id'.
For example again, a person may have no trouble expressing 'sexual feelings' -- indeed, this may be part of his or her 'personna' -- but at the same time have great trouble expressing affectionate feelings, romantic feelings, tender feelings -- that may or may not have anything to do with sexuality -- and shouldn't be 'falsely interpreted and/or categorized as such',
To summarize using a combination of Freudian, Jungian, and DGB terminology:
1. The '(Potential) Self is the 'roulette wheel' in the personality from which all potential human behaviors spring;
2. The 'Shadow' is the supressed, marginalized, dissociated, and/or disowned part of the personality that is fighting for 'freedom of speech, freedom of action, and equal rights;
3. The 'Personna' is our dominant 'style of expression', our usual 'form of presentation to the world outside ourselves;
4. The 'Id' is the caldron of boiling instincts and/or impulses within us -- a part of The Potential Self -- mainly comprised of impulses like sensuality, sexuality, aggression, and violence, but other instincts and/or impulses can be included as well such as hunger, thirst, sleep, breathing, excitement...
5. The 'Dionysian-Narcissitic-Assertive (DNA) Ego' is the 'Agency' in 'The Splitting of The Ego' that looks after conscious (overt) expressions of the 'Id'. The DNA Ego can be divided into 'Topdog' and 'Underdog' functions in an authoritarian relationship;
6. The 'Romantic-Creative-Natural (RCN) Ego' is that part of the Actualized Potential Self and 'The Splitting of The Ego' that looks after romance, tenderness, love, affection, creativity, the arts, symbolism, mythology, and the enshrinement-engagement of nature...The Romantic Ego can be divided into 'Topdog' and 'Underdog' functions;
7. The 'Central Ego' is that central part of 'The Splitting of The Ego' that oversees all conscious expression and activity, mediating and negotiating and making 'compromise-formations between different 'Specialist Agencies' within 'The Splitting of The Ego' such as those mentioned above and below.
8. The 'Righteous Ego (Superego, Topdog, Underdog)' is the critical, judging, and rejecting element of the 'Ego', easily viewed as the 'patriarchal' and/or 'paternal' part of the personality, and potentially horizontally bipolarized against the 'Nurturing Ego' and/or vertically bipolarized against either the 'Approval-Seeking Underdog' and/or 'The Rebellious Underdog' and/or The DNA Underdog;
9. The 'Nurturing Ego' (Superego, Topdog, Underdog) is the encouraging, nourishing, supportive part of the personality easily viewed as 'matriarchal' or 'maternal' in its origin and easily bipolarized against The Righteous (Paternal) Ego, The Approval-Seeking Underdog-Ego, The Rebellious Underdog Ego, and/or the DNA Underdog Ego;
10. The 'Apollonian-Enlightenment' Ego seeks rationality, reason, truth, fairness, justice, equal rights, democracy in the bi-polarized face of the more power-oriented, authoritarian Righteous Ego;
11. The 'Darwinian-Economic' Ego seeks to economically survive, evolve, and flourish;
12. The Humanistic-Existential Ego seeks to find meaning in a potentially meaningless, alienated, and alienating world;
13. The 'Creative-Dynamic Unconcious' integrates and sends all symbolic-creative-mythological messages up to The Central Ego;
14. The Personal Memory and Transference-Lifestyle Template
15. The Symbolic-Mythological Genetic-Memory Template.
That is enough for tonight.
April 18th-19th, 2009
