Freud - Complete Works (757 page)

   In 1921 I endeavoured to make use
of the differentiation between the ego and the super-ego in a study
of group psychology. I arrived at a formula such as this: a
psychological group is a collection of individuals who have
introduced the same person into their super-ego and, on the basis
of this common element, have identified themselves with one another
in their ego. This applies, of course, only to groups that have a
leader. If we possessed more applications of this kind, the
hypothesis of the super-ego would lose its last touch of
strangeness for us, and we should become completely free of the
embarrassment that still comes over us when, accustomed as we are
to the atmosphere of the underworld, we move in the more
superficial, higher strata of the mental apparatus. We do not
suppose, of course, that with the separation off of the super-ego
we have said the last word on the psychology of the ego. It is
rather a first step; but in this case it is not only the first step
that is hard.

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   Now, however, another problem
awaits us - at the opposite end of the ego, as we might put it. It
is presented to us by an observation during the work of analysis,
an observation which is actually a very old one. As not
infrequently happens, it has taken a long time to come to the point
of appreciating its importance. The whole theory of psycho-analysis
is, as you know, in fact built up on the perception of the
resistance offered to us by the patient when we attempt to make his
unconscious conscious to him. The objective sign of this resistance
is that his associations fail or depart widely from the topic that
is being dealt with. He may also recognize the resistance
subjectively
by the fact that he has distressing feelings
when he approaches the topic. But this last sign may also be
absent. We then say to the patient that we infer from his behaviour
that he is now in a state of resistance; and he replies that he
knows nothing of that, and is only aware that his associations have
become more difficult. It turns out that we were right; but in that
case his resistance was unconscious too, just as unconscious as the
repressed, at the lifting of which we were working. We should long
ago have asked the question: from what part of his mind does an
unconscious resistance like this arise? The beginner in
psycho-analysis will be ready at once with the answer: it is, of
course, the resistance of the unconscious. An ambiguous and
unserviceable answer! If it means that the resistance arises from
the repressed, we must rejoin: certainly not! We must rather
attribute to the repressed a strong upward drive, an impulsion to
break through into consciousness. The resistance can only be a
manifestation of the ego, which originally put the repression into
force and now wishes to maintain it. That, moreover, is the view we
always took. Since we have come to assume a special agency in the
ego, the super-ego, which represents demands of a restrictive and
rejecting character, we may say that repression is the work of this
super-ego and that it is carried out either by itself or by the ego
in obedience to its orders. If then we are met by the case of the
resistance in analysis not being conscious to the patient, this
means either that in quite important situations the super-ego and
the ego can operate unconsciously, or - and this would be still
more important - that portions of both of them, the ego and the
super-ego themselves, are unconscious. In both cases we have to
reckon with the disagreeable discovery that on the one hand
(super-) ego and conscious and on the other hand repressed and
unconscious are far from coinciding.

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   And here, Ladies and Gentlemen, I
feel that I must make a pause to take breath - which you too will
welcome as a relief - and, before I go on, to apologize to you. My
intention is to give you some addenda to the introductory lectures
on psycho-analysis which I began fifteen years ago, and I am
obliged to behave as though you as well as I had in the interval
done nothing but practise psycho-analysis. I know that that
assumption is out of place; but I am helpless, I cannot do
otherwise. This is no doubt related to the fact that it is in
general so hard to give anyone who is not himself a psycho-analyst
an insight into psycho-analysis. You can believe me when I tell you
that we do not enjoy giving an impression of being members of a
secret society and of practising a mystical science. Yet we have
been obliged to recognize and express as our conviction that no one
has a right to join in a discussion of psycho-analysis who has not
had particular experiences which can only be obtained by being
analysed oneself. When I gave you my lectures fifteen years ago I
tried to spare you certain speculative portions of our theory; but
it is precisely from them that are derived the new acquisitions of
which I must speak to you to-day.

   I return now to our topic. In
face of the doubt whether the ego and super-ego are themselves
unconscious or merely produce unconscious effects, we have, for
good reasons, decided in favour of the former possibility. And it
is indeed the case that large portions of the ego and super-ego can
remain unconscious and are normally unconscious. That is to say,
the individual knows nothing of their contents and it requires an
expenditure of effort to make them conscious. It is a fact that ego
and conscious, repressed and unconscious do not coincide. We feel a
need to make a fundamental revision of our attitude to the problem
of conscious-unconscious. At first we are inclined greatly to
reduce the value of the criterion of being conscious since it has
shown itself so untrustworthy. But we should be doing it an
injustice. As may be said of our life, it is not worth much, but it
is all we have. Without the illumination thrown by the quality of
consciousness, we should be lost in the obscurity of
depth-psychology; but we must attempt to find our bearings
afresh.

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   There is no need to discuss what
is to be called conscious: it is removed from all doubt. The oldest
and best meaning of the word ‘unconscious’ is the
descriptive one; we call a psychical process unconscious whose
existence we are obliged to assume - for some such reason as that
we infer it from its effects -, but of which we know nothing. In
that case we have the same relation to it as we have to a psychical
process in another person, except that it is in fact one of our
own. If we want to be still more correct, we shall modify our
assertion by saying that we call a process unconscious if we are
obliged to assume that it is being activated
at the moment
,
though
at the moment
we know nothing about it. This
qualification makes us reflect that the majority of conscious
processes are conscious only for a short time; very soon they
become
latent
, but can easily become conscious again. We
might also say that they had become unconscious, if it were at all
certain that in the condition of latency they are still something
psychical. So far we should have learnt nothing new; nor should we
have acquired the right to introduce the concept of an unconscious
into psychology. But then comes the new observation that we were
already able to make in parapraxes. In order to explain a slip of
the tongue, for instance, we find ourselves obliged to assume that
the intention to make a particular remark was present in the
subject. We infer it with certainty from the interference with his
remark which has occurred; but the intention did not put itself
through and was thus unconscious. If, when we subsequently put it
before the speaker, he recognizes it as one familiar to him, then
it was only temporarily unconscious to him; but if he repudiates it
as something foreign to him, then it was permanently unconscious.
From this experience we retrospectively obtain the right also to
pronounce as something unconscious what had been described as
latent. A consideration of these dynamic relations permits us now
to distinguish two kinds of unconscious - one which is easily,
under frequently occurring circumstances, transformed into
something conscious, and another with which this transformation is
difficult and takes place only subject to a considerable
expenditure of effort or possibly never at all. In order to escape
the ambiguity as to whether we mean the one or the other
unconscious, whether we are using the word in the descriptive or in
the dynamic sense, we make use of a permissible and simple way out.
We call the unconscious which is only latent, and thus easily
becomes conscious, the ‘preconscious’ and retain the
term ‘unconscious’ for the other. We now have three
terms, ‘conscious’, ‘preconscious’ and
‘unconscious’, with which we can get along in our
description of mental phenomena. Once again: the preconscious is
also unconscious in the purely descriptive sense, but we do not
give it that name, except in talking loosely or when we have to
make a defence of the existence in mental life of unconscious
processes in general.

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   You will admit, I hope, that so
far that is not too bad and allows of convenient handling. Yes, but
unluckily the work of psycho-analysis has found itself compelled to
use the word ‘unconscious’ in yet another, third,
sense, and this may, to be sure, have led to confusion. Under the
new and powerful impression of there being an extensive and
important field of mental life which is normally withdrawn from the
ego’s knowledge so that the processes occurring in it have to
be regarded as unconscious in the truly dynamic sense, we have come
to understand the term ‘unconscious’ in a topographical
or systematic sense as well; we have come to speak of a
‘system’ of the preconscious and a ‘system’
of the unconscious, of a conflict between the ego and the system
Ucs
., and have used the word more and more to denote a
mental province rather than a quality of what is mental. The
discovery, actually an inconvenient one, that portions of the ego
and super-ego as well are unconscious in the dynamic sense,
operates at this point as a relief - it makes possible the removal
of a complication. We perceive that we have no right to name the
mental region that is foreign to the ego ‘the system
Ucs
’, since the characteristic of being unconscious is
not restricted to it. Very well; we will no longer use the term
‘unconscious’ in the systematic sense and we will give
what we have hitherto so described a better name and one no longer
open to misunderstanding. Following a verbal usage of
Nietzsche’s and taking up a suggestion by Georg Groddeck, we
will in future call it the ‘id’. This impersonal
pronoun seems particularly well suited for expressing the main
characteristic of this province of the mind - the fact of its being
alien to the ego. The super-ego, the ego and the id - these, then,
are the three realms, regions, provinces, into which we divide an
individual’s mental apparatus, and with the mutual relations
of which we shall be concerned in what follows.

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   But first a short interpolation.
I suspect that you feel dissatisfied because the three qualities of
the characteristic of consciousness and the three provinces of the
mental apparatus do not fall together into three peaceable couples,
and you may regard this as in some sense obscuring our findings. I
do not think, however, that we should regret it, and we should tell
ourselves that we had no right to expect any such smooth
arrangement. Let me give you an analogy; analogies, it is true,
decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home. I am
imagining a country with a landscape of varying configuration -
hill-country, plains, and chains of lakes -, and with a mixed
population; it is inhabited by Germans, Magyars and Slovaks, who
carry on different activities. Now things might be partitioned in
such a way that the Germans, who breed cattle, live in the
hill-country, the Magyars, who grow cereals and wine, live in the
plains, and the Slovaks, who catch fish and plait reeds, live by
the lakes. If the partitioning could be neat and clear-cut like
this, a Woodrow Wilson would be delighted by it; it would also be
convenient for a lecture in a geography lesson. The probability is,
however, that you will find less orderliness and more mixing, if
you travel through the region. Germans, Magyars and Slovaks live
interspersed all over it; in the hill-country there is agricultural
land as well, cattle are bred in the plains too. A few things are
naturally as you expected, for fish cannot be caught in the
mountains and wine does not grow in the water. Indeed, the picture
of the region that you brought with you may on the whole fit the
facts; but you will have to put up with deviations in the
details.

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   You will not expect me to have
much to tell you that is new about the id apart from its new name.
It is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality; what little
we know of it we have learnt from our study of the dream-work and
of the construction of neurotic symptoms, and most of that is of a
negative character and can be described only as a contrast to the
ego. We approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a
cauldron full of seething excitations. We picture it as being open
at its end to somatic influences, and as there taking up into
itself instinctual needs which find their psychical expression in
it, but we cannot say in what substratum. It is filled with energy
reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization,
produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the
satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of
the pleasure principle. The logical laws of thought do not apply in
the id, and this is true above all of the law of contradiction.
Contrary impulses exist side by side, without cancelling each other
out or diminishing each other: at the most they may converge to
form compromises under the dominating economic pressure towards the
discharge of energy. There is nothing in the id that could be
compared with negation; and we perceive with surprise an exception
to the philosophical theorem that space and time are necessary
forms of our mental acts. There is nothing in the id that
corresponds to the idea of time; there is no recognition of the
passage of time, and - a thing that is most remarkable and awaits
consideration in philosophical thought - no alteration in its
mental processes is produced by the passage of time. Wishful
impulses which have never passed beyond the id, but impressions,
too, which have been sunk into the id by repression, are virtually
immortal; after the passage of decades they behave as though they
had just occurred. They can only be recognized as belonging to the
past, can only lose their importance and be deprived of their
cathexis of energy, when they have been made conscious by the work
of analysis, and it is on this that the therapeutic effect of
analytic treatment rests to no small extent.