The Ego and the Id

Freud sets out his second account of mental structure here, replacing the earlier division into conscious, preconscious and unconscious with three agencies: the id, the ego and the super-ego. He argues that the ego is itself largely unconscious, and that the resistance a patient mounts during treatment operates without the patient knowing it, which is why repression cannot simply be reasoned away. The super-ego receives his closest attention. Freud traces it to the abandoned attachments of the Oedipus complex and links its severity to the unconscious sense of guilt, the need for punishment, and the negative therapeutic reaction in which a patient worsens precisely as the work goes well. For a clinician, the value lies in these mechanisms named and argued rather than asserted. Published in German in 1923 as Das Ich und das Es, the work first appeared in English in 1927. This volume carries James Strachey's Standard Edition translation with an introduction by Peter Gay.