![]() In contrast to the instinctual id and the rule-based superego, the ego is the rational part of our personality. It strives for perfection and judges our behavior, leading to feelings of pride or-when we fall short of the ideal-feelings of guilt. The superego acts as our conscience it is our moral compass that tells us how we should behave. The superego develops as a child interacts with others, learning the social rules for right and wrong. Through social interactions with parents and others in a child’s environment, the ego and superego develop to help control the id. Freud believed that the id operates on what he called the “pleasure principle,” in which the id seeks immediate gratification. It directs impulses for hunger, thirst, and sex. The unconscious id contains our most primitive drives or urges, and is present from birth. The job of the ego, or self, is to balance the aggressive/pleasure-seeking drives of the id with the moral control of the superego. He called them the id, ego, and superego ( Figure). Freud suggested that we can understand this by imagining three interacting systems within our minds. Our personality is the result of our efforts to balance these two competing forces. The information in our unconscious affects our behavior, although we are unaware of it.Īccording to Freud, our personality develops from a conflict between two forces: our biological aggressive and pleasure-seeking drives versus our internal (socialized) control over these drives. Freud believed that we are only aware of a small amount of our mind’s activities and that most of it remains hidden from us in our unconscious. Seeing them as a reflection of unconscious desires, linguists today have found that slips of the tongue tend to occur when we are tired, nervous, or not at our optimal level of cognitive functioning (Motley, 2002). Speech errors such as this are quite common. Freud suggested that slips of the tongue are actually sexual or aggressive urges, accidentally slipping out of our unconscious. You’ve probably heard of a Freudian slip, the term used to describe this. For example, we sometimes say things that we don’t intend to say by unintentionally substituting another word for the one we meant. According to Freud, unacceptable urges and desires are kept in our unconscious through a process called repression. Our unconscious refers to that mental activity of which we are unaware and are unable to access (Freud, 1923). He said that only about one-tenth of our mind is conscious, and the rest of our mind is unconscious. To explain the concept of conscious versus unconscious experience, Freud compared the mind to an iceberg ( Figure).
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