1856-1939

  Born in Freiberg, Moravia, Freud spent most of his life living in Vienna, Austria, until he was forced to flee in 1937, due to the Nazi occupation. One of the giants in psychology, his research centered around psychoanalysis, dream research and the development of the personality, progressed in many books over the duration of his life.

   Freud organizes the personality into three major systems

1) The Id: This function is also referred to as the pleasure principle

Its aim is to relieve the person of tension or stress, it consist of avoiding pain and finding pleasure. In its earliest stage, the id is a reflex that discharges immediately through motor pathways, e.g. a bright light causes the eye to blink. In an infant this is observed by the baby crying, when they are hungry.

  In the next stage (the primary process) the psyche discharges tension through “an identity of perception.” For the id, a memory of an object is the same as the object itself. In a sense, a hungry dreamer, dreams of food to achieve gratification. This is the process of wish fulfillment, and a reason why dreams are considered an important pathway into the subconscious mind.

   The id is in closer contact with the body, than the other systems, and processes this awareness into its interpretation of the world. It is not governed by the laws of logic and reason, by ethics, values or moral standards. The Id is driven by one consideration only, the need to derive satisfaction. It is infantile in character, demanding, selfish, and pleasure seeking.

2) The Ego:  This is the secondary process through which the id discharges tension. Neither reflex, nor wishes will attain food for a hungry person; they must seek out and find food if they wish to eat. In order to achieve this task they must take into account the external environment, and either by accommodating themselves to it, or by asserting mastery over it, to obtain from the world what they desire. This is the process of the ego.

   In a well adjusted person, the ego is the executive of the personality, controlling and governing the id and superego, and maintaining interaction with the external world, in the interest of personal attainment.

    The ego is referred to as the reality principle, its aim is to postpone the discharge of energy, until the object that will satisfy the need has been discovered or produced.  The secondary process is nothing more or less than what is ordinarily called problem solving or thinking.

  When a person puts a plan into motion, to see if it will work, they are said to be reality testing. If the test does not work, a new plan is thought out and tested, until the tension is discharged, and satisfied through the development of a working plan.

   The perceptual system develops finer powers of tuning, until it learns to scan the world rapidly, and to select from the available stimuli, the features relevant to the problem to be solved. Memory is improved by the formation of associations between memory traces, and by the development and cognition of language. Over time ones judgment becomes sharper, so that it is easier to make clear cut decisions as to whether something is true, (it actually exists) or false (it does not exist.)

   Although the ego is largely a product of interaction, its lines of development are laid down by hereditary and guided by natural growth. This suggests every person has inborn potentialities for thinking and reasoning. The realization of these potentials is brought about by experience, training and education.

3) The Superego: The third major process of the personality is the moral or judicial branch of the personality. It develops out of the ego as a consequence of the child’s assimilation, usually learned from the parents, of what is good, and what is evil. It is made up of two subsystems, the ego-ideal and the conscience.

   The ego-ideal corresponds to the child’s conceptions of what their parents consider to be morally good. The parents convey this virtue by rewarding the child for behaving in line with these values. If a child is rewarded for being neat and tidy, they are apt to adopt this ideal

   Conscience corresponds to the child’s conceptions of what their parents consider to be bad. If they are frequently punished for getting dirty, then dirtiness is considered to be something bad.

  The ideal-ego and conscience, as such, are opposite sides of the same moral coin. In the final analysis, rewards and punishments are considered to be conditions that reduce or increase inner tension. This is the reason the pleasure principle recognizes the superego as a code of morality.

   In order for the superego to have the same power over the individual as the parent figure, it must have the power to enforce its rewards and punishments on the psyche. These are conferred to the ego, because of its virtue of control over the individual. If an action is considered ethical by the standards of the superego, the ego is rewarded, or likewise punished.

  It is not actually necessary for an action to take place for this process. Merely thinking a thought may cause this reaction, in this respect the superego is like the id. This is why a person, who lives a virtuous life, may nevertheless suffer pangs of conscience. 

  One method of reward from the superego is the rationalization, that “since I’ve been good for a very long time, it is ok to indulge myself.” A punishment might be an upset stomach, an injury one accidentally inflicts on themselves, or the loss of a valuable possession.

  The mind is a complex thing. The works of Freud have been considered one of the three great insults to humanity, in that they suggest the subconscious mind in fact has more control over the actions of the individual than we would like to give them credit for.

(The other two are considered Darwin and Copernicus.)