The Ego and the Id

„‘Being conscious’ is in the first place a purely descriptive term, resting on perception of the most immediate and certain character.”

„it is still true that all that is repressed is Ucs., but not all that is Ucs. is repressed.”

„We can come to know even the Ucs. only by making it conscious.”

„Thinking in pictures is, therefore, only a very incomplete form of becoming conscious. In some way, too, it stands nearer to unconscious processes than does thinking in words, and it is unquestionably older than the latter both ontogenetically and phylogenetically.”

„Sensations of a pleasurable nature have not anything inherently impelling about them, whereas unpleasurable ones have it in the highest degree.”

„The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface.”

„the higher any mental function ranks in our scale of values the more easily it will find access to consciousness assured to it.”

„The fact remains, however, as we have stated it: the more a man controls his aggressiveness, the more intense becomes his ideal’s inclination to aggressiveness against his ego.”

„Psychoanalysis is an instrument to enable the ego to achieve a progressive conquest of the id.”

„death is an abstract concept with a negative content for which no unconscious correlative can be found.”

„The fear of death in melancholia only admits of one explanation: that the ego gives itself up because it feels itself hated and persecuted by the superego, instead of loved. To the ego, therefore, living means the same as being loved—being loved by the superego, which here again appears as the representative of the id. The superego fulfils the same function of protecting and saving that was fulfilled in earlier days by the father and later by Providence or Destiny. But, when the ego finds itself in an excessive real danger which it believes itself unable to overcome by its own strength, it is bound to draw the same conclusion. It sees itself deserted by all protecting forces and lets itself die. Here, moreover, is once again the same situation as that which underlay the first great anxiety-state of birth and the infantile anxiety of longing—the anxiety due to separation from the protecting mother.”

„These considerations make it possible to regard the fear of death, like the fear of conscience, as a development of the fear of castration. The great significance which the sense of guilt has in the neuroses makes it conceivable that common neurotic anxiety is reinforced in severe cases by the generating of anxiety between the ego and the superego (fear of castration, of conscience, of death).”

„The id, to which we finally come back, has no means of showing the ego either love or hate. It cannot say what it wants; it has achieved no unified will. Eros and the death instinct struggle within it; we have seen with what weapons the one group of instincts defends itself against the other. It would be possible to picture the id as under the domination of the mute but powerful death instincts, which desire to be at peace and (prompted by the pleasure principle) to put Eros, the mischief-maker, to rest; but perhaps that might be to undervalue the part played by Eros.”