Essay 63: On Matters of Definition and Semantics: Regarding The Psychoanalytic Use of The Concepts of 'Ego' and 'Id' (1893-1938)

Finished! October 25th, 2015

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. Friedrich Nietzsche

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. Friedrich Nietzsche

Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent. Friedrich Nietzsche

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.
Friedrich Nietzsche

I would believe only in a God that knows how to Dance.
Friedrich Nietzsche

https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/f/friedrich_nietzsche_6.html

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The title of one of Freud's last papers in 1938 -- an important but perplexing paper called 'Splitting of The Ego in The Process of Defence' -- could have very well summed up 45 years of Freudian Psychoanalysis except that the paper seemed to be ushering in a new brand or realm of psychoanalysis as well as returning to Freud's earliest psychoanalytic (or pre-psychoanalytic) work between 1893 and 1896, fresh off the influence of, and/or rebellion against, Charcot, Breuer, and Janet -- and also a rebellion against hypnosis as he moved towards 'psychoanalysis proper', whatever we deem that to mean. Opinions are wide and varied, and can be as different as black and white. 

Freud opened the essay by summing up his own puzzlement in this regard: 

'I find myself for a moment in the interesting position of not knowing whether what I have to say should be regarded as something long familiar and obvious or as something entirely new and puzzling. But I am inclined to think the latter.' (Freud, S.E. V. 23, 'Splitting of The Ego in The Process of Defence', p. 275). 

I think both. I think that Freud was both reaching back into the beginning of his earliest psychoanalytic investigations as well as reaching forward into what would become 'Klein's, Fairbairn's, and Guntrip's 'Object Relations' territory.

Indeed, by 1938, Melanie Klein was already well into her 'new but old Psychoanalytic approach' and had butted heads through the mid 1930s with Freud's soon-to-be-ultimate-protegee-and-protector-of-the-'Classical' Psychoanalytic-Faith' -- his own daughter, Anna Freud,  A 'classic match' as even Klein tried to 'hold onto the old' while 'branching out into the new' -- the ultimate Janus mythology of 'the two faced coin' -- one Janus looking to the past, the other Janus looking into the future. 

Klein was perhaps doing a better job at that than Anna, as Anna Freud would continue to live out her own professional life in her dad's shadow -- old school, classical psychoanalysis, true to her last dying breath to her dad's vision of psychoanalysis (even though Sigmund Freud was still 'evolving' in his thinking, even in 1938, the year before he died. Was Father Freud moving in the direction of Klein? Or was Klein 'barking up a new branch of Classical Psychoanalysis' that Sigmund Freud had just not fully got to yet, and even he, as can be seen above, wasn't sure whether he was being the Janus of the past, or the Janus of the future.

Again, I say he was being both simultaneously, and perhaps having a little trouble with his own definitions and semantics. Back in 1893, 1894, Freud had talked about 'the splitting of the personality' into 'will' and 'counter-will', and between 'conscious' and 'unconscious'.

However, back then (meaning 1893-94, and really, up until 1923), 'the ego' had meant the whole personality, the whole self -- not what it came to mean in 1923 and afterwards as a 'restricted and constricted part of the whole personality, the whole self'.

So which 'ego' was Freud talking about here when he titled this essay 'Splitting of The Ego in the Process of Defence': the 'whole self ego' of Freud's 1893-1894 thinking, and again, really up until 1923, or the 'restraining, compromising, civilized ego' of psychoanalytic fame that became defined that way in 1923 when Freud was 67 years old.

A lot of psychoanalytic water had passed under the bridge before 1923 and this 1923 version of the 'restricted-constricted' ego -- as now was going to be differentiated like black and white from Freud's brand new concept of 1923 -- 'the id'.

Well, forgive me for asking but 'where did the id come from' that it suddenly 'appeared seemingly out of nowhere' in 1923? Did Freud have a sudden epiphany?

Or was Freud simply 'semantically re-shuffling the deck' with a new, much more restricted and constricted meaning for an old word (i.e., 'the ego' as in 'the whole self'), and at the same time, he was creating a new word to label and conceptualize some of the 'wholistic ego's' old semantic territory -- i.e., 'the more impulsive, dangerous, anxiety-provoking ego' which would take over for Freud's old terminology from years gone by such as 'the counter-will' (1893) or 'the unconscious' (1893-1922) or 'the pleasure ego' (1914, 'On Narcissism'), or in the terminology of other theorists...'the alter-ego' (Janet), or 'the Shadow' (Jung) and now become in 1923 Freud's latest play toy -- i.e., 'the id'?

Forgive me if I might be accused of 'leading the witness' in that last paragraph of mine because I think I set you up to draw the same conclusion that I have -- that Freud in 1923 was employing new terminology and new conceptuology to try to teach and explain the same psychoanalytic territory that he had been investigating from his earliest years of 1893, 1894 (and even before), right up to the point of the birth of his new terminology in one of his most famous essays -- 'The Ego and The Id' (1923).   

So now 'the id' which was taking over the role of Freud's 1914 'pleasure ego' -- which Freud wanted to differentiate from the more constricting, restricting, compromising, civilized, defensive-laden 'reality-ego' of 1914 -- would be differentiated from simply 'the ego' as opposed to 'the reality ego'. In this regard also, the 'id' could be regarded as the 1923 version of the 1893 'counter-will' or Janet's 'alter-ego' or Freud's 'pleasure-ego' of 1914, or Jung's 'shadow', any and/or all of which could be viewed as 'wanting things impulsively' that tended to be more 'uncivilized, uncultured, unethical, illegal, un-tame, and/or wild' in nature.

Indeed, the 'id' might be better defined as 'impulsive desire and/or impulsive drive' as opposed to 'The It' which I believe is what 'the id' means in German and which tends to depersonalize, objectify, and dissociate ourselves from our deepest, darkest, most personal desires and/or drives.

Well, we can be very good at doing this 'depersonalizing job' by ourselves -- without the help of psychoanalysis which can claim that it is just doing what most people do anyway -- i.e, depersonalize and dissociate our 'id impulses' from our 'normal, much more civilized and ethical behavior' -- but, that in my opinion, is one of the biggest objections against Classical Psychoanalysis -- specifically, its 'objectification' of people, and of 'human subjectivity', and the 'either/or' compartmentalization of human behavior, and 'the human, holistic self or holistic ego'.  

Now, I have no problem with 'ego-compartmentalization' per se -- I use it as a teaching tool where all the different and important 'ego-functions' of the ego are 'sub-compartmentalized' into different 'ego-states' or 'ego-compartments' which can either complement each other and/or conflict and compete with each other. But aside from this understanding and teaching process -- which they do in medicine no differently -- well, maybe a little differently -- but if or when the 'brain' or 'liver' is compartmentalized (albeit empirically as opposed to metaphysically, metaphorically, and/or mythologically), this is done for similar understanding and/or teaching of brain and/or liver functions -- and their different possible pathologies -- as well as for every other organ in the human body.

Now, Western Medicine has been criticized as well for being too 'reductionistic' and too 'compartmentalized' and too 'objectified', not to mention too 'pharmaceutical' -- but ideally speaking, after a doctor has learned as much as he or she is capable of learning 'causally' and 'functionally' and 'compartmentally' and 'reductionistically' -- and has passed all tests and requirements to become an 'official, authorized, legal, practising doctor' -- well, at this point, when we walk into this doctor's office, we would like to feel like we are being treated as a 'whole person' -- not just as the sum of our different organ parts and pathologies. Right?

And similarly, to the extent that i am willing to surmise here, I think most of us would like our psychoanalyst or psychotherapist to treat us also, not only as 'the sum of our different 'ego-parts and pathologies' but also as a whole, human person who is experiencing the psychoanalyst and/or psychotherapist sitting before him or her -- and talking to us not as an 'object' but more so as a 'living, breathing, talking, feeling, whole person in evolution....or God-Nature and/or the therapist help us, in 'de-evolution'...

  Where does this leave us? 

It leaves us at the distinguishing point between what I will call here -- loosely and unofficially -- 'GAP-DGB Neo-Classical Freudian Greater Psychoanalysis' -- and every other brand of psychoanalysis that is out there.

And our 'birth point' and 'primary distinguishing feature' of DGB Neo-Greater Psychoanalysis -- is what I will call the concept of 'the id-ego'.

To my knowledge this concept was only mentioned once, very briefly in passing, by Freud in 1938 in the context of a sentence to label the earliest point in human infantile development where the 'ego' had not yet 'broken off' and 'distinguished or differentiated itself' from the 'id' yet -- and this, Freud, in 'An Outline of Psychoanalysis' (1938, written after the 'Splitting' essay mentioned above, and also published in 1938), labeled as 'the ego-id' (as opposed -- but just in the sequence of a dialectically hyphenated name -- to my newly developing concept of 'the id-ego').

Let me quote a couple of different paragraphs and comments that Freud made in his last articulated synopsis of psychoanalysis taken from 'An Outline of Psychoanalysis' (1938) (but first let me take a break for a bit and then I will come back and address this whole 'id-ego' concept and where it can take us that is quite different than from where Freud and other psychoanalysts of different 'sub-schools'  have taken us up to this point in the evolution of psychoanalysis):   

There is actually too much that I want to write here from 'Outline' so for those of you who have access to the full essay, I encourage you to read it -- if you have not already done so recently -- because again, the essay represents Freud's last succinctly and clearly articulated thoughts on Psychoanalysis -- before he left us. And the 'Splitting' part was at least partly emerging 'new-old' psychoanalytic theory.

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'The power of the id expresses the true purpose of the individual organism's life. This consists in the satisfaction of its innate needs. No such purpose as that of keeping itself alive or of protecting itself  from dangers by means of anxiety can be attributed to the id. That is the task of the ego, whose business it also is to discover the most favorable and least perilous method of obtaining satisfaction, taking the external world into account. The super-ego may bring fresh needs to the fore, but its main function remains the limitations of satisfactions. (Freud, 'An Outline of Psychoanalysis', 1938, S.E., V. 23, p. 148). 

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Well, without going any further, let me give you my editorial opinions on what you have just read above.

In 'Hegel's Hotel' which is my 'neo-Hegelian' container that I put my 'neo-Freudian' brand of Psychoanalysis in, I am accustomed to using hundreds if not thousands of 'hyphenated words' such as 'id-ego' which posits the wish for 'homeostatic-dialectic-democratic balance' within the organism by utilizing the bipolar tandem of two or more opposing and partly competing functions of the personality which are designed to offset the unilateral extremes of its bipolar partner. In this regard, I posit the 'id-ego' as such a dualistic and dialectic bipolar tandem-- 'the id' component of the 'id-ego' tandom designed to 'specialize in awareness, contact, and engagement risks'  aimed at not only helping the organism to survive -- but also to 'survive with an impulsive, vibrant, vital, and passionate flourish' -- this is much of what I personally mean when I elaborate on Hegel's use of the concept of 'the passionate, vital phenomenology of the human spirit'.

For me, there is no psychoanalysis without viewing psychoanalysis within the context of a much larger philosophical context, only part of which can be labeled something like this: an 'Anaximander-Heraclitus-Lao-tse-Plato-Aristotle-Diogenes-Alexander-the-Great-Epicurus-Spinoza-Bacon-Locke-Hume-Kant-Schelling-Fichte-Hegel-Schopenhauer-Dostoevsky-Kierkegaard-Smith-Marx-Nietzsche-Sartre-Russell-Wittgenstein-Korzybski-Foucault-Derrida-Rand-Fromm' context...with Hegel -- or at least my 'projection' of Bainian neo-Hegelian humanistic-existential and deconstructive thinking...taking centre stage... I dare you to memorize and repeat that!

 I digress...

So the id looks after 'risks' in human behavior and 'the ego' looks after 'safety', 'defense', 'restraint', 'compromise', and 'timing' -- and together we have the 'id-ego' working in tandem with each other in anything and everything we do -- both conscious and unconscious, in and out of harmony -- in some ways 'the id' can be viewed as 'the yang' of the personality and 'the ego' or 'reality ego' or 'restraining ego' as the 'yin' of the personality. But that classification -- like all classification systems -- only goes so far before it get into trouble...We will leave before we arrive at 'classification trouble'.

We can also look at the id 'mythologically' as I have started to do in a couple of my most recent papers, Here, what we do, is we study as as many 'mythological Gods' in human history as we can possibly can -- or have time to do -- and then 'introject' these 'Gods' into the 'id' where they become 'mythological id archetype figures'. In this regard, we not only have the two main ones as articulated by Freud in the quote I will cite below (or at least one of them -- 'Eros' -- the other, 'Thanatos', would be articulated by Stekel after Freud's death), but we also have as many as we can possibly articulate and classify including (and these are only the Greek Gods): Gaia, Zeus, Hera, Hestia, Narcissus, Dionysus, Apollo, Aries, Hermes, Aphrodite...  

So once again, Gods 'introjected' into the human psyche become 'Mythological Id-Dominant-Archetype Figures' (MIDAFs), and MIDAFs projected into the 'air' or the 'underworld' become 'Gods'. Saying which came first is like opening up a chicken and egg argument or opening up a 'repression and civilization' argument: which came first, repression or civilization -- quite frankly I don't care, nor do I even usually use Freud's 'favorite defense mechanism' -- repression -- perhaps that only goes to prove just how 'repressed' I am!

From the MIDAF-Formations of our subconsciously working and evolving (and/or 'de-evolving') 'id-ego', come the more pre-conscious and conscious 'ego-formations', 'ego-states' or 'ego-compartments' of our now consciously thinking, feeling, wanting 'id-ego' -- either written on our face, or hidden in our conscious private shadow ego' -- and this is what we meet and greet the day with, in conjunction with our more 'mediating central executive ego (functions)' and our 'public social persona ego (functions)' which are designed to be more 'civilized' and 'cultured' than our 'more id-raw private shadow ego (functions).  

The ego has a lot of 'ego-functions' -- probably more than the liver has 'liver functions'. We won't get into any dualistic or dialectic argument about 'brain' as opposed to 'mind' or 'ego' functions...We would be here all night...

We need to delve deeper into Freud's concepts of 'the instincts' as well as my evolving 'Oedipal Trauma-Thanatos-Eros-Reality-Fantasy' Transference Connection'...but I will save that for my next essay -- Part 2 of this one.

Hope to see you there1

-- dgb, October 25th, 2015,

-- David Gordon Bain