that emerges from psychoanalysis

is not a human being

that is at peace with itself.

It is a human being that is

divided,

split,

that is in conflict with itself,

and that doesn't know itself completely.

There is a kind of, in a way,

a new vision of what it is to be human

that emerges through psychoanalysis

which recognises conflict as fundamental.

Freud's fundamental view of humans

is that they are incessantly at war

with themselves, inside their own mind.

So that model of conflict

and of division within,

of a sort of fractured self,

is fundamentally important.

Freud has two models of the mind.

In the first model he distinguishes between

perception-consciousness,

what he calls the preconscious,

and the unconscious.

In the second model he distinguishes between

the ego, the id, and superego.

The id refers to the cluster of drives,

that push for immediate satisfaction.

It's governed by the pleasure principle.

It wants things here and now,

regardless of the consequences,

and if it doesn't get it then it screams

or has a tantrum.

So if the id's associated with the drives

and with getting satisfaction

however, in whatever form,

then the ego has to deal with that

and say: 'You can't do it that way,

but maybe you can do it this way'.

It's a negotiating agency.

And then you've got the superego

on the other side, which is to do with

conscience and law, which says:

'No, you can't try and do anything ever.

You've got to be perfect.

You've got to be all right.'

And so the ego's got to

mediate that too.

It's about how to makes these two,

the law and the drives,

how to make that liveable.

One of the difficulties in the later model

of ego, id, and superego,

and one off the reason why it doesn't just

map onto the earlier model

of conscious, unconscious, preconscious,

is that Freud thought that a part of the ego

was also unconscious to itself.

So there could be, as it were,

something going on in the ego

that's repressing thoughts

and yet that very fact, or that very process,

might be unconscious within the ego.

He thought of the ego as split

between a conscious and an unconscious part.

And then he also realised that

when, as a result of identifications

with our parents, we form ideals

that we want to match, ideals of ourselves,

these agencies are not all conscious.

So that the unconscious is actually spread

over the whole area of the mind.

Sometimes I think we can oversimplify it

by thinking about these

three little figures

running about in our minds.

The id represents normal, childish desires

and pleasures,

and to demonise those by calling it a devil,

I don't think is a good idea.

And with the superego as an angel,

I think that is even more problematic

because many of the demands of the superego

are quite tyrannical and nonsensical.

People talk about it as conscience,

a kind of, internalised version of conscience,

but that makes it sound rather sanitised.

So one of the features of the superego

is that is seems to be the voice of

conscience and morality,

but it's actually a passionately sadistic

and hating

voice in my ear, telling me what to do.

You know, the idea of the superego being

something quite, potentially perverse.

That it's an agency that can even get

enjoyment from making the person suffer,

from watching them fail

to live up to an ideal, for instance.

What Freud was saying was that

people fall ill of their moral ideals.

And we ought to question their moral ideals.

But the superego is

built out of the orders,

and the instructions and the diktats

and the words of your primary carers:

and 'you should' and 'you shouldn't',

and 'you must' and 'you mustn't', et cetera.

And so the exact words and beliefs

and ideals of your parents

are what your superego is built out of.

Let's take an example:

Take a person who,

a man who,

whose job was outside, in the street,

say he was a merchant at a market stall.

He developed panic attacks

when going into work,

and only in the summer,

and in the end he couldn't go into work

at all in the summer.

What emerged in the analysis was that

he was told as a young boy,

when he became interested in girls

and used to look,

'You mustn't stare at a woman.'

Now, in the summer, lots of slightly clad,

very pretty young women, girls

came to his market stall,

and he found it impossible not to look.

So to fulfil this moral demand of the superego

of which he wasn't aware, not initially,

all he could do in the end was to

avoid the situation completely.

So he was unable to work

because of his strict superego.

If people have a moral ideal,

that doesn't enable them to live,

then they're going to suffer.

In a way any symptom.

any psychological symptom,

would be an example of the ego breaking down,

so, you know, whether it's a phobia,

or an obsession with handwashing,

or an inability to go to work,

or depression.

All those things are signs

that the ego just isn't coping

and isn't managing to find a suitable compromise.

The second model of the mind

that Freud came up with,

the one that distinguishes between

the ego, the id, and the superego,

which also became the most popular one,

has advantages and disadvantages.

The disadvantage is,

and I think Freud himself noticed that

towards the end of his life, is that

it gives pride of place to the ego.

Freud draws the analogy between

a horse and a rider

and the ego and the id.

The id is a horse: a strong animal,

full of energy,

and the rider tries to rein in the horse,

to direct it along a pathway

that the rider chooses.

and, more often than not, that works.

However, sometimes

the horse has a mind of its own

and it chooses its own way,

and the ego, the rider, just follows

and pretends that it's going where it wants to go

where it's the horse that's making the decision.

And this gives us a bit of a problem

with the ego

because our egos are often giving us

a false idea about who we are

and what we can see.

The ego is always a bit of a

hokey construction. It's always a bit silly.

It's always just trying to make everything ok

and make everything look good.

It's a bit like politicians saying:

'We don't want to be seen to da da da da.'

They don't mind actually doing it

but they don't want to be seen to do it.

The ego is something a bit like that.

So, some of the things the ego might bring

when someone comes

is a story about themselves.

A typical one would be:

'I had a very happy childhood.

My mother and father got on very well.'

It's a story that, with a question,

may prove to not be the whole story.

And it's the ego,

it's job has been to censor

some of these darker aspects of people's lives.

There's no idea of propping up the ego.

It's just: stop the ego being so silly,

stop it being such a politician

and be a bit more realistic about the fact that

you might want to do bad things,

you might fail to live up to your ideals,

it might be very difficult to be human,

but try with that

and stop trying to be a robot.