Sigmund Freud’s The Ego

and the Id
Freud died 80 years ago this week. In this “Virtual Roundtable,” three scholars
debate the legacy of his 1923 text.

Sigmund Freud via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sigmund_Freud_colorized.jpg)

By: Elizabeth Lunbeck (https://daily.jstor.org/daily-author/elizabeth-lunbeck/) , Amber Jamilla Musser

(https://daily.jstor.org/daily-author/amber-jamilla-musser/) and Todd McGowan
(https://daily.jstor.org/daily-author/todd-mcgowan/) |
September 21, 2019 19 minutes

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Sigmund Freud died 80 years ago this week, and his 1923 study, The Ego and the Id,
which introduced many of the foundational concepts of psychoanalysis, entered the
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Daily—asks scholars about the legacy of The Ego and the Id in the 21st century.
(https://bit.ly/30jM88p)

• Elizabeth Lunbeck: Pity the Poor Ego!

• Amber Jamilla Musser: The Sunken Place: Race, Racism, and Freud
• Todd McGowan: The Superego or the Id

Pity the Poor Ego!

Elizabeth Lunbeck (https://daily.jstor.org/daily-author/elizabeth-lunbeck/)

It would be hard to overestimate the significance of Freud’s The Ego and the Id for
psychoanalytic theory and practice. This landmark essay has also enjoyed a robust
extra-analytic life, giving the rest of us both a useful terminology and a readily
apprehended model of the mind’s workings. The ego, id, and superego (the last two
terms made their debut in The Ego and the Id) are now inescapably part of popular
culture and learned discourse, political commentary and everyday talk.

Type “id ego superego” into a Google search box and you’re likely to be directed to
sites offering to explain the terms “for dummies”—a measure of the terms’ ubiquity
if not intelligibility. You might also come upon images of The Simpsons: Homer
representing the id (motivated by pleasure, characterized by unbridled desire),
Marge the ego (controlled, beholden to reality), and Lisa the superego (the family’s
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conscience), all of which need little explanation, so intuitively on target do they
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If you add “politics” to the search string, you’ll find sites advancing the argument
that Donald Trump’s success is premised on his speaking to our collective id, our
desires to be free of the punishing strictures of law and morality and to grab
whatever we please—“a flailing tantrum of fleshly energy.” Barack Obama in this
scheme occupies the position of benign superego: incorruptible, cautious, and given
to moralizing, the embodiment of our highest ideas and values but, in the end, not
much fun. You’ll also glean from Google that Trump’s ego is fragile and needy but
also immense and raging, its state—small or large?—a dire threat to the nation’s
stability and security.

In these examples, the ego is used in two distinct, though not wholly contradictory,
ways. With The Simpsons, the ego appears as an agency that strives to mediate
between the id and superego. When we speak of Trump’s fragile ego, the term is
being used somewhat differently, to refer to the entirety of the self, or the whole
person. When we say of someone that their ego is too big, we are criticizing their
being and self-presentation, not their (presumably) weak superego.

The idea of the ego as agency is routinely considered more analytically rigorous and
thus more “Freudian” than the ego-as-self, yet both interpretations of the ego are
found not only in popular culture, but also—perhaps surprisingly—in Freud. Further,
I would argue that the second of these Freudian conceptualizations, premised on
feelings, is more consonant with a distinctively American construal of the self than
are the abstractions of ego psychology. Understanding why this is so necessitates a
look at the post-Freud history of the ego in America—in particular at the attempts
of some psychoanalysts to clear up ambiguities in Freud’s texts, attempts that luckily
for us met with only mixed success.

As Freud proposed in The Ego and the Id, three agencies of the mind jostle for
supremacy: the ego
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on the one hand, and the superego’s crushing, even authoritarian, demands for
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submission to its dictates, on the other. The work of psychoanalysis was “to
strengthen the ego”; as Freud famously put it 10 years later, “where id was, there
ego shall be.”

The Freudian ego sought to harmonize relations among the mind’s agencies. It had
“important functions,” but when it came to their exercise it was weak, its position, in
Freud’s words, “like that of a constitutional monarch, without whose sanction no law
can be passed but who hesitates long before imposing his veto on any measure put
forward by Parliament.” Elsewhere in the essay, the ego vis-à-vis the id was no
monarch but a commoner, “a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the
superior strength of the horse … obliged to guide it where it wants to go.”
Submitting to the id, the ego-as-rider could at least retain the illusion of sovereignty.
The superego would brook no similar fantasy in the erstwhile royal, instead
establishing “an agency within him” to monitor his desires for aggression, “like a
garrison in a conquered city.” Pity the poor ego!

It could be argued that the Viennese émigré psychoanalysts who took over the
American analytic establishment in the postwar years did precisely that. They
amplified this Freudian ego’s powers of mastery while downplaying its conflicts with
the id and superego. They formulated a distinctively optimistic and melioristic
school of analytic thought, “ego psychology,” in which the ego was ideally mature
and autonomous, a smoothly operating agency of mind oriented toward adaptation
with the external environment. More than a few commentators have argued that
ego psychology’s celebration of compliance and de-emphasis of conflict fit perfectly
with the demands of the postwar corporate state as well as with the prevailing stress
on conformity and fitting in. Think here of William H. Whyte’s The Organization
Man, published in 1956, or of David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, from 1950, best
sellers that were read as laments for a lost golden age of individualism and
autonomy.
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The ego-as-self is as authentically psychoanalytic
as its linguistic double, neither a corruption of
Freud’s intentions nor an import from the gauzy
reaches of humanistic psychology.

Among the professed achievements of the mid-century ego psychologists was

clearing up Freud’s productive ambiguity around the term’s meanings; ego would
henceforth refer to the agency’s regulatory and adaptive functions, not to the
person or the self. Consider that the doyen of ego psychology, Heinz Hartmann,
gently chided Freud for sometimes using “the term ego in more than one sense, and
not always in the sense in which it was best defined.”

Ego psychologists’ American hegemony was premised on their claim to being

Freud’s most loyal heirs; The Ego and the Id ranked high among their school’s
foundational texts. Freud’s text, however, supports a conceptualization of the ego
not only as an agency of mind (their reading) but also as an experienced sense of
self. In it, Freud had intriguingly referred to the ego as “first and foremost a body-
ego,” explaining that it “is ultimately derived from bodily sensations.”

Ignored by the ego psychologists, Freud’s statement was taken up in the 1920s and
1930s by, among others, the Viennese analyst Paul Federn, who coined the term
“ego feeling” to capture his contention that the ego was best construed as referring
to our subjective experience of ourselves, our sense of existing as a person or self.
He argued that the ego should be conceived of in terms of experience, not
conceptualized as a mental abstraction. Ego feeling, he explained in 1928, was “the
sensation, constantly present, of one’s own person—the ego’s perception of itself.”
Federn was a phenomenologist, implicitly critiquing Freud and his heirs for favoring
systematizing over felt experience while at the same time fashioning himself a
follower,
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his insights have been largely overlooked in the analytic canon.
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