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The id, ego and superego are the three different, functionally interlocking main components of the human soul, as investigated and defined by Sigmund Freud. They represent the structural model of psychoanalysis. Freud himself used the German terms das Es, Ich, and Über-Ich. The Latin terms id, ego and superego were chosen by his original translators and have remained in use. The terms soul and psyche here are synonymous in the sense of the human organism as a whole, focussing on the mental aspect without any option of concrete separability from matter and therefore in strict distinction to the religious concept of "soul".
The structural model of the soul was introduced in Freuds essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). It describes the innate needs of the id located in the unconscious as a primary process, which the conscious mind - the secondary process - evaluates with participation of its socialisation and strives to satisfy via appropriate objects of external reality. This model - further refined and formalised in subsequent essays as The Ego and the Id - represents a response to the ambiguous/contradictory use of the terms conscious and unconscious in the topological model, the first one.[1][2]
According to Freud as well as ego psychology the id is a set of uncoordinated instinctual needs; the superego plays the judgemental role via internalized experiences; and the ego is the perceiving, logically organizing agent that mediates between the id's innate desires, the demands of external reality and those of the critical superego;[3] Freud compared the ego - in its relation to the id - to a man on horseback: the rider must restrain and direct the superior energy of his animal and at times allow for a satisfaction of its urges if he wants to keep it alive and the species healthy. The ego is thus "in the habit of transforming the id's will into action, as if it were its own."[4]
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