Freud may be seen as offering another theory for the emergence of the self.

He offers two distinct but interrelated theories:

1)Structural:

  1. What we take as a single entity—the Self—is in fact a multiplicity of parts in transformable relationship to one another: the ego, the id and the superego.
  2. The ego: conscious, what you take to be your self, rational.
  3. The id: basic life force, impulse, unconscious, includes drives such as hunger, thirst and sex.
  4. The superego: rules, laws, and norms of society, internalized, makes self-criticism possible; but may also create feelings of shame and guilt.
  5. Who you become—what you and others take as you personality—is a function of how these three components are related to each other. If the individual went through a normal process of psychological development, then there is balance and harmony between these parts; if not, then we get psychological pathologies—which vary from garden variety neurosis (e.g. you want to eat a lot of junk food when you get sad) to extreme cases of loss of sense of reality (psychosis, where you see and hear things that do not exist).

2)Dynamic:

  1. How the ego emerges depends on the developmental stages through which every human being—from infancy to maturity—must pass.
  2. These psychosexual stages are:
  3. Oral
  4. Anal
  5. Oedipal
  6. Genital
  7. Each stage makes new types of relationship to oneself and others possible; and each generate some conflict. If these conflicts are resolved satisfactorily, then the infant may reach adulthood with a set of healhy responses to the world. If the conflicts are simply repressed, then in later life the adult regresses to childlike responses under conditions of stress and anxiety. Think about the difference between feeling sad in response to the loss of a loved one (a rational emotion to have in that situation) vs. The impossibility to start a new relationship with other people or never wanting to get out of bed again in response to separation from your boy/girl-friend (depression and hence unhealthy emotional reaction).
  8. Freud’s point is that the repressed content (wish, desire, etc.) always returns and manifests itself through symptoms: vomiting, ticks, fits of anger, etc. In that case we regress to our chilhood responses and hence are unable to live happy lives as adults in society.

3)A key distinction is that between instinct and drive.

  1. Instinct: animals have certain behaviours hard-wired into their genetic make-up. A bee makes the honeycomb in hexagones, a dog mates with another dog in heat—and they do not have to learn how, when, or why. Their responses to the world are not acquired through culture and education. Their instincts for food and water and sex are preformed and fixed in terms of their purposes.
  2. But for humans the instincts may be detached from their purposes and reattached to new objects. The baby sucks its thumb as if it were the mothers breast—but no nutritious food enters the body through the thumb-sucking activity. Yet the pieasure is there. Similarly, humans ay form heterosexual or homosexual or fetishistic love affairs; or they may enjoy feeling or inflictin pain on others (sadism, masochism).
  3. For these reasons, Freud uses the term “drive” instead of instict to characterize human psychic impulses for food, thirst and sex.