Accept Your Id!

Through concepts of the Id, Ego and Superego, Freud concludes that all individuals are caught in a state of constantly desiring more than they can realistically have. Due to the constant pressure from the societal and cultural institutions of the Superego, we are forced to suppress most innate drives of our Id, and this dynamic creates subconscious trauma that manifests itself in unrecognizable and sometimes harmful ways. We manage to reconcile the two opposing forces of the Id and the Superego in our Ego, the socially acceptable form of ourselves, yet we are constantly concealing, consciously and unconsciously, the drives that make up our most basic existence.  So, as long as we accept the idea of these permanent drives and the existence of a repressive society, we live in an unhealthy Freudian paradox. 

            The most harmful component of this complex appears logically to be our personal trauma – the unconscious, repressed desires that find ways to emerge through sublimation or physical symptoms.  These traumas also lead, according to Freud, to aggression and guilt towards the superego repressors.  So, according to the Freudian definitions, it seems like in order to attain the best possible relationship between the Id, Ego, and Superego, we must overcome that trauma by recognizing and identifying it, therefore eliminating the harmful, unconscious manifestations in our psyche or physical self.

            We cannot free our Id entirely; society would dissolve into chaos and violence.  Yet, if we can internally learn to recognize our drives, even to then accept them as virtually impossible, we would be in a clearer and healthier mental state.  It appears that if Freud were to imagine some sort of public enlightenment, it would be the collective recognition of our innate drives, our Id.  If everyone can internally learn to accept their Id, than our overarching societal Superego would finally have the potential to publicly acknowledge the drives as well.  The Superego institutions must still not actually permit acting on the drives, obviously, but it could become closely unified with the Ego, both recognizing the drives of the Id.  The internal drives could potentially even become a subject of public discourse. Essentially, this shift in both the private and public perception of our Id means that the Superego would then only have to exist as a repressor of the actions of the drives, and not, as it does now, of the ideas of them.  This potentially means that while civilizations could still function peacefully and effectively, individual would also be healthier and potentially better members of society.

            So, ideally, both the Ego and Superego should become completely aware and accepting of the Id, yet the desires of the Id should still not be entirely fulfilled. The subconscious would be brought into consciousness, even, arguably, into the public.  While before we could have privacy in our unfulfilled drives, that privacy would break out of our subconscious and become harmful to us.  Now, in recognizing the likeness between all of our innate Ids, we could bring the destructive private out into the public arena and are finally work through it, internally and externally, in an accepting and healthy way.