Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [126]
Thus Freud’s theory of psychosexual development, often narrowly misconstrued as concerned only with sexual desire and behavior, actually deals with far larger issues: the basic, inevitable conflicts between childishness and maturity, instinctive desires and societal norms, and wishes and reality, the resolutions of which are crucial to character development and social life.
The structure of the psyche: 77 Freud had at first pictured the psychic apparatus as made up of the unconscious, the preconscious, and the conscious, but as he worked out his theory of psychosexual development he found this a too-simple formulation. He depicted instead a tripartite psyche comprising id, ego, and superego; these are not entities in any physical or metaphysical sense but merely names of groups or clusters of mental processes that serve different functions.
In the newborn, all mental processes are id processes, unconscious and primary. There is nothing akin to logical reasoning in the id; it is a cauldron of instinctual demands for the satisfaction of primitive desires having to do with self-preservation (hunger, thirst, and the like), sexuality, and aggression. The demands of the id operate in accordance with the pleasure principle; they seek the relief of tension without any consideration of social rules or the practical consequences of relief-seeking acts.
Since social life would be impossible if the id directed behavior, child rearing and socialization are aimed at controlling the forces of the id and directing them into acceptable activities. In part this is achieved through training and education of the conscious mind, which understands, reasons, and functions according to secondary-process thinking; this is the ego, or self, which develops and becomes differentiated from the id as the child grows. The ego is not sharply separated from the id but somewhat overlaps and merges with it. However, ideas and emotions in the id that enter the ego and create anxiety, such as the Oedipal impulse, are thrust back by repression and walled off so that they cannot re-enter consciousness.
Many other impulses, in contrast, are consciously controlled by the ego. The child learns, among other things, that one does not take another’s property, strike another without just cause, or masturbate in public; we teach our children that such actions are not acceptable and will have dire consequences. Although in part we train them, as we do animals, by simple reward and punishment, in larger part we rear them by telling them how they should behave and why. The ego, absorbing these lessons, becomes capable of self-criticism and self-control.
Much of the ego, however, is not conscious. Many of its processes are preconscious—not repressed but not in the spotlight of attention. We do a good deal of our problem solving, for example, outside of consciousness, continuing to consider information we have gathered and ways of achieving our goal without consciously thinking about the matter. When a solution pops into mind seemingly from nowhere, it is because we were working on it all along. Similarly, the preconscious operates many of our well-learned skills, freeing the conscious mind to use its limited attention elsewhere. The trained musician’s fingers automatically strike the right notes as he reads music; he does not have to think about them.
In contrast, the superego, which monitors and censors the ego, is unconscious and critically important to the governing of social behavior. It develops within the ego as a result of the Oedipus complex, at which time the child, coming to identify with the same-sex parent, absorbs the parent’s injunctions and beliefs and makes them part of himself or herself. Perceived commands like “you must not” or “you should” are transformed by identification into “I must not” and “I should.” This mechanism turns all sorts of moral values into internalized and self-imposed rules; collectively, they form