Cocaine magnate and cigar fetishist Sigmund Freud is certainly the world’s most famous psychologist. He’s perhaps best well known for putting forth the argument that everything in your dreams is some approximation of human genitalia, and how you either want to have sex with your mother or want a penis. Nobody really takes anything he says seriously, and his reputation is a huge hit to the credibility of the psychology industry…. Oh wait, the industry’s reputation is fine (in spite of my protestations). And the credibility he’s given is a mixed, albeit interesting batch. If you’ll excuse the triteness of the sentiment, perhaps you can learn a lot about a man by his opinion on Freud.
I took a psych course in undergrad, like pretty much everyone. We were given a primer on Freud that was brief to the point of uselessness–pretty much how the whole class worked, really…. The obvious objections popped out at me. I lamented to the professor something to the effect of “but that’s terrible science!” My professor’s response, which I did not, could not appreciate at the time was “I never said he was a scientist.” Freud and his contemporaries would absolutely not qualify as scientists by today’s standards, and even by the standards of their own day, it’d be debatable. It was far closer to philosophizing than medicine. To be fair though, neuroscience in Freud’s day was just as insane. They had people who dismissed phrenology as quackery but didn’t think twice about jabbing an icepick into an eye socket in order to inflict brain trauma. Today, when we put Freud against our modern standards, a lot of his ideas fall short, laughably short at times, and often rightfully so. But what if we’re throwing out the proverbial baby with the bathwater? What Freud did was develop and/or popularize any number of psychological terms and concepts. Even if his theories connecting these terms don’t hold up to scrutiny, it’s still possible that the terminology itself remains useful, and it’s possible that some of the theories he hashed out are still worth investigating.
Some of Freud’s famous terminology is that of the structural model of the psyche, what we call the Id, the ego, and the super-ego. These words sound pretty strange to the uninitiated, unless you took Latin in high school, which you probably didn’t because it’s not terribly common anymore. Interestingly, Freud himself did not use these terms! A translator named James Strachey came up with them. Freud wrote these terms in his native German. Directly translating, these terms are the it, the I, and the above-I (or you could say beyond-I). Id, ego, and super-ego are Latin translations of those. So why the use Latin when nobody on Earth speaks the language? Excellent question. I don’t know Strachey’s rationale, but if I had to hazard a guess, it’s part of the sickness in academia to make unnecessarily complicated jargon in order to look like you know what you’re talking about, because simple communication and expanding upon human knowledge would be too provincial. So thanks to a translator’s pomposity, two generations or so of the public has been shut off from discussing the ideas of a rather influential man.
The Id, ego, and super-ego are actually rather handy terms to have. They make a lot of sense; even if they aren’t rooted in hard neuroscience, they are wonderfully practical tools to facilitate the discussion of human psychology. So what are they? As much as I love Latin, and would love if they went back to teaching a bit of it in schools, it’s not necessary here. So I’ll use English. Here’s a really quick summary:
The it is your basic instincts, your animal nature. You’re born with it. It wants you to avoid pain and pursue pleasure. The I is the you that deals with reality. It has to deal with the it and the above-I. The above-I is the basically your sense of morality. It’s the internalization of the rules of your culture and environment (your parents and your religion play a huge role in this), that is, these things are above or beyond yourself. The above-I is something you are not born with, but something that must be imparted to you as you grow. The I has to deal with juggling these two conflicting components of your psyche and work them into reality. How you deal with this, or how you struggle with this, your wants and desires against your duty and expectations in the world, can be analyzed in psychoanalysis. Or if that’s not your cup of tea, you can use it in other subjects. If you’re analyzing something that involves human psychology, try thinking about it through this dynamic. See if it helps you organize your thoughts better. Personally, I’ve found it delightfully handy.
For more, Wikipedia is a great a place as any to start.