I
ID A term that designates one of the three conflicting internal agencies of the mind outlined by Freud, the others being ego and superego. This tripartite division is consolidated quite late in Freud's work (The Ego and the Id, 1923), and can be seen as reworking his first ‘topography’ of the mind, the binary divide conscious/unconscious.
Freud originally used the term unconscious to distinguish a part of the mind distinct from any conscious control. Seen by many as the most significant aspect of psychoanalysis, over many years Freud went on to develop a whole theory around the unconscious: how it was created out of primary repression, how its contents represented the drives and how it was enslaved to the pleasure principle.
The term ...
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