I love Sigmund Freud's work. His work in the realms of the human mind and personality is mindblowing. He had once famously said, " I was the only worker in a new field." And that explains the challenges before him.
For him, nothing was ever accidental. Even a slip of tongue was enough to gain insight into the mind of a person because it reflects the working of the unconscious mind. Say a patient tells his doctor inadvertently, "please do not give me any more bills" instead of "pills", it shows the patient to be financially stressed. Similarly, our repressed sexual, aggressive and other tendencies make their way out through jokes and sarcasms.
He said that human personality- including its emotions and strivings-arose due to a conflict between our aggressive pleasure-seeking biological impulses and the social restraints against them.
Our mind is like an iceberg. As we know, 90% of the mass of the iceberg is under water & only 10 % above it. Our conscious awareness is that part of the iceberg which floats above the surface. Below the surface is the much larger unconscious region which contains thoughts, wishes, feelings and memories of which we are largely unaware. For instance, a child below 18 months loves to suck a finger. I have seen parents commanding harshly to remove the finger or simply removing the finger from the mouth themselves. They repeat it till the child loses that habit. However, a conflict has arisen. Children who never quite resolve this conflict have a great chance of becoming"orally-fixated" in their adult life. They might continue to seek oral gratification through smoking or excessive eating. Or they might exhibit passive dependence like that of a nursing infant.
I have drawn an image to describe the mind functioning.
The conflicts which we were talking about, revolve around three interacting systems. In simple words:
Id - pleasure principle - makes the mind seek instant gratification.
Ego - Reality principle - seeks to satisfy Id's impulses in a realistic way. ( for instance, a sexually starved person might feel like having sex with someone. However, ego contains and restrains by showing the real-life demands of the external world. So instead of forcing someone, the person chooses to find a consenting partner. This person might be a prostitute or a life partner or just some consenting person)
Superego- It is a voice of conscience that forces the ego to consider not only the real but also the ideal. (In the above example of the sexually starved person, he/she might consider a prostitute as not-ideal according to the value system/culture. Instead, that person might wait for a life partner to gratify sexual needs.)
A few days back, i was coming home from dombivli station. It was around 9.30 pm. In front of me, a person was partly walking and partly swaying under the influence of alcohol. In such an inebriated stage, our real nature seeks to come out. In front of us there was an unmanned cart full of apples. Now, this man immediately stole one apple and hid it behind his back and kept walking. The vendor saw this and came running and confronted him. The man immediately gaave up the apple and went forward. I hurried to see what he would do next. As soon as he saw a bend, he went into it and then started running, looking back all the time. I followed too. He then went into some society compund and hid there for some time. When he felt safe, he came out.
In an inebriated state, the id became dominant. He lost sight of the real world and the ideal world. Theft was not his main motive though. If theft had been his innermost desire, he wouldn't have given up the apple so easily. His desire was of thrill. Thrill of doing something naughty like a child. When he was caught, he didn't quite comprehend what was happening though he very obediently returned the apple. However in a few seconds he had some inkling of the reality. His ego and superego woke up to make him run and hide. He felt scared maybe because of the fear of being beaten. He became aware enough to protect himself.
I am reminded of another incident. This was in 1999. I was traveling from Pilani to Delhi by bus at night. There was a bus driver and a companion who was supposed to be a backup driver. He was fully drunk and swinging to the tunes of "chamma chamma". I hadn't got a seat and so i was sitting in the driver's area on the cross seat. He couldn't be brought under control at all. However, his Id was the only dominant energy here. So he could uninhibitedly do whatever he felt like doing.The same is the case with any child.It startes crying when it wants something. As the ego develops, the young child begins to cope with the real world.Well, in the morning when he came back to his senses, i told him of his behaviour thoughout the night. He couldn't believe his ears at all !!
The superego's demands often oppose the Id's and the ego struggles to reconcile the two.
