Hello, I’m Wang Fang. Last time we discussed Freud’s three levels of mental life: conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. The unconscious teems with dynamic primitive impulses and desires rejected by social morality. As his research and thought developed, Freud saw a limitation in this model: psychic topography described different levels of awareness, but psychic energy also has functions, and those functions may operate both consciously and through unconscious processes.

So in The Ego and the Id, published in 1923, he proposed another model: id, ego, and superego. Each performs a distinct psychological function, and later thinkers treated the division as Freud’s account of personality structure. Today we will discuss these three selves and the psychological outcome of their conflicts: anxiety.。

First, the id. The word is simply Latin for “it.” The renowned Chinese historian of psychology Gao Juefu once rendered it poetically as yidi, drawing on a line from the Book of Songs: “I consider these plans—where will they ever end?” It conveys the id’s chaotic, primitive nature.

The id is the vast reservoir of innate, primitive psychic energy: a boiling cauldron of excited desire in the unconscious. It contains basic biological impulses—the need to eat and excrete, to escape pain, and, more importantly, to obtain sexual pleasure and release aggression: the life and death instincts. Sex and aggression are thus fundamental parts of human nature. They need not be learned; both forces drive behavior.

An aside: this shows Freud’s belief in humanity’s innately darker nature, sharply different from a representative Western traditional view: Adam and Eve were born innocent in Eden and corrupted by the world’s temptations. In psychoanalysis, sex and aggression are natural and seek satisfaction; society instead restrains these biological tendencies.This rebellion against traditional views of human nature—and such heretical ideas as infant sexuality—predictably provoked enormous controversy and condemnation when first proposed.