The balance between forcesįreud believed that all these parts of the psyche exist in all people and, in their own way, are an indispensable part of mental processes. For the father of psychoanalysis, is superego makes sense in a context in which the influence of society forces us to adopt behaviors of vigilance of oneself to avoid confrontations with others, although in the long run this influence goes much further than this logic oriented towards socialization and becomes a fundamental element in the creation of the identity of the individual. That is why the superego presses to make great sacrifices and efforts in order to make one's personality as close as possible to the idea of perfection and good.Īs the Id totally rejects the idea of submission to morality and the Ego, despite trying to curb the drives, is also driven by selfish objectives focused on survival and the pragmatic way of adapting to the environment, The Superego faces both. It is the psychic instance that watches over the fulfillment of the moral rules. The superegoĪccording to Freud, the superego would appear after 3 years of life, and it is a consequence of socialization (basically learned through parents) and the internalization of socially agreed norms. It is not simply an entity that limits the influence of the other two, but has its own agenda and interests and is governed by a different logic: that of the pragmatic and survival. Ultimately, the Ego is, according to Sigmund Freud's theory, the psychic instance that is responsible for ensuring that the force of the Id does not take control of the body, leading us to catastrophic situations in the short term, and that of the Superego does not suffocate us.

This makes it face the Id to appease the drives that emanate from it, for which it uses defense mechanisms.

That means that the I is more outwardly focused, and leads us to think about the practical consequences of what we do and the problems that overly uninhibited behavior can generate. This psychic instance would arise after two years and, unlike the Id, would be governed by the principle of reality. For this reason it is usually considered that the Id is 'the animal' or 'instinctive' part of the human being. The It moves from the principle of immediate pleasure, and that is why it struggles to make the primary drives govern the behavior of the person, regardless of the medium or long-term consequences that this may entail. Unlike what happens with the ego and the superego, it is present from the moment we are born, and therefore during the first two years of our lives it is the one that commands throughout that period of time. What is the basis for this struggle that according to Freud is fought in our heads in a fundamentally unconscious way? What interests and objectives are at stake according to the father of psychoanalysis? To answer these questions it is first necessary to define what the id, the ego and the superego are, the three entities that for Freud explain the personality of human beings through the way in which they fight each other.įreud proposed that the Id or Id is the structure of the human psyche that appears first.

The concepts of the id, the ego and the superego form the section of Freud's theories in which this idea of collision between different psychic structures is most evident.īut let's get away from such abstract terms. Hence comes the term 'dynamics', which expresses that constant succession of events by which one party tries to impose itself on the other. The psychodynamic approach, which was born with Freud's psychoanalysis, is based on the idea that the psychic processes that occur in each person are defined by the existence of a conflict. The three psychic instances of Freud's theory

Id ego superego meaning