There were two great minds in this century. One such mind was that of
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). In the year 1923 he created a new view of the mind.
That view encompassed the idea we have split personalities and that each one
have their own realm, their own tastes, their own principles upon which they are
guided. He called these different personalities the id, ego, and super ego.
Each of them are alive and well inside each of our unconscious minds, separate
but yet inside the mind inhabiting one equal plane. Then there was Nietzsche
(1844-1900) who formulated his own theories about the sub-conscious. His ideas
were based on the fact that inside each and every one of us is a raging battle
going on. This battle involves the two most basic parts of society, the
artistic Dionysian and the intelligent Apollonian. Sometimes one being becomes
more dominant than the other or they both share the same plane. Even though
individually created, these theories could be intertwined, even used together.
Thus it is the object of this paper to prove that the Freudian theory about the
unconscious id, and ego are analogous to the idea on the Apollonian and
Dionysian duality's presented by Nietzsche.
"The division of the psychical into what is conscious and what is
unconscious is the fundamental premise of psycho-analysis; and it alone makes it
possible for psycho-analysis to understand the pathological processes in mental
life..." (Freud, The Ego and the Id, 3). To say it another way, psycho-analysis
cannot situate the essence of the psychial in consciousness, but is mandated to
comply consciousness as a quality of the pyschial, which may be present (Freud,
The Ego and the ID, 3). "...that what we call our ego behaves essentially
passively in life, and that, as he expresses it, we are 'lived' by unknown and
uncontrollable forces," (Groddeck, quoted from Gay, 635). Many, if not all of
us have had impressions of the same, even though they may not have overwhelmed
us to the isolation of all others, and we need to feel no hesitation in finding
a place for Groddeck's discovery in the field of science. To take it into
account by naming the entity which begins in the perception system. And then
begins by being the 'ego,' and by following his [Groddeck's] system in
identifying the other half of the mind, into which this extends itself and acts
as if it were unconscious, namely the id. It could then be said that the id
represents the primitive, unconscious basis of the psyche dominated by primary
urges. The psyche of a newly-born child, for instance, is made up of primarily
the id. But then contact with that child and the outside world modifies the id.
This modification then creates the next part of the psyche, the ego, which
begins to differentiate itself from the id and the rest of the psyche (Dilman,
163).
The ego should be seen primarily as Freud puts it is, "...first and
foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the
projection of a surface," (Freud, The Ego and the Id, 20). An analogy that
could help with this definition could be one that states the following. If we
were to identify it with the, "cortical homunculus," (Freud, TEI, 20) of the
anatomists, "which stands on its head in the cortex, sticks up its heels, faces
backwards and, as we know, has its speech area on the left side," (Freud, TEI,
20). Ego, the Latin word for "I," is a person's conception of himself or
herself. The term has taken on various shades of meaning in psychology and
philosophy. In psychoanalysis, the ego is a set of personality functions for
dealing with reality, which maintains a certain unity throughout an individual's
life. Freud, with whom the concept is closely associated, redefined it several
times. In 1923, Freud used the term to refer to the conscious, rational agency
in his famous structural model of the mind; powered by the instinctual drives of
the id, the ego imposed moral restraints derived from the superego. After
Freud's death, several of his associates, including Anna Freud and Erik Erikson,
extended the concept of ego to include such functions as memory, sensory
abilities, and motor skills. It could also be said that there are other
important functions to the ego. It is the reality guide for one, and conscious
perceptions also belong to it. During the height of the phallic phase, about
ages three to six, these libidinous drives focus on the parent of the opposite
sex and lend an erotic cast to the relation between mother and son or between
father and daughter, the so-called Oedipus complex. However, most societies
strongly ...