Freud - Complete Works (656 page)

   But the repressed merges into the
id as well, and is merely a part of it. The repressed is only cut
off sharply from the ego by the resistances of repression; it can
communicate with the ego through the id. We at once realize that
almost all the lines of demarcation we have drawn at the
instigation of pathology relate only to the superficial strata of
the mental apparatus - the only ones known to us. The state of
things which we have been describing can be represented
diagrammatically (Fig. 1); though it must be remarked that the form
chosen has no pre tensions to any special applicability, but is
merely intended to serve for purposes of exposition.

Fig. 1.

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   We might add, perhaps, that the
ego wears a ‘cap of hearing’ - on one side only, as we
learn from cerebral anatomy. It might be said to wear it awry.

   It is easy to see that the ego is
that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence
of the external world through the medium of the
Pcpt.-Cs
.;
in a sense it is an extension of the surface-differentiation.
Moreover, the ego seems to bring the influence of the external
world to bear upon the id and its tendencies, and endeavours to
substitute the reality principle for the pleasure principle which
reigns unrestrictedly in the id. For the ego, perception plays the
part which in the id falls to instinct. The ego represents what may
be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which
contains the passions. All this falls into line with popular
distinctions which we are all familiar with; at the same time,
however, it is only to be regarded as holding good on the average
or ‘ideally’.

   The functional importance of the
ego is manifested in the fact that normally control over the
approaches to motility devolves upon it. Thus in its relation to
the id it is like a man on horse back, who has to hold in check the
superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the
rider tries to do so with his own strength while the ego uses
borrowed forces. The analogy may be carried a little further. Often
a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to
guide it where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego is in the
habit of transforming the id’s will into action as if it were
its own.

   Another factor, besides the
influence of the system
Pcpt
., seems to have played a part
in bringing about the formation of the ego and its differentiation
from the id. A person’s own body, and above all its surface,
is a place from which both external and internal perceptions may
spring. It is seen like any other object, but to the
touch
it yields two kinds of sensations, one of which may be equivalent
to an internal perception. Psycho-physiology has fully discussed
the manner in which a person’s own body attains its special
position among other objects in the world of perception. Pain, too,
seems to play a part in the process, and the way in which we gain
new knowledge of our organs during painful illnesses is perhaps a
model of the way by which in general we arrive at the idea of our
body.

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   The ego is first and foremost a
bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the
projection of a surface. If we wish to find an anatomical analogy
for it we can best identify it with the ‘cortical
homunculus’ of the anatomists, which stands on its head in
the cortex, sticks up its heels, faces backwards and, as we know,
has its speech-area on the left-hand side.

   The relation of the ego to
consciousness has been entered into repeatedly; yet there are some
important facts in this connection which remain to be described
here. Accustomed as we are to taking our social or ethical scale of
values along with us wherever we go, we feel no surprise at hearing
that the scene of the activities of the lower passions is in the
unconscious; we expect, moreover, that the higher any mental
function ranks in our scale of values the more easily it will find
access to consciousness assured to it. Here, however,
psycho-analytic experience disappoints us. On the one hand, we have
evidence that even subtle and difficult intellectual operations
which ordinarily require strenuous reflection can equally be
carried out preconsciously and without coming into consciousness.
Instances of this are quite incontestable; they may occur, for
example, during the state of sleep, as is shown when someone finds,
immediately after waking, that he knows the solution to a difficult
mathematical or other problem with which he had been wrestling in
vain the day before.¹

  
¹
I was quite recently told an instance of
this which was, in fact, brought up as an objection against my
description of the ‘dream-work’.

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   There is another phenomenon,
however, which is far stranger. In our analyses we discover that
there are people in whom the faculties of self-criticism and
conscience - mental activities, that is, that rank as extremely
high ones - are unconscious and unconsciously produce effects of
the greatest importance; the example of resistance remaining
unconscious during analysis is therefore by no means unique. But
this new discovery, which compels us, in spite of our better
critical judgement, to speak of an ‘unconscious sense of
guilt’, bewilders us far more than the other and sets us
fresh problems, especially when we gradually come to see that in a
great number of neuroses an unconscious sense of guilt of this kind
plays a decisive economic part and puts the most powerful obstacles
in the way of recovery. If we come back once more to our scale of
values, we shall have to say that not only what is lowest but also
what is highest in the ego can be unconscious. It is as if we were
thus supplied with a proof of what we have just asserted of the
conscious ego: that it is first and foremost a body-ego.

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III

THE
EGO AND THE SUPER-EGO (EGO IDEAL)

If the ego were merely the part of the id
modified by the influence of the perceptual system, the
representative in the mind of the real external world, we should
have a simple state of things to deal with. But there is a further
complication.

   The considerations that led us to
assume the existence of a grade in the ego, a differentiation
within the ego, which may be called the ‘ego ideal’ or
‘super-ego’, have been stated elsewhere.¹They
still hold good.² The fact that this part of the ego is less
firmly connected with consciousness is the novelty which calls for
explanation.

   At this point we must widen our
range a little. We succeeded in explaining the painful disorder of
melancholia by supposing that an object which was lost has been set
up again inside the ego - that is, that an object-cathexis has been
replaced by an identification.³ At that time, however, we did
not appreciate the full significance of this process and did not
know how common and how typical it is. Since then we have come to
understand that this kind of substitution has a great share in
determining the form taken by the ego and that it makes an
essential contribution towards building up what is called its
‘character’.

  
¹
Cf. ‘On Narcissism: an
Introduction’ (1914
c
), and
Group Psychology and the
Analysis of the Ego
(1921
c
).

  
²
Except that I seem to have been mistaken in
ascribing the function of ‘reality-testing’ to this
super-ego - a point which needs correction. It would fit in
perfectly with the relations of the ego to the world of perception
if reality-testing remained a task of the ego itself. Some earlier
suggestions about a ‘nucleus of the ego’, never very
definitely formulated, also require to be put right, since the
system
Pcpt.-Cs
. alone can be regarded as the nucleus of the
ego.

  
³
Mourning and Melancholia’
(1917
e
).

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   At the very beginning, in the
individual’s primitive oral phase, object-cathexis and
identification are no doubt indistinguishable from each other. We
can only suppose that later on object-cathexes proceed from the id,
which feels erotic trends as needs. The ego, which to begin with is
still feeble, becomes aware of the object-cathexes, and either
acquiesces in them or tries to fend them off by the process of
repression.¹

   When it happens that a person has
to give up a sexual object, there quite often ensues an alteration
of his ego which can only be described as a setting up of the
object inside the ego, as it occurs in melancholia; the exact
nature of this substitution is as yet unknown to us. It may be that
by this introjection, which is a kind of regression to the
mechanism of the oral phase, the ego makes it easier for the object
to be given up or renders that process possible. It may be that
this identification is the sole condition under which the id can
give up its objects. At any rate the process, especially in the
early phases of development, is a very frequent one, and it makes
it possible to suppose that the character of the ego is a
precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and that it contains the
history of those object-choices. It must, of course, be admitted
from the outset that there are varying degrees of capacity for
resistance, which decide the extent to which a person’s
character fends off or accepts the influences of the history of his
erotic object-choices. In women who have had many experiences in
love there seems to be no difficulty in finding vestiges of their
object-cathexes in the traits of their character. We must also take
into consideration cases of simultaneous object-cathexis and
identification - cases, that is, in which the alteration in
character occurs before the object has been given up. In such cases
the alteration in character has been able to survive the
object-relation and in a certain sense to conserve it.

  
¹
An interesting parallel to the replacement
of object-choice by identification is to be found in the belief of
primitive peoples, and in the prohibitions based upon it, that the
attributes of animals which are incorporated as nourishment persist
as part of the character of those who eat them. As is well known,
this belief is one of the roots of cannibalism and its effects have
continued through the series of usages of the totem meal down to
Holy Communion. The consequences ascribed by this belief to oral
mastery of the object do in fact follow in the case of the later
sexual object-choice.

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   From another point of view it may
be said that this transformation of an erotic object-choice into an
alteration of the ego is also a method by which the ego can obtain
control over the id and deepen its relations with it - at the cost,
it is true, of acquiescing to a large extent in the id’s
experiences. When the ego assumes the features of the object, it is
forcing itself, so to speak, upon the id as a love-object and is
trying to make good the id’s loss by saying: ‘Look, you
can love me too - I am so like the object.’

   The transformation of
object-libido into narcissistic libido which thus takes place
obviously implies an abandonment of sexual aims, a desexualization
- a kind of sublimation, therefore. Indeed, the question arises,
and deserves careful consideration, whether this is not the
universal road to sublimation, whether all sublimation does not
take place though the mediation of the ego, which begins by
changing sexual object-libido into narcissistic libido and then,
perhaps, goes on to give it another aim.¹ We shall later on
have to consider whether other instinctual vicissitudes may not
also result from this transformation, whether, for instance, it may
not bring about a defusion of the various instincts that are fused
together.

   Although it is a digression from
our aim, we cannot avoid giving our attention for a moment longer
to the ego’s object-identifications. If they obtain the upper
hand and become too numerous, unduly powerful and incompatible with
one another, a pathological outcome will not be far off. It may
come to a disruption of the ego in consequence of the different
identifications becoming cut off from one another by resistances;
perhaps the secret of the cases of what is described as
‘multiple personality’ is that the different
identifications seize hold of consciousness in turn. Even when
things do not go so far as this, there remains the question of
conflicts between the various identifications into which the ego
comes apart, conflicts which cannot after all be described as
entirely pathological.