Id, ego and super-ego

The structural model of the psyche or three-instance model is a model of the human psyche described by the Austrian depth psychologist Sigmund Freud, consisting of three instances with different functions: the "id", the "ego" and the "superego".

Freud first elaborated this topical model in his 1923 paper The Ego and the Id (see there for the development of this instance model). The model is also called the second topic or second topical model.

The id

"It" refers to that unconscious structure whose content is the psychic expression of the drives (such as food drive, sex drive, death drive), needs (need for recognition, need to be accepted) and affects (envy, hate, trust, love). Central to this are the basic drives, the union drive (also "libido") and the destruction drive (also "destrudo"). They take central roles in the Oedipus complex.

The id acts according to the pleasure principle, that is, it strives for immediate satisfaction of its striving. The drives of the id shape and structure human action unconsciously, that is, they have an effect without the agent always being explicitly aware of this effect.

Origin of the id

The id (English technically id) is the psychically first originated, partly also innate instance of the soul. When a human being is born, he seems to be psychically nothing else than a bundle of drives. The following innate drives (among others) can be identified:

• to take something with the mouth, to take it in, to feel it, to want to be full (oral phase),
• to want to have a pleasant skin feeling (not to freeze, to want to be drained, need for extensive skin contact, touch).

According to Freud's drive theory, the way in which the satisfaction of needs is experienced again and again, the extent and nature of the experiences of pleasure and displeasure, forms the further needs and emotions of a person, his "drive structure" or his unconscious character. Neglect as well as overprovision on the part of the environment shape the character of the child suboptimally. Depending on how the environment - the mother, for example - responds to the child's drives, feelings and needs develop from drive impulses.

The I

"I" (English technically ego) in Freud's model refers to that instance which corresponds to the conscious thinking of everyday life, to self-consciousness. According to Rupert Lay, the ego "mediates between the demands of the id, the superego and the social environment with the aim of resolving psychological and social conflicts constructively". The mature and psychologically healthy person thus substitutes the reality principle for the libidinal pleasure principle.

The elements of the ego include first and foremost the consciousnesses of perception, thought and memory. In more advanced psychoanalytic theories, the ego also includes the ego-conscience (the moral principles, values and individual moral norms from the superego and from the demands of the social environment, which are critically and self-critically examined by the ego) as well as the ideas about one's own person, the self-image or self.

genesis of the self

After the first months of life, a newborn baby experiences more and more clearly that it is different from things and other people. It develops a first awareness of its own bodily boundaries and feelings of self. Rupert Lay: "In the following four years of life, a child learns (pre-linguistically and therefore also unconsciously) to answer the questions: 'Who am I?' - 'What can I do?' and thus to fill its self-awareness with content as well." Around the id, then, is built a zone that can be called the "early self." This early I, which wraps itself around the id like a shell, is thus formed by the early body-representatives and the early self-representatives. The early body representatives are the infantilely grounded contents of consciousness and feeling about areas of the body. The early self-representatives include the childishly grounded consciousness and feeling contents concerning the own person. They determine the social character and all our later acquired self-concepts (who we are, what we fear and hope for, what we believe in) in different ways.

Freud also counted the socialization-formed character of a person as part of the early ego: the emotions and needs that are capable of consciousness and that have been formed in type and intensity from the basic drives of the id through the socialization process. In this process, Freud referred to the socialization-formed emotions and needs as the "drive-derivatives of the id in the ego." The id with its innate drive impulses is compared here to a tree trunk from which the early ego grows out as a crown. This is why Freud calls this part of the ego a product of the id: it has been developed from the material of the id (from basic drives).