As most of you may or may not know (probably know), Freud created his theory of 'the id' -- relative to both 'the ego' and 'the superego' -- in 1923, in one of his classic, famous essays -- 'The Ego and The Id'.
Freud wrote this essay to address a number of ambiguities and areas of potential or actual confusion surrounding his previous use of the concept of 'the unconscious'.
Previously, Freud had distinguished between: 1. 'the (deep) unconscious'; 2. 'the preconscious' (as in the 'shallow' or 'almost but not quite' conscious) and; 3. 'the conscious'.
Furthermore, in around 1915, after Freud's paper 'On Narcissism' (1914, where Freud's new concept of 'narcissism' started to at least partly replace Freud's old concept of 'libido' as a more 'general psychic concept' (to compete with Jung's concept of libido as a 'general life energy' rather than 'straight, unadulterated, sexual energy', and also to compete with Adler's concept of 'the masculine protest' that also seemed to mix elements of 'egotism', 'self-esteem', 'selfishness', 'self-absorption' and 'sexuality' in a similar vein to what Freud's 1914 concept of narcissism was at that time doing.
It was at about this point in time (actually a little earlier, 1911, Two Principles of Mental Functioning), that Freud started to make the new distinction between 'the pleasure ego' (connected to 'the primary principle') and 'the reality ego' (connected to 'the secondary principle'). This distinction would become 'the id' vs. 'the ego' in 1923 where the id would become relegated strictly to the unconscious, and the ego would be relegated mainly to the conscious but with portions operating in the unconcious.
The same 'concious-unconsious split' was deemed by Freud to also play a part in the role of the activities of the 'superego' which contained both our 'ego ideals' as well as our 'agent of enforcement and criticism' relative to our failure to live up to these primarily 'society-introjected' ego-ideals.
However, the question can be asked -- and indeed needs to be asked -- if both the ego and the superego were deemed by Freud to be active in both the conscious and the unconcious part of the personality, why not the id too? Maybe rather than dropping the concept of the 'pleasure-ego' altogether, Freud should have developed a 'working relationship' between the 'unconcious id' and the 'conscious pleasure ego'.
This would have necessitated a 'conceptual splitting of the ego' (in 1923 as opposed to when he wrote his last paper in 1939 -- 'Splitting of The Ego' -- still playing with his 'metaphysical conceptuology' at the very end of his life which was steering towards Melanie Klein 'Object Relations' conceptuology) into -- let's say for argument sake -- 'the pleasure ego', 'the social reality ego' (like Jung's concept of 'the personna' or what I am contemplating calling 'the public ego'), and 'the central, (mediating, decision-making, problem-solving, conflict-resolving, executive) ego'.
The activities of the id should no more be curtailed to the activities of the unconscious personality than the activities of the ego and superego should be curtailed to the activities of the conscious personality. To 'restrict the freedom and movement' of the id (by definition) in this respect was -- and still is -- to engage in unecessary 'theoretical and clinical reductionism', a habit that Freud has been accused of many times before, by many Freudian critics preceding me.
The 'id' should not be viewed as a 'reservoir of life and death instincts' -- as Freud once analogized it -- because a 'reservoir' is definitely not the same thing as a working, thinking 'mind-brain' -- or any functional or dysfunctional, psycho-dynamic subset of one. I can work with most of the characteristics of the id as laid out by Freud in different definitions -- but not the idea of the id being like a 'reseroir' or a 'seething cauldron' (I call this part 'The Shadow-Id Vault'), nor even that all parts of the id are 'unorganized' because our 'sex drive' is certainly at least partly 'organized' in one particular direction...
Thus, I view the id as the most primitive and uncivil part of our mind-brain that starts from chaos and moves -- or evolves -- up through the unconscous personailty and into the different 'ego-states' in the ego that each have 'functional and/or dysfunctional purposes, motives, drives that sometimes 'fuse' with each other, sometimes co-operate with each other, and sometimes compete with each other -- a 'house of parliament, so to speak, in the conscious personality, as driving up from the underground, multi-directional id and ego instincts, that come from the confines of that part of our mind-brain that we can call our id....at least this is my conceptual formulation of the id....
In comparison and contrast, Freud's definitions and descriptions of the id are articulated below from Wikipedia with quotes from multiple Freudian essays...
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Id
The id is the unorganized part of the personality structure which contains the basic drives.The id contains the libido, which is the primary source of instinctual force that is unresponsive to the demands of reality[2]. The id acts according to the "pleasure principle", seeking to avoid pain or displeasure aroused by increases in instinctual tension.[3]
The id is unconscious by definition:
In the id,"It is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality, what little we know of it we have learned from our study of the Dreamwork and of the construction of neurotic symptoms, and most of that is of a negative character and can be described only as a contrast to the ego. We 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."[4]
Developmentally, the id precedes 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:"contrary impulses exist side by side, without cancelling each other out....There is nothing in the id that could be compared with negation...nothing in the id which corresponds to the idea of time."[5]
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 needs immediate satisfaction, a view which 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, paraphrasing a quip made by former U.S. President Ronald Reagan during his 1965 campaign for Governor of California in which he compared government to a baby [7]."...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 organization, and which find a first psychical expression here (in the id) in forms unknown to us." [6]
The id is responsible for our basic drives, "knows no judgements of value: no good and evil, no morality...Instinctual cathexes seeking discharge — that, in our view, is all there is in the id."[8] It is regarded as "the great reservoir of libido",[9] the instinctive drive to create — the life instincts that are crucial to pleasurable survival. Alongside the life instincts came the death instincts — the death drive which Freud articulated relatively late in his career in "the hypothesis of a death instinct, the task of which is to lead organic life back into the inanimate state."[10] For Freud, "the death instinct would thus seem to express itself — though probably only in part — as an instinct of destruction directed against the external world and other organisms."[11]: through aggression. Freud considered that "the id, the whole person...originally includes all the instinctual impulses...the destructive instinct as well."[12] as Eros or the life instincts.
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Going back to my interpretation of the id, I believe that the id should be viewed as a portion of our mind-brain (like the distinction in neuro-anatomy between our 'thalamus' and 'hypothalamus' -- our id at least partly matching up, metaphorically speaking, with our more or less automatic, unconscious 'hypothalamus', and our ego and superego matching up, again, metaphorically, with our more 'evolved', and usually more 'civilized' -- but not always -- thalamus.)
Of course, our 'brain' is anatomical and physical; whereas our mind is 'metaphysical' as in 'above physics' -- and our 'mind-brain' is a 'dgb dialectic concept' that (somehow 'as if by 'magic') connects the physical activies of our brain with the metaphysical activities of our mind.
All three 'personality states' should be conceptually given the 'freedom' -- in following what, in my opinion, seems to actually happen in reality -- to 'travel', 'psycho-dynamically speaking', from our conscious to our un(sub)(pre)conscious personality state. and back again, at their respective whim -- or rather, 'our' respective whim, existentially speaking.
Freud wrote about the 'vicissitudes' of the id and its instincts which is an idea that I like -- and will continue to follow up on -- because this is Freud's idea of 'movement of energy and instincts up through the id to its 'derrivatives' or 'vicissitudes' (meaning mainly 'modifications') in the conscious personality', but, at this point, we need a 'pleasure-ego' or a 'narcissistic ego' to receive our 'id impulses' from down below....What we need, in other words, is a 'conscious id or pleasure or narcissistic ego state' in our conscious personality to receive the impulses of our id...
I will give you a little time to mull over these Dialectical Gap Bridging (DGB), modified and extrapolated, ideas before we move on.
-- dgb, April 22nd, 2012
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectical Gap-Bridging Creations...
-- Are Still in Process....
