The Ego according to Sigmund Freud - Essay Example

 Sigmund Freud Sigmund Freud was a famous psychiatrist who was well known for his Theories Of Unconscious Mind and the mechanism of repression. His work has been highly influential in the field of psychology. He constructed a psychic apparatus which consisted of three parts known as the id, ego and super-ego. The ego acts as an intermediary between the id, super-ego and the external world. It aims to derive a middle way between the morals and reality while ensuring that the id and super-ego are satisfied. It only allows the id to express some its desires provided their consequences are minimal. The ego initiates defensive mechanisms if there are conflicts between behavior and the morals and taboos of society. Freud defined the ego to contain consciousness with functions like decision, forbearance, planning and memory. The ego allows the super-ego and id to express their desires in realistic ways. The ego inside a person has to ensure that the id, super-ego and external world are all content. The defense mechanism initiated by the ego can be denial, rationalization, fantasy, projection and repression. The ego has ideas about an individual’s identity. Sigmund Freud said that “The ego is not master in its own house”. Life upsets the set of normality which the ego strives to maintain. A balance cannot be perceived forever because of factors like age, disease and death. The ego would than respond by initiating defensive mechanisms in order to ensure mental stability. This leads to restriction to enjoying a free and happy life (Esterson, 1993). One of the legal implications of Freud’s assertion that the ego is not the master in its own house has been that of the accuracy of repressed memory tests which are conducted in cases of sexual abuse or child sexual abuse. Some of the evidence has been used to support successful prosecution. In other cases they have been termed as false memories which have not been accepted by courts. Most courts today reject the use of “false memory” defense used by child molesters to minimize their abusive and criminal behavior. There have been multiple lawsuits against psychiatrists and psychologists inside the United States for inducing sexual abuse and incest abuse in memories of patients. Some individuals who were subjected to these memories found out them to be false. Freud however explained that the ego has a reservoir for repressing memories of traumatic events. Another implication of the above quote is that it would reduce the crime of rape to fantasies and seduction. It would create a myth that women secretly wish to get raped. There are other potential legal implications also for instance if a child is caught stealing than the response according to Freud would be to find the reasons why the child committed the crime in the first place. Criminals have disturbances or abnormalities due to trauma in childhood which gives rise to antisocial tendencies as they grow older. Freud’s statement would seem to imply that if the conscious is weak it cannot control the urge to commit crime (Esterson, 1993). Examining early infantile development, Freud stated initially that aggression is a reaction to frustration in the satisfaction of the ‘‘pleasure principle’’. He described the ‘‘pleasure principle’’ as the dominant motivational force within the infant psyche that seeks primarily to obtain pleasurable experiences and will do so without consideration or regard for the other. Later, Freud established aggression as a separate drive or instinct that is self sustaining and independent from the sexual/life instinct or libido, although the two instincts may, at times, merge. Freud also described this instinct as the so-called ‘‘death instinct’’. He wrote that the death instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of being which the living entity has been obliged to abandon. The death instinct thus seeks to return the human psyche to a state of non-being from which it initially emerged. He extended this notion on ego to suggest that life consists of a continuous descent into death, intimating that psychic life is governed by the need to bring about the state of death. Freud’s death instinct is thus expressed as innate and destructive aggression. According to Freud, the death instinct may be directed inwards to harm the self (as in suicide), or may be directed outwards (a process termed ‘‘projection’’) and onto others, thus viewing others as a target of aggression. The death instinct as a destructive psychic force may seek to destroy both the self (‘‘restore an earlier state of being’’ as in suicide) as well as the other (Esterson, 1993). Aggression not only is a deflection of self destructiveness to the outside, as described by Freud, important though it is, but also from the very beginning the wish to annihilate is directed both at the perceiving self and the object perceived, hardly distinguishable from one another. Aggression, viewed as a continuous, destructive pressure within, demands constant release. It is the need for this urgent discharge, according to Freud that results in the spontaneous emergence of aggression. Freud, in proposing this drive-theory, emphasized the endogenous, spontaneous, propulsive nature of aggression, not derived from deprivation or frustration of pleasure-seeking but a constant and driving power comparable only to the sexual instinct. If there is no reason or provocation for the aggression (such as war) then reasons will be manufactured so as to relieve the inner pressure. If aggression is viewed as innate and in need of release, it is understandable that some serial killers describe a compulsion to kill that is experienced as a force within them that urges them to kill. The acting-out means the liberation from unbearable inner tension. Once the killing is carried out, the tension is released and there is a sense of satisfaction for a while. Freud’s quote about the ego places aggression at the centre of human psychic organization, and attempts to explain the historical significance and universality of human destructiveness. Dangerous criminals such as serial killers are understood as losing control of their unmanageable destructive aggression. Most serial killers, however, do know right from wrong; they are not prey to irresistible urges but choose not to resist these impulses in their quest for murder and sexual pleasure (Esterson, 1993). The classical psychoanalytical perspective of aggression does not account for the significant element of premeditation and enjoyment in inflicting pain on victims. This point to the fact that some serial killers, although they may attempt to plead insanity as a defense, are mainly not tried as such, and few are convicted. On the contrary, some serial killers display above-average intelligence, are charming but manipulative, and capable of concealing their pathology. Some serial killers lead ostensibly normal lives as students, friends, married people with children, gainfully employed and active community members. The vast majorities are not insane; they knew what they were doing at the time of the crime. The police evidence points to their intentions even if the actual crime was apparently sloppy, disorganized and opportunistic. The decision may have been made quickly, thus presenting the overt appearance of an opportunistic and disorganized crime scene but, in all cases, it was planned. Evil, as destructive aggression, is premeditated. In terms of Freudian ego theory, to adopt the view that childhood (oedipal) abuse alone is the only or primary source for understanding serial murder is limited. Many individuals are abused as children and do not become serial killers. The difference may be that there are also inadequate pre-oedipal experiences which contribute to serious psychopathology. In this regard, it is likely that both pre-oedipal and oedipal disturbances in self-development give rise to serious psychopathology such as revealed by sexually motivated serial killers. If aggression is viewed as a reaction to a perceived threat (of non-being), aggression is assumed to be justified (Esterson, 1993). The ego is rational and externally directed, in contrast to the id, which is instinctual, primitive, chaotic and unconscious. Although derived from the id, the ego doesn’t share its instinctive pursuit of pleasure. Freud regards the ego rather as a frontage or façade for the id. The ego tends towards synthesis, mediating between the claims of the id and the objections of the external world. In order to preserve its adaptability to the external world, the ego must tame the demands of the id, repressing desires that can’t be satisfied, either temporarily or permanently. The third element in Freud’s model of the mind is the super-ego, an agency that watches over the psyche, functioning as a conscience that alerts the ego when it falls short of the ideal. The ego must then deal with conflict between the competing demands of the id, the super-ego and the external world. It is here that the defense mechanisms (repression, projection, denial and sublimation) come into play, allowing the ego to cope Freud also posited the existence of two basic instincts, the destructive instinct (or death drive) and the sexual or love instinct. Freud associates hate with the ego’s primordial struggle to protect itself from the external world. Hate, he maintains, is older than love, representing the desire to return to a state of complete tranquility. While Eros strives for unity and relation, the death drive, through its main representative, the aggressive instinct, aims at destruction and the severance of connections (Eysenck, 1990). Freud draws an analogy between the libidinal development of the individual and the process of civilization. Man’s aggressive instinct, Freud, declares, presents ‘the greatest impediment to civilization. In order for society to fulfill its cultural ideals, the individual must renounce his liberty in favor of the power of the community, sublimating and repressing the instinctive impulses that civilized society dismisses as ‘brute force’. However, renouncing instincts is not an easy matter. Privation breeds hostility towards society, and the conflict between individual freedom and the claims of civilization may, Freud says, be irreconcilable. In order to conform to the demands of communal life, the aggression that the individual seeks to direct against others is turned in against himself, whence it is taken up by the super-ego, giving rise to a ‘sense of guilt’. However, while the individual can avoid the censure of the external world by forgoing the satisfaction of his instincts, the censure of the super-ego is not so easily evaded. The explicit adoption of an ego framework opens up a somewhat different perspective. Applied to the collective mind of society, the dilemma can be reframed as the state-as-ego’s inability to live up to the ideal demanded by its super-ego. For Freud, the acquisition of cultural and ethical ideas marked the point at which the child ceased to regard himself as the omnipotent centre of the universe. In a similar way, contemporary society and the ‘policy predicament’ it engenders may mark the end of the state’s capacity to regard it as sovereign. The ego-ideal for the state would be absolute triumph over crime and disorder, which is of course an unrealizable aspiration (Eysenck, 1990). In the absence of omnipotence, the state as ego has two options: it can seek to adapt to the reality principle through the development of new strategies, or it can engage in denial, retreating into expressive, non-adaptive responses. Adaptive responses try to minimize the effects of the state’s limitations by seeking an accommodation between instinctive drives and the demands of the external world. There are adaptation strategies, all of which are underpinned by the awareness that the control of crime is beyond the state – not only beyond its capabilities, but beyond it in a more literal sense, in community agencies, organizations and individuals. These responses seek to lower the public’s expectations, and to encourage them to think of crime as a fact of life, and as something which they have a responsibility to help control (Eysenck, 1990). In Freudian terms, the problem with the normalization of crime is that while it meets the demands of the external environment halfway, it doesn’t offer the id a compensatory package in the form of a suitable enemy towards whom to direct a proportion of its aggression. Adaptive strategies postpone but don’t eradicate the unconscious desire for aggressive and exclusionary punishments. The unease that results from the suppression of the aggressive instinct manifests itself in discontent and hostility towards the state and its representatives. Similarly, although we increasingly rationalize, bureaucratize and managerialise the world of criminal justice in the fiction that we can eliminate risk, we are continuously brought back to the realization that crime is remarkably intractable and apparently oblivious to our controls. This narcissistic wound is a source of no small amount of frustration for the state-as-ego, which retreats from the specter of its limitations and seeks to deny these through the reassertion of the sovereign power to punish. The state’s expressive, punitive gestures against offenders who are constructed as ‘alien others’ may be understood in this way. Rather than recognizing, in line with the narcissism of small differences, that those we reject closely resemble ourselves, we fall back on archetypes of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Research has described this process as the ‘splitting of the ego’, wherein parts of the self that are perceived as ‘bad’ are split off and identified with an outside object or another person. However the guilt of the criminal establishes the innocence of the society; but, like all oppositions, it risks a potential identification between its terms (Farrell, 1996). We unconsciously attribute to others the undesirable aspects of our own personalities. This sort of scapegoating is a particular expression of general problem of shadow projection or denying the shadow. The shadow is an unconscious part of the personality that the conscious ego rejects or ignores. Ego and shadow, although separate, are seen to be inextricably linked together in much the same way that thought and feeling are. The ego, however, is in perpetual conflict with the shadow, in what is the battle for deliverance. The outcome of this battle depends on our ability to comprehend the shadow and to reconcile it with our conscious personality. Freud’s thesis in rests on his contention that the fundamental hostility of human beings towards one another constitutes a constant threat to civilized society. Rather than loving his neighbor and reserving his power to defend himself from harm, man is led by this ubiquitous aggressive drive to seek opportunities to exploit and sadistically attack others. It is no coincidence that the most enduring legacy of psychoanalysis has been in literary and arts criticism, where complexity and idiosyncrasy are accepted and encouraged. Even in the heyday of Freudian psychology, its theories had little impact on criminal justice beyond offender treatment. Even though much of the educated public had embraced psychoanalytic concepts, the legal system itself had shown little inclination to change from its older punishment-oriented approaches centering on deterrence and rehabilitation after punishment. Returning to the problem of reconciling individual happiness with the desire for human fellowship, Freud focuses on the central significance of the sense of guilt. He suggests that the analogy between the development of the individual and the process of civilization may be extended to the evolution of a ‘cultural ego’, the demands of which may have made society itself neurotic. Freud makes a cautious recommendation that the cultural community might benefit from therapy; however, he doesn’t offer much of a strategy for initiating this process, nor, given the absence of a mandate for ‘treatment’, does he seem convinced that even a masterly analysis of communal neuroses would be of any real use. Freud does not accept that we can rid ourselves of the ego simply by recognising it. Nor can we solve the problem by banishing it to our subconscious; such suppression would be akin to using beheading to cure a headache. Rather, the goal is to find a way in which the self can be reconciled. Such an accommodation can be reached; with goodwill and insight, some aspects may be assimilated into the conscious personality. However, in the case of the criminal shadow, several features render it peculiarly resistant to influence. References: Esterson, Allen, "Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud." Chicago: Open Court, 1993. Eysenck, H. J. The Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire, Scott-Townsend Publishers, Washington D. C., (1990) Farrell, John. Freud's Paranoid Quest: Psychoanalysis and Modern Suspicion. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. Read More