“The Ego and the Id”: How and why Freud transformed his model of the mind*

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that, despite its title, “The Ego and the Id” can be seen as the book of the superego, and although it is a metapsychological work, Freud’s introduction of the new conceptual tools provided by the structural model was a response to the clinical problems he faced. The implications of Freud’s introduction of the superego for the analytic relationship are discussed, with an attempt to deepen our understanding of what he had in mind by reading “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” alongside “The Ego and the Id”. Finally, the paper draws on Bion to consider the implications of this remodelling of the analytic scene for listening and interpretation.

KEYWORDS:

• Metapsychology
• topographical model
• structural model

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 “It is still true that all that is repressed is Ucs., but not all that is Ucs. is repressed” (Freud 1923a, 18).

2 “Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” would be a more correct translation of the German title. Interestingly, while Freud used “Masse” to render both McDougall’s “group” and Le Bon’s “foule”, which would be more naturally translated into English as “crowd”, Strachey uses “group” even when “crowd” or “mass” would seem to be called for, “for the sake of uniformity”, as he tells us in a footnote (Freud, 1921, 69).

3 This paper was given as a talk at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society on 20 September 1977.

4 In “Notes on Memory and Desire” (1967b, 208) Bion quoted Freud’s famous 1916 letter to Lou Andreas Salome in support of this view of his: “I know that I have artificially blinded myself at my work in order to concentrate all the light on the one dark passage” (25 May 1916).