Chapter 108. Freud's Personality Structure

1. Followers of Freud often compare the human mind to an iceberg divided into three parts: the conscious mind (the tip of the iceberg that shows above the water) represents our current awareness; the preconscious (just below the water's surface) represents information that is available but not currently being used; and the unconscious (the main part of the iceberg deep in the water) is the home of impulses, wishes, and inaccessible memories that affect our thoughts and our behaviors.

2. According to Freud, a person’s personality has three components This illustration shows how the components can be mapped onto the iceberg model. The id, which wants immediate gratification, operates in the unconscious and attempts to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives.

3. The superego, our internalized set of ideals, is the voice of our conscience, judging our actions and producing feelings of pride or guilt. The superego is partly conscious, but much of the superego operates below our conscious awareness.

4. Alongside the id and the superego is the ego, the largely conscious, reality-oriented executive part of the personality. The ego attempts to reconcile the impulses of the id with the demands of the superego and those of the external world.

5. Although the "iceberg" model is the most common way of illustrating the three components in Freud's theory of personality, here is a different "egg-shaped" model used by Freud himself. At the top, the “perceptual-conscious system” (processing the information that reaches our conscious attention) is our interface with the outside world. Through this window, the superego (überich in German) picks up the moral values of parents and society. The aggressive and sexual impulses of the id run counter to the superego's ideals, so the id's drives have been pushed down (repressed) deep in the unconscious (unbewusst in German). The ego (ich in German, the "self we know") has taken on the role of mediator between the id and the outside world, in order to meet the id's desires in a realistic way.

6. A very different way of illustrating the three components of personality is to imagine that we have three different people living inside our mind. The ego is technically in charge of behavior. But the ego is caught in the middle of a ferocious struggle between the basic drives of the id (often drawn as a "devil" figure) and the moral ideals of the superego (often drawn as an "angel" figure). No wonder the poor ego needs to create defense mechanisms to protect itself from this conflict!

You've been wandering for hours lost in the woods, without food. You come upon a campsite. The campers aren’t anywhere around the campsite, but they've left a pile of sandwiches in a container on the picnic table.