Freud created his concept of 'the id' in an effort to help clarify his image of the unconscious. However, paradoxically, in doing so, he created some new conceptual ambiguity -- and a reduced perception/conceptualization of the unconscious.
Problem Number 1: How can the id be viewed as being a metaphysical 'structural container' -- containing the 'instincts' on the one hand -- and then be viewed as the sum total of the instincts themselves on the other hand, not to mention being viewed as a 'primitive, narcissistic, uncivil mind-brain' with the sole function of satisfying these same instincts from a third perspective. That's basically three different views or definitions of the id all rolled into one.
It's like saying, from a male perspective, that the prostate and semen are the same thing, and/or the testicles and sperm are the same thing -- with a primitive, narcissistic, uncivil masculine mind-brain controlling the functions of both which many people jokingly say that there is. How many times have we heard the expression that men have two brains: one above their neck, and the other below their waist.
Consequently, I justified the existence of a distinction between: 1. the id; 2. the id vault; and 'the id ego'. But this doesn't go quite far enough....
Problem 2: In reducing the unconscious to 'the id', Freud screened out -- or at least failed to clearly distinguish (at least to my knowledge) other important elements of the unconscious such as memories and traumacies as well as fantasies and as well as 'functional compartments' that have functions other than that of the id.
What at one time in 'The Interpretation of Dreams' Freud called 'The Dream Censor', I call 'The Dream, (Fantasy, and Nightmare) Weaver' allowing for the fact that 'dream, fantasy, and nightmare symbolization can, and often do in many dreams (the manifest content), both hide and allude to their underlying meaning, fears, and/or wishes (the latent content). I do not subscribe to Freud's one-sided theory that all dreams reflect wish-fulfillments although it might be more appropriately stated that dreams often reflect cathartic emotional releases. Whereas psychoanalysis in its very beginning stage (Breuer and Anna O.) was called 'chimney sweeping' and 'the talking cure', dreams can be viewed as a second type of 'chimney sweeping' using 'hallucinated picture and/or other forms of sensory symbolization' to clear -- or at least temporarily clear -- our 'Shadow-Id' of its day residue with a generally emotional abreaction or cathartic, working-through, release effect...
From an integrative DGB-Gestalt perspective, our dreams and/or nightmares and/or fantasies help us to work through -- or at least temporarily and/or partly work through -- our 'Shadow-Id' emotional unfinished business. In 'Post-Stress Traumacy Syndrome', this 'working through' process may take a long, or very long time -- in fact, we may never completely work through the 'perceived traumacy' in the course of our whole lives....such as in the case of war veterans....Thus, the underlying reason for what Freud called 'the repetition compulsion' -- i.e., we 'repeat' in order to work through either an 'obsessional desire' and/or an 'unfinished, unworked through, 'ego-traumacy' or 'narcissistic (self-esteem) injury'.
The reason that I choose to use the term 'Shadow-Id' rather than just 'Id' is that 'The Shadow-Id' allows for the conceptual visualization of 'memories, traumacies, ego-traumacies, and narcissistic fixations conflating/integrating/synthesizing with id impulses/drives/desires/fantasies'. That is a part of the clinical equation that Freud basically left out when he abandoned his 'reality-traumacy-seduction triadic theory', to be less appropriately be replaced in 1920 with his 'entropy and death instinct theory' although that might in some cases of aging patients be a part of the clinical equation as well. Aging cells, organs, cell-functions, and organ functions lead to less and less energy over time (oxidation and entropy) and eventually death. Our bodies are born from the vitamins and minerals of the land, and to the land, do our vitamins and minerals -- and us -- eventually return.... I almost sound like Freud's mom - and Freud. And the 'constancy principle', 'the conservation of energy', 'entropy theory', 'death instinct theory' -- but I don't abandon reality, traumacy, and sexual traumacy like Freud did.
When our 'Shadow-Id-Ego-Vault-Energy' (which I will shorten to 'sieve energy') is 'unbound' or 'leaking' -- like a 'sieve' -- then this 'unbound energy' is going to have an impact on the psychodynamics in 'The Narcissistic-Hedonistic Ego', as well as 'The Central-Mediating Ego', 'The Shadow-Id (Private) Ego', and 'The Personna (Public) Ego', as well as encouraging and/or criticizing elements coming down on us from our 'Superego Complex'.
'Sieve energy' takes the place of Freud's concept of 'libido' (sexual energy) as well as Jung's concept of libido (life energy). In contrast, 'sieve energy' can be any kind of mixture of love, lust, aggression, anger, rage, hate, anxiety, creativity, destruction, construction, deconstruction.....
Sieve energy can surface in the form of different types of 'allusions to immediacy' and/or 'allusions to transference' such as dreams, jokes, fantasies, neurotic symptoms, projections, sublimations....anything that both partly hides and partly alludes to underlying elements of our 'Shadow-Id Complex'...
Sieve energy often tends to come out in an allusionary, partly restrained and censured, partly released, symbolic fashion...in essence, some form of 'compromise-formation'.
However, under the influence of drugs, alcohol, certain stressors -- internal and/or external -- sieve energy can also 'explode' totally unexpectedly like where did this come from? (I'll let you figure out the sexual metaphor involving the prostate...but the same 'explosive principle' applies for love, anger, rage, hate, aggression, violence...)....
When some sort of reaction from a person seems to come totally out of left or right field -- he or she 'freaks' on you, 'flips out' on you, has a hysterical and/or psychotic breakdown, suddenly turns 'sexual' and/or 'aggressive' on you....you can be sure that you are dealing with some sort of underlying 'Shadow-Id Complex' and/or Shadow-Id-Transference Complex' that the person has totally or partly hid from you.
Enough for tonight.
-- dgb, January 21st, 2012...
-- David Gordon Bain...
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Creations...
-- Are Still in Process....
