The title of this piece is the literal (and in my opinion correct) translation into English of the the good old pillars of the psychoanalytic universe: Id, Ego, and Superego.

Although the conventional names have been in use from the very first translations of Freud’s work in 1924, they are actually a mistranslation, and their use has caused decades of unnecessary confusion and “discussion” (aka, bitter intellectual squabbling) for analysts, psychotherapists, psychologists, and lay-people alike.

The original German terms are:

  • das Es (Id)

  • das Ich (Ego)

  • das Uber-Ich (Superego)

The mistranslations were chosen because they gave psychoanalytic theory the gravity and authority of Latin, which probably appealed to the translators ego, making the term ego itself a perfect example of the exact problem that the mistranslation has created. (This is also a nice example of real-life irony).

Freud’s Ich is not about the grandiosity or arrogance the word ego usually connotes in casual speech. In fact, grandiosity and arrogance are signs of ego-weakness, or the self’s inability to regulate itself. So, because of the confusion created by the Latin-based translation, having a big ego means you have a small ego.

Translations

It’s important to note that id, ego, and super-ego are actually the correct translations from German into Latin. But English isn’t Latin. On top of this, the Latin word ego had already been assimilated into English at least 200 years before Freud’s first translator decided to use it.

Importantly, although the word’s use in metaphysics was the same as that of Latin, referring to the individual person’s sense of self, the English-language association between ego and self-centred-ness extends back at least as far as 1714, in the word egotism.

1714, “too frequent use of ‘I’,” from ego + -ism. … [the] obtrusive use of first person singular pronoun in writing, hence “talking too much about oneself.”

There are a number of other ego- words which long antedate the 1924 translation:

  • egoist (n.) “one who maintains there is no evidence of the existence of anything but the self” (metaphysics) (1763)

  • egotize (v.) “to talk overmuch of oneself,” 1775.

  • egomania (n.) “obsessive self-centeredness,” 1825 Entered common use in 1890s, where it translated German Ich-Sucht.

  • egotheism (n.) “deification of the self,” 1855.

  • egoist (n.) “Meaning ‘selfish person’” (1879)

The main frustration, then, with how Freud has been translated is that equating “ich” with ego-latin ignores the fact that although ego-english has the same meaning when used technically in the various jargons of philosophy and psychology, it already had (and still has) numerous negative associations resulting from the common and natural use by the average (ie. non-academic) speaker.

Ignoring these pre-existing meanings creates a confusing conceptual overlap which makes it more difficult for non-psychoanalysts to understand the single most important (and helpful!) concept in all of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

Clarity

In other words, the problem with the fancy Latin translations is that they have taken something simple, elegant, and obvious and made it seem highly technical and mystically complex.

If, however, we translate the terms directly into common-use English, we discover that what was once arcane and obscure becomes almost painfully clear: there are three basic components to the cognitive and emotional processes which govern human behaviour, and the great majority of our psychological difficulties are caused by the conflict between them.

The It, The Me, and The Over-Me

The It. The seat of the unconscious and the source of all of our impulses and desires. In modern terms, people often refer to this aspect as the lizard brain, or the inner monkey, but it is actually better understood as our inner ameoba. Basic needs create simple drives to satisfy those needs; needs which revolve around survival and sensory gratification.

Although the needs themselves are simple, satisfying them is not: think about how complex an operation it is to chew and swallow a mouthful of food, let alone hunting a rabbit or identifying edible plants in a forest full of potentially poisonous plants. These operations are far too complex for the It-amoeba to manage successfully, and so we develop a more complex structure which can assess complex situations and decide between alternatives: the Me.

The Me. This is exactly what it sounds like; that part of yourself which refers to itself as Me. This part is responsible for interacting with the world so that our needs are met as efficiently and with as little conflict as possible. The Me’s primary job is to control the simplistic, but powerful impulses that come from the It, and redirect them towards the best possible solution, rather than the quickest or easiest.

As we all know, this is not always easy to do, and we often discover that the how we handled a give situation wasn’t exactly the optimal way of doing it (to put it rather diplomatically). Anxiety, therefore, is the Me’s fear that something you’re about to do either won’t work out as planned, or will lead to bad consequences, up to and including death. Predicting the future in this way requires us to have a set of rules for how things work, and a set of expectations which reflect the desired outcome. Thus…

The Over-Me. The Me knows that trouble is on the horizon because the Over-Me is always there watching, monitoring, correcting, and punishing our behaviour. Many people experience this monitoring, judging, and controlling function as somewhere in the air vaguely above them, like a parent hovering over their shoulder - hence the over in Over-Me. The Over-Me is the seat of our conscience and moral judgement, and uses guilt and shame to coerce good behaviour and punish bad.

This is also the source of what is referred to as moral anxiety, the fear that you are about to do something which will not only be factually wrong, but which will break the rules of your society or cause harm to others, and therefore make you a bad person. Because this is so important to both social harmony and individual survival, the Over-Me is often brutally punishing of even the smallest mistakes and mistteps.

My Over-Me is Very Unhappy with My Me-Me for Letting My It-Me Have Another Slice of Cake

Humourous grammatical oddities aside, it is actually this simple:

  • Impulse = It

  • Action = Me

  • Judgement = Over-Me

These are the three basic functions necessary for both survival and personal fulfilment. Every action begins with an impulse, is fulfilled by intentional action in the world, and is then judged on its effectiveness.

When these three functions act in harmony, you become anxiety-free; a feeling which is known by any number of names: integration, balance, tranquility, enlightenment, satori, self-actualisation, and so on.

But, of course, the It, Me, and Over-Me rarely work together, let alone with anything approaching what you might call harmony. Most of the time, the It and the Over-Me pull in completely opposite directions. This is one of the reasons why sex was so central to Freud’s theory; there is no other impulse which is so powerful, pleasurable, and yet has such destructive potential as un-checked sexual desire. We need it, yet fear it, and many people struggle to ever feel entirely comfortable in and with their own sexuality because of the inner tug-of-war between the desiring It and the judging/punishing Over-Me.

Dominant Functions

For some, the It is the strongest of the three. These people tend to have difficulties with self-regulation; often starting emotional conflicts with others, struggling with self-reflection and long-term thinking, and tend to be impulsive, often getting caught in patterns of substance abuse and addiction more generally. They are often experienced as impulsive, demanding, and inconsiderate.

Others have the opposite problem, a dominant Over-Me. These people are hyper-reflexive over-thinkers, and typically experience a lot of anxiety and carry a lot of shame. Insecurity and low self-esteem often results from the thunderbolts of shame and guilt which the Over-Me hurls at us for even the smallest mistake. This is the source of impostor syndrome, but also all of the anxiety-based issues like social anxiety, obsession/compulsion, paranoia, agoraphobia, orthorexia, anorexia, and so on.

The shame and guilt of course also contribute directly to the hopelessness, dread, and self-loathing of depression. This also explains why most so-called “psychological disorders” are so highly co-morbid. For example, anxious people often have both paranoid thoughts and depressive feelings, are plagued by the intrusive thoughts of “OCD,” and have signs of disordered eating… because these are all different dimensions of the same basic problem: an over-active and punishing Over-Me.

It’s tempting to think that the ideal state, then, would be that of a dominant Me, right? Planning, rationality, self-control are all desirable traits, aren’t they? But in fact, we tend to experience Me-dominant people as stuffy, uptight, lifeless, and boring. There is, after all, such thing as being too reasonable and too levelheaded. Leaning too far in this direction often leads to feelings of apathy, ennui, futility, pessimistic nihilism, and boredom.

Sometimes we need to be impulsive and unconsidered, and sometimes we need to be morally upright and unshakable in our resolve. If you are stuck in the wooly-middle ground of being perfectly reasonable all the time, you effectively become stuck in perpetual stasis; minimal action, minimal challenge, minimal excitement.

Satisfying action, therefore, is any consciously-chosen action which fulfills our needs, while remaining within the boundaries of what’s acceptable within our given moral framework.

PsychoDynamics

This is part of why post-Freudian psychotherapy calls itself psycho-dynamic. It’s not simply that our psychology is a dynamic system of (often contradictory) emotions, thoughts, desires, and inhibitions. Healthy psychological function requires the system to be in constant flux.

Rather than the flag tied to the rope of an eternal tug of war between desire and inhibition, the Me-in-the-middle will ideally function as a negotiator which ensures that both sides get as much of what they want as is possible in the given situation. Confidence is the basic belief that you are able to do this, and insecurity/anxiety is the belief that you can’t.

Therapy, then, is the process of learning how to tame both the It and the Over-Me, without becoming someone who eats only bran-flakes, drinks only tapwater, and reads only washing machine instruction manuals…