In this video I review the fundamental ideas of psychoanalysis and the Freudian unconscious, then I describe Freud’s personality structure of the id, ego, and superego. The id is the animal drives of personality, powered by libido and operating on the pleasure principle. The ego seeks to maintain relationships and integrate into society by operating on the reality principle. The superego represents the ideals of morality and virtue that we can never quite achieve and this failure can cause anxiety. While Freud’s views are often criticized or dismissed today, the underlying ideas of subpersonalities and forces pushing and pulling us in multiple directions remain appealing and relatable. Finally I consider Bruno Bettelheim‘s suggestion that Freud’s work has been misinterpreted due to translation into academic Greek and Latin and has lost the emotional connection of its original German.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel to see future videos! Have questions or topics you’d like to see covered in a future video? Let me know by commenting or sending me an email!

Check out my book, Master Introductory Psychology, an alternative to a traditional textbook: http://amzn.to/2eTqm5s

Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is a Psych Exam Review. In this video we’re going to start looking at the psychoanalytic approach to understanding personality. So we’ll start with the founder of psychoanalysis and this is Sigmund Freud, probably the most famous name in psychology.

Freud lived from 1856 to 1939 and he was a medical doctor who specialized in nerve disorders and he began to think that maybe some of the problems that his patients had were related to psychological factors rather than purely physiological factors. So this led him to come up with a number of theories about how the mind might be operating and it’s important to remember that these were mostly theoretical; they were based on his own personal experience and the experiences of his patients, who mostly came from the upper class in Vienna which is where Freud spent most of his life.

So an important part of psychoanalytic theory is the idea of the unconscious or the Freudian unconscious, to separate it from sort of modern use of the term unconscious. So the Freudian unconscious was the idea that we have this repository of desires, wishes, and fears, and these are things that can cause us anxiety. So we keep them out of mind and keep them hidden away in the unconscious. So the idea was if somebody was experiencing anxiety, this related to their unconscious. That somehow they weren’t managing the unconscious properly and so the goal of psychoanalysis was to uncover what it was that was causing the anxiety in the unconscious and resolve any of these conflicts in order to reduce anxiety.

So the three main approaches that would be used by a psychoanalyst to uncover the contents of the unconscious were dream interpretation, so this is the idea that the unconscious reveals itself in dreams and it does this in sort of a coded manner. So we have this idea I mentioned in a previous video on manifest content and latent content. So the manifest content is what you actually dream about, but the latent content is the hidden message of the dream and what it really means and what in your unconscious was causing you to have that particular dream.

So a psychoanalyst would analyze and interpret the dreams of patients and they would also use free association. And this is probably what most people think of when they think of psychiatry or they think about sort of a psychoanalyst doing work; they imagine somebody laying on a couch and sort of talking about all sorts of things. So the idea of free association was that the patient just talks freely and the patterns of their speech and the way that they move from one topic to another might reveal something about their unconscious. So the psychoanalyst’s job was to sit and listen carefully and take notes and look for these clues to what was hidden away in the patient’s unconscious.

And lastly, we have the idea of a parapraxis. So Freud thought that these revealed contents of the unconscious. So what a parapraxis is, this comes from the Greek for contrary action, it’s the idea that you intend to say one thing and you accidentally say something similar and that the mistake that you’ve made somehow reveals something about your unconscious. So you probably know this better as a “Freudian slip“. So the old joke is a Freudian slip is when you mean to say one thing and you accidentally say your mother.

Ok, so let’s take a look at Freud’s structure of personality. He thought of personality as having three main parts; the id, the ego and the superego. So the idea of each of these parts is the id referred to the animal drives of personality, right? So these are sort of the raw emotional forces that are driving your personality and that these are driven by this psychic energy which he called libido. And the id operates on what Freud called the pleasure principle. So it’s quite simple it’s just that if something is pleasurable then the id is pushing you to want to do it.

Now of course we can’t just do things that are pleasurable whenever we want. We can’t just eat or mate or do anything we want just because it might be pleasurable, right? There’s constraints on our behavior and so this brings us to the next part of our personality which is the ego. And the ego’s job is to constrain the id. So what the ego does is it tries to integrate us into society. It says well, we can’t just do whatever we want, we have to get along with other people. We have to maintain relationships and integrate into a functioning society and that necessarily means restraining the id sometimes. So the idea of the ego is that we want to maintain relationships, we want to get along with other people, and we have to live in a society. If everybody’s just driven by their id then society will fall apart. So we need to integrate ourselves into some form of society and get along with others and so this means that rather than operating on the pleasure principle, what the ego does is it operates on the reality principle. It sort of considers the consequences of things and how you can manage to maintain your relationship with other people rather than just doing what’s pleasurable.

And then lastly we have the idea of the superego and the superego is sort of exerting itself upon the ego. And the superego is like the ideal version of you that you could be, right? It’s all the lessons that you learned from teachers and parents telling you about what a perfect or ideal person is and how that person would behave. So the superego is the ideal and the idea, it’s sort of the ideal of morality and virtue, right? It’s the perfect person that unfortunately you can never really be. You’re certain to fail in terms of reaching this ideal and your failure could provoke anxiety.

So well in sort of modern approaches to psychiatry we don’t really use terms like id, and ego, and superego very much anymore but the underlying concept is that there’s different drives to people’s personalities. There’s sort of these sub-personalities that are pushing and pulling and they conflict with one another. Your id wants one thing and your ego wants another and your superego is this ideal that you’ll never really live up to and that’s going to cause you some anxiety.

So you have to learn how to manage that and that’s something that, you know, people are often very dismissive of Freud now, not scientific and there are a number of problems with Freud’s theories. But a lot of these underlying ideas here that, that you’re not one person with, you know, sort of single-minded goals that you just go out and achieve. But rather you’re you’re this push and pull of multiple forces and you experience that and it does cause anxiety is very relatable and I think most people can understand where this theory comes from and how it feels. We can imagine ourselves in situations where we can say “oh that feels like, you know, that would be my id and this would be my superego”.

So we could imagine something like; here’s a scenario for remembering these different parts. You could say, let’s imagine that you were throwing a surprise birthday party for one of your closest friends. And so your other friends have all gathered at somebody’s house and you’re preparing for this party. Now let’s say you’ve been really busy that day and, you know, you’ve been running around trying to get things ready for this party and you haven’t had a chance to eat anything and your stomach is growling. You’re really hungry and you’re setting things up and you realize; there you are alone in the kitchen with this amazing chocolate cake just sitting in front of you.

And in this situation you can imagine your id is saying you know “eat it”, you know, pleasure principle “that’s going to taste amazing, there’s nobody here, just, you know, grab some of that cake and eat it right now while you can”. But of course, hopefully you don’t actually do this because you have your ego stepping in and saying “you know what, that’s going to ruin your friendships. That’s a really bad idea. Yeah, sure it will be pleasurable and, you know, you’re hungry, it’s chocolate cake, you know, that seems perfect. The more important thing is that you maintain your relationship. You don’t want to get, you’ll be shunned by your friends if you do this. They come in and there’s just, you know, a piece of cake the size of your hand missing. They’re gonna know that was you. You’re going to lose your friendship. You’re going to be an outcast from this group and it’s not worth it, right? Think about the reality of the situation.”

And then thirdly you can imagine your superego is sort of like, you know, thinking about all the problems in the world and the fact that there are people who are starving and should you really be having this frivolous birthday party to celebrate? None of you really need this cake anyway. Maybe you should donate to people who are truly starving and you should be, you know, rather than celebrating somebody’s birthday you should be out helping others or doing some sort of ideal and virtuous behaviors, right? So that’s the way you can think about these three forces in, you know, a sort of silly example but you can probably find other examples in your life and that’s a good way to review these concepts.

Ok, and this brings me to a final point which is about Freud’s terminology. So as I said, people don’t really use the terms id, ego, superego anymore and it sort of feels like you’re learning a new language when you have to talk about psychoanalysis. And many students complains “why do we have to learn all these new terms?” Why do I have to keep track of which one is the id and the ego, I mean nobody even talks about this anymore?”. It’s like it’s stupid, it’s a waste of time, and this brings us to the point that Freud didn’t intend this. He wasn’t trying to create this whole separate vocabulary for describing life, right?

And so this is based on some writings of Bruno Bettelheim and Bettelheim wrote that Freud’s legacy has been misinterpreted in many ways because of this separate vocabulary. Because it separates the emotional connections that people would have had reading the original writings of Freud and this is because Freud wrote in German. He didn’t write with these terms the ego, superego, id, these come from Greek and Latin and they’re sort of an intellectual language that’s used to talk about psychoanalysis. But they’re not how Freud actually described them himself. So when Freud was writing in German he didn’t write about the “ego”, he wrote about the “ich”, right? And this is just German for “I”. And it’s sort of the sense that your ego is the part of you that sort of feels most like you, right? And then you have your superego which again he didn’t use that term “superego” he wrote about the “uber Ich”. And this was simply the “over I”, right? And it’s sort of that virtuous ideal that’s always above you, right? That you can never reach, right? And you know if you read that in German as “uber Ich” just it makes more sense. And lastly the id again he didn’t use the term “id” he used “Es” and this is a neuter pronoun for it, right? And it’s often used to refer to children and so the idea is it’s sort of this childlike simple “it”, right? This thing that’s pushing your behavior it’s these animal drives, right? They don’t really feel like you or I, right?

And so I think it’s important to think about the emotional connections that people who are reading Freud’s writings originally in German would have felt with this terminology. And I know now it feels like a separate language but it really shouldn’t be. It’s supposed to be a simple way of thinking about how the mind works and it supposed to be relatable to everyday life experience. And I think we’ll see more of that when I talk about some of other theories in the future. So in the next video we’ll take a look at Freud’s psychosexual stages of development. I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!