The Id, Ego and Superego

Freud separated human personality (“structural model of the psyche”) into three parts: Id, ego and superego. To my understanding, the “Id” here means the most basic instinctual and unconscious mental activities which reveal human basic needs, such as libido. Id doesn’t obey any social morality, law or external standard, and it is the most animal-like (“animalistic”) aspect of human psyche. One of the evidence of Id is the “Oedipus Complex”, the psychological theory that one desires to kill the same sex and have sexual involvement with the opposite sex between his/her parents. It is really interesting that Freud tried to analyze Da Vinci’s painting Virgin and Child with St. Anne (1507-13) as a portrait of Da Vinci’s childhood. In this painting, St.Anne is represented his birth mother who left Da Vinci when he was young, and Virgin is represented as ​

​Leonardo’s stepmother. The charming Mona Lisa like smile on St.Anne’s face reveals the Oedipus Complex occurred in Da Vinci’s childhood. Same thing happens in many literatures. D. H. Lawrence’s novel “Sons and Lovers”, for example, describes a mother who detested and rejected her husband and poured all her love and hope into her son, therefore her motherhood was an abnormal. I think this novel well interprets how the Oedipus Complex affects children and their future.

Artworks are explained as an upshot of artist’s unconscious psychological creation which is mostly dreamlike and disguised, and it is a way to express artists’ Id. All of these emotions, such as fright, hate, pleasure, are converted into some unconscious content that will uncover artists’ inner world.

Since Id is the most distasteful, chaotic and instinctual psyche structure which is definitely not associated with human society, we can also realize this as we grow up both physically and psychologically. Just like our repeated daily life, for example, We put our clothes on and go to work, rather than stay at home naked and be engaged into copulation just like animals, we force ourselves to go to gym every week and push ourselves to create new ideas at work. It seems like we human beings have to find some ways to suppress or these unconscious motivations or transfer them into other activities. Differentiating from human being, animals survive based on their Id and ego. A male lion wants to copulate with a group of female lions, for example, it has to defeat the original leader male lion of this group to construct its ego, and then it can achieve its Id to satisfy its instinctual desire. I’m not sure not sure if animals have a superego, or they will attain superego after a strict training.

I believe that the psychological mechanisms of the dream have some connection with our physical body, and I’m not sure if the whole dreaming process only expresses our unconscious desires. When we dream about urination, for example, we get satisfaction in our dream, but it really means we need to get up and go to bathroom to do actual urination, and we control this urgency while we are dreaming, until we wake up and satisfy this need physically. Apparently, dreaming urination is a reflection of our physical desire.

To my understanding, the superego defined by Freud is the highest moral understanding of ones’ psyche. It reveals human conscience, idealization and the desire of goodwill, and that explains the potential motivation of dreaming is a way for human to release the suppressed Id energies, which are a string of unconscious psychological activities revealed in the dreaming experience. Just like the dreaming process, litterateur and artists have to express their unconscious impulses when they are creating artworks which are some dreamlike experiences, in order to satisfy their basic libido, and the emancipation of their Id energies affect the process of artistic creation. While viewers are appreciating artworks, they also get the satisfaction of libido release.