Id, Shmid; Ego, Shmego

Id shmid, ego shmego: that has long summarized my Jewish-inflected disdain for most of psychoanalysis. But as I’ve gotten older (OK, old) and have become perhaps a bit less obsessed with empirical validation of all things and the need for “p” to be <.05, I’ve come to appreciate how Herr Doctor Professor Freud was not just a crackpot but a brilliant one, especially when it comes to the real-world implications of what he called the unconscious. Particularly the Id – more literally translated as the “it” – and its interaction with the Ego, our conscious, responsible, reality-suffused and public selves.

One of Freud’s most resonant observations, in his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, was “Es war, soll Ich warden” - Where id was, there ego shall be. This suggests that the good doctor never made it to Daytona Beach during Spring Break, or to the White House during the presidency of Donald Trump. Seriously, each of us is presumably born with our id – an uncontrolled mix of desires, fears, yearnings, needs, and so forth – but eventually, as we recognize that we are not the center of the world and that we cannot satisfy all (or even many) of the id’s demands, a healthy ego develops.

“You must not expect me to tell you much that is new about the id,” wrote Freud, “except its name. It is the obscure inaccessible part of our personality; the little we know about it we have learnt from the study of dream-work and the formation of neurotic symptoms… and can only be described as being all that the ego is not. We can come nearer to the id with images, and call it a chaos, a cauldron of seething excitement.” Does this sound familiar? Evoking a situation that suggests our current political circumstance? Where id was, and in at least one case still is, Twitter reveals.

In more modern usage, analysts think in terms of “primary process energy,” which, as Freud emphasized, is fundamentally immune to facts and logic. “The laws of logic,” he wrote, “above all, the law of contradiction – do not hold for processes in the id. Contradictory impulses exist side by side without neutralizing each other or drawing apart… and we are astonished to find in it an exception to the philosophers’ assertion that space and time are necessary forms to our mental acts.” And so, we have a president who proclaims himself in favor of modest gun controls, then not; that a trade war with China will not hurt the US economy, then tries to plan for its ill effects; that North Korea is a huge threat, then maintains that the threat is gone; embraces white nationalism, then denies he has done so; appoints “the best people,” then vilifies them, and on, and on, daily flouting the “law of contradiction.”

Another contradiction, cogently expressed by Freud in his most insightful book, Civilization and its Discontents, is between the id and civilization itself; namely, that civilized life is built upon the suppression of the instincts, notably the id. This, in turn, highlights the importance – indeed, the necessity – of societal norms of decency, civility, and, when it comes to democracy, a variety of expectations, many of them unstated but nonetheless key to healthy functioning at the level not merely of individuals but also of large-scale societies, including nation-states – not least our own. When they are disregarded in favor of an uninhibited id, the outlook isn’t good, especially if the individual doing the disregarding is prominent, influential, and politically powerful.

In more general Freudian terms, the danger of an id unconstrained by a healthy ego (not to mention any hint of a super-ego), is its unresponsiveness to what most people acknowledge – and cherish – to be conscious, rational control. Here is Freud once again, this time from The Problem of Anxiety: “The id cannot be afraid, as the ego can; it is not an organization, and cannot estimate situations of danger.” Which, in turn, is worrisomely liable to generate “situations of danger” (economic, social, geopolitical, existential) for the rest of us.

As Mr. Trump is increasingly surrounded by flunkies and yes-men (indeed, mostly men, and white men at that), his disconnection from reality appears to be increasing, furthered by the absence of people able and willing to provide reality-testing – which might not avail in any case given his insistence that any contrary views or data are a result of “fake news” or a manifestation of unacceptable personal “disloyalty.” For a disconcerting conclusion, here is Freud one last time (again, from the Outline): ““The core of our being, then, is formed by the obscure id, which has no direct relations with the external world and is accessible even to our own knowledge only through the medium of another agency of the mind. … The id, which is cut off from the external world, has its own world of perception…”

Alas, in today’s America, one person’s “world of perception” has a troublesome likelihood of impinging on the real world of everyone else.