The superego tells the id and the ego whether gratification in a particular instance is ethical. (3) Superego :- The best way to characterize the superego is to think of it as the moral branch of mental functioning. The ego is patient, reasonable, and works by the reality principle. It works by the reality principle and often directs the id towards more appropriate ways of behaving. (2) Ego :- It grows out of id, and seeks to satisfy an individual’s instinctual needs in accordance with reality. Id does not care for moral values, society, or other individuals. Freud considered much of a person’s instinctual energy to be sexual, and the rest as aggressive. It works on the pleasure principle, which assumes that people seek pleasure and try to avoid pain. It deals with the immediate gratification of primitive needs, sexual desires, and aggressive impulses.

(1) Id :- It is the source of a person’s instinctual energy. They reside in the unconscious as forces and they can be inferred from the ways people behave. This is, in part, because the ego knows that its mother will nolonger come to feed it, but also in part, due to the super-ego which knows that crying is not a socially acceptable reaction to being hungry.According to Freud’s theory, there are three primary structural elements of personality which are id, ego, and superego. However, when an adult is hungry, it will not cry. This is because the id is hungry and the ego has worked out that if it cries its mother will feed it. The ego, super-ego and id work together to control the body.įor example a newborn baby, when it is hungry, will cry for it's mother. The word id is taken from Latin where it is the nominative neuter form of the third person personal pronoun normally translated as 'it itself'. The id works according to the pleasure principal, it seeks instant gratification to its desires. It is a completely unconcious part of the mind and thus continues to function even when we are asleep.

The id is the part of the mind that is responsible for primative desires such as hunger. In his later works Freud also mentions a 'cultural super-ego' which is responsible for influencing the individual's super-ego. It is responsible for our inner sense of morality and thus develops as we grow up. The super-ego is the part of the mind that acts as our conscience and tries to impose on the rest of the mind the expectations of society. The word ego is taken directly from Latin where it is the nominative of the first person personal pronoun and is translated as 'I myself'. Its task is thus to find a balance between primative drives, morals and reality.Īlthough in his early writings Freud equated the ego with the sense of self, he later began to portray it more as a set of psychic functions such as reality-testing, defence, synthesis of information, intellectual functioning, and memory. In Freud's theory, the ego mediates between the id, the super-ego and the external world. The structural theory divides the mind into three agencies or 'structures': the id, the ego, and the super-ego. Most people who identify with the contemporary school of ego psychology place its beginnings with Sigmund Freud's 1923 book The Ego and the Id, in which Freud introduced what would later come to be called the structural theory of psychoanalysis. The Structural/Topographical Model of the Mind as an Iceberg.

The id contains 'primitive desires' (hunger, rage and sex), the super-ego contains internalized norms, morality and taboos, and the ego mediates between the two and may include or give rise to the sense of self. The ego, super-ego, and id are the divisions of the psyche according to the psychoanalytic theory developed by Sigmund Freud.

Superego psychology