An outline of psycho-analysis / Sigmund Freud ; authorized translation by James Strachey.

  • Sigmund Freud
Date:
1949
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: An outline of psycho-analysis / Sigmund Freud ; authorized translation by James Strachey. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    18/104 page 4
    and of reality, that is to say if it is able to reconcile their demands with one another. The details of the relation between the ego and the super-ego become completely intelligible if they are carried back to the child’s attitude towards his parents. The parents’ influence naturally in¬ cludes not merely the personalities of the parents them¬ selves but also the racial, national and family traditions handed on through them as well as the demands of the immediate social milieu which they represent. In the same way, an individual’s super-ego in the course of his development takes over contributions from later succes¬ sors and substitutes of his parents, such as teachers, admired figures in public life or high social ideals. It will be seen that, in spite of their fundamental difference, the id and the super-ego have one thing in common: they both represent the influences of the past (the id the influence of heredity, the super-ego essentially the influence of what is taken over from other people), whereas the ego is principally determined by the individual’s own experience, that is to say by accidental and current events. This general pattern of a psychical apparatus may be supposed to apply equally to the higher animals which resemble man mentally. A super-ego must be presumed to be present wherever, as in the case of man, there is a long period of dependence in childhood. The assumption of a distinction between ego and id cannot be avoided. Animal psychology has not yet taken in hand the interesting problem which is here presented.
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