Id, Ego, And Superego

324 Words2 Pages
The concept of Id, Ego, and Super-Ego originate from Freud’s theories on the composition of the human psyche. The id embodies the “pleasure concept”, in which a person pursues pleasure and avoids pain in order to satisfy their biological needs. The superego embodies the perfectionist and ideal part of the human psyche. The ego, on the other hand, is the combination of id and superego, and is the part of the human psyche that is visible to the public through a person’s personality and actions. To further explain the id, ego, and superego, we will take Joe, a high school sophomore, as an example. Joe’s id seeks pleasure, and thus leads Joe to drugs. He takes drugs because they satisfy the drives of the id: to seek pleasure and reduce pain. Joe’s superego, meanwhile, is generating all these idealistic images of Joe becoming a successful businessman, married, and a house: the American dream. Yet, when you first meet Joe, you can’t tell he aspires to become a businessman, nor can you tell he seeks pleasure to an extent where drugs are an option, you see only Joe’s ego. This ego could, for example, be more lenient towards his id, and he could be using drugs, but not to an extreme. Or, Joe could be more lenient towards his superego and seek pleasure in sports while maintaining a good academic career at school. As you can see now from Joe’s example, the ego acts according to the Freud’s “reality principle”, it seeks to please the id’s drive while keeping some of the characteristics of the superego’s ideal image. This way, the ego attains pleasure in a balance that reduces the chances that one would take pleasure from a long-term harmful factor. Freud’s theories conclude by stating that leniency towards one end of the id-superego spectrum can result from psychological
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