THE STATESMAN: Freud’s threefold personality division and its literary manifestations

Description

But what exactly are these three? Freud, in his “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920) and “The Ego and the Id” (1923), postulated the individual psyche comprised these three parts, all developing at different stages in life and non-corporeal. Saul McLeod of the University of Manchester says that, at the simplest, they can be understood as the primitive and instinctual part of the mind that contains sexual and aggressive drives and hidden memories (Id), the moral conscience (Superego), and the part that mediates between desires of these two (Ego). Each has its unique features and they mix to form a whole, each part making its contribution to an individual’s behaviour.