Category: Article

There is nothing quite so satisfying as finding the perfect metaphor to describe a complex thought or experience. A good metaphor brings with it a kind of settling feeling, as if you’ve finally found a permanent, but unobtrusive space on the shelf for that old vase your grandmother gave you, that you don’t much like, but also don’t have the heart to throw away.

It’s finding the perfect parking spot right by the elevator in a totally packed parking lot. Or putting in the last piece on the edge of a large and complex jigsaw puzzle—you know you’ve a lot more work to do, but you feel real accomplishment at having made a good start.

Familiar and Easy to Understand

In therapy, the main value of metaphor is this feeling itself: it allows you to take abstract, and difficult-to-explain thoughts and emotions and turn them into tangible, familiar objects and processes. You give yourself something to grab onto, and you finally get to feel like you actually understand something about yourself.

For example, self-esteem is a hopelessly ill-defined concept. Almost nobody knows what anybody else means when they use the term, because self-esteem isn’t a thing you can point to. It’s a non-physical idea that refers to a psychological orientation towards the world that allows you to feel confident while making both decisions and compromises, so that you get what you need while retaining your self-respect.

But if I say that self-esteem is the “seat” of a stool with three legs, you can immediately get a sense of what it comprises and how the parts relate and interact. And if we name the three “legs,” social connection, agency and productivity, and philosophical/spiritual/religious engagement, the picture becomes even clearer.

Of course, self-esteem doesn’t literally work like a stool with three legs does. Furthermore, you could argue that the stool should have 4 legs and a backrest, and maybe a bit of padding for you to sit comfortably on.

Which is exactly the idea: as you build the image, you refine your understanding of the system it represents. In other words, creating a metaphor helps clarify the aspects involved and how they relate.

Clarifying and Refining Our Understanding

This clarifying and refining function makes metaphor and analogy incredibly powerful tools in psychotherapy.

One of the hardest parts of managing and healing emotional and psychological suffering is how confusing and overwhelming it all is. Metaphorical thinking doesn’t “cure” our overwhelming emotions, but it does allow you to take break from them for a while. And, more importantly, you start to move towards understanding yourself, rather than running away from the frightening things within you.

Even the smallest understanding of how it all fits together is enough to give you the feeling that you’re starting to get a handle on things. You can understand it all.

And if you can understaind it, you can fix it.

Creating More Confusion?

The two main arguments against metaphorical thinking are:

• It leads to misleading over-simplifications.
• It allows us to invent facts and events that make for a pretty picture, but which don’t actually reflect reality.

Both of these can be an issue in therapy, because, indeed, the emotions we struggle with are often very complex. And secondly, a big psychological challenge for many people is establishing what is actually true, and what is imagination and/or projection. And so, it might seem that thinking and speaking metaphorically will only confuse things more.

Somewhere to Start

But, nobody who wants to learn math would ever start with calculus; the first book all of us read in school was definitely not War & Peace; and no pianist ever had their very first lesson on stage in front of 20,000 people.

In other words, learning a new skill requires you to start simple and move at a pace that works for you.

As with the metaphor of three-legged stool of self-esteem, it’s never going to be a perfect match, and there are lots of ways to change the diea, but working with a simple image helps you identify the core features of the thing you’re trying to understand. It’s somewhere to start.

Secondly, identifying all of the places where a metaphor doesn’t match reality is just as helpful as creating it in the first place. There are many ways in which learning to manage emotions is utterly unlike learning the piano, or being on stage in front of 20,000 people, for that matter.

Teasing these things apart helps you create a more nuanced understanding of your emotions and your experience, and therefore of yourself. Which is the major goal of psychotherapy in the first place.

Of-a-Piece with Yourself

First and foremost, therapy is about learning that you don’t have to be afraid of your emotions. Even though you can’t control them directly, you can influence your emotions, and you can decide whether or not to act on them. So although it sometimes feels like it, you are not locked in a stagecoach being dragged towards the edge of a cliff by a team of wild horses. Which is to say, you are not a mind trapped in a runaway body that you can’t control.

We are not buggy and driver, nor are we horse and rider. We are like the centaur or the sphinx, half animal, half rational; a complex system consisting of two seemingly incompatible aspects which somehow combine well enough for us to think, to feel, and to be active, intentional agents in the world.

But we are also not two separate creatures magically joined at the waist. Our thoughts explain our emotions, and our emotions respond to our thoughts. We can separate them metaphorically, but in reality they are of a piece and inseparable. Metaphors are incredibly helpful, but they’re also not the whole truth.

Engaging with the Process

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what the final product looks like, the important thing is the process of creating it. Therapy is about engaging with your emotions and memories in a way that takes the fear out of the equation so that you can be honest with yourself and the people in your life.

And so, creating metaphors is a way of disarming the emotions, thoughts, and memories that scare us. It is a way of playing with our experience, and rearranging our feelings into patterns that feel right and true, and above all, that make sense. Even if nobody else understands, we do, and that’s the whole point of starting therapy in the first place.

The title of this piece is an alternate translation of Freud’s three most famous concepts:

Id, Ego, and Superego.

Even though the terms seem mystical, and perhaps a little intimidating, the idea itself is quite simple. Freud’s theory is that the human mind isn’t a single unit that does all of our emotional and cognitive processing. Instead, our minds are composed of three separate parts, each with its own motivations and goals.

• Id: Animal impulse
• Ego: Rational decision making
• Super-Ego: Self-judgement, social rules and morals

Mental and emotional disturbance (aka. “mental illness”) occurs when any two of the three parts come into conflict. The bigger the conflict, the bigger the disturbance. Therefore, the “cure” for all mental illness is to find a way to bring a person’s Id, Ego, and Superego into perfect balance.

The Word Problem

The concept itself is remarkably simple, and similar ideas have existed in religious and spiritual teachings for millennia. So why does Freud’s version seem so much more complex, and why has it been so hotly debated over the last century?

Because of a bad translation.

Lost in Translation

The problem begins right at the beginning. The terms Id, Ego, and Superego are not English words, but were borrowed instead from Latin when Freud’s books and papers were first translated in 1924. Because they sound scientific, everyone assumes that Id, Ego, and Superego are the terms that Freud himself must have used in his original writings in German. The problem is, he didn’t.

The original German terms are:

• das Es (Id)
• das Ich (Ego)
• das Über-Ich (Superego)

In particular, ich in German has a very different meaning than ego has in common English. Specifically, the English ego has strong overtones of grandiosity, arrogance, or narcissism that the German ich does not. In fact, the correct English translation of ich is I.

• I went to the store.
• Ich bin zum Laden gegangen.

Latin or English?

It’s important to note that id, ego, and super-ego are real Latin words. Not only that, but they are actually the correct Latin translations of es, ich, and über-ich.

In Latin, the word ego refers simply to an individual person’s sense of self—the same as I in English, and ich in German:

• Ego amo te. (Latin)
• Ich habe dich lieb. (German)
• I love you. (English)

So, this translation was not a mistake. The translator intentionally chose to use Latin words because in science and medicine dead languages like ancient Greek and Latin are considered more sophisticated and intellectual than modern living languages. The goal of using ego instead of I was to give psychoanalytic theory gravity and authority of Latin—which probably appealed to the translator’s weak ego.

The problem is that the trick worked. The translated terms sound deep and impressive, which makes people assume they’re more complicated than they actually are.

Double Meanings

Latin, of course, isn’t English, but it’s also extremely common for English speakers to borrow from other languages. So the real problem here is that the Latin word ego had already been borrowed by English… 200 years before Freud’s work was translated.

In modern English, the word ego almost always refers to selfishness, grandiosity, and narcissism; and this is not a new development. This use of ego extends back at least as far as 1714, as seen in the word egotism:

“too frequent use of ‘I’… the obtrusive use of first person singular pronoun in writing, hence ”talking too much about oneself.”

There are a number of other negative “ego-” words from long before the 1924 translation of Freud:

• egoist (n.) “one who maintains there is no evidence of the existence of anything but the self” (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 (Self-addiction)).
• egotheism (n.) “deification of the self,” (1855).
• egoist (n.) “selfish person” (1879)

So, by ignoring all of these pre-existing ego-words, and the generally negative connotations of ego in English, the translator created a confusing conceptual overlap which still causes confusion and unnecessary arguments more than a hundred years later.

Which is annoying because Freud’s personality theory is maybe the single most important (and helpful!) idea in of all of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

Clarity

To put it another way, the fancy Latin translations make a simple and elegant idea seem highly technical and mystically complex.

However, if we translate es, ich, and über-ich directly into common-sense English, we discover that what was once arcane and obscure becomes almost painfully clear.

The It, The Me, and The Over-Me

The It

The animal. The It is 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. Pleasure, good, more; pain, bad, less. Hungry, horny, sleepy, etc.

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 leaves in a forest full of potentially poisonous plants. These operations are far too complex for the It-amoeba to manage successfully, and so we developed a more complex structure which can assess complex situations and decide between alternatives…

The Me

The negotiator. This is exactly what it sounds like: That part of yourself which refers to itself as Me.¹⁾ 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 simple, 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 never easy to do, and we often discover that the way we handled a past situation wasn’t exactly the optimal way of doing it (to put it rather diplomatically). Anxiety, therefore, is the Me’s fear that you’re about to do something that either won’t work out as planned, or that will lead to bad consequences, up to and including death.

In other words, part of the Me’s job is to predict the future, or at least make a best-guess as to what’s most likely to happen. Predicting the future in this way requires us to have a set of rules for how things work, and a set of expectations which assess the final outcome of an action. Thus…

The Over-Me

The judge. 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 it 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. Shame and guilt are painful, but they’re also the bedrock of social harmony; without them stopping us from doing brazenly selfish things, the human world begins to fall apart. However, emotionally sensitive people often have an over-active Over-Me that punishes even the smallest mistake in the most brutal possible way.

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, 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, zen, satori, jazz, 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 opposing 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 potential for social disruption 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, exactly because of the inner tug-of-war between the desiring It and the judging/punishing Over-Me.

Dominant Functions

It Dominance

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. They tend to be reactive and often get caught in patterns of substance abuse and addiction more generally. They are often come across as impulsive, demanding, and inconsiderate.

Over-Me Dominance

Others have the opposite problem, a dominant Over-Me. These people are 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 them 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.

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.

Me Dominance

It’s tempting to think that the ideal state, then, would be that of a dominant Me, right? Planning, rationality, and 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 spend your whole life 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.

PsychoDynamics

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

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

Ideally, the Me-in-the-middle should function as a negotiator which ensures that both the moral and the animal side get as much of what they want as 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…

¹⁾

German speakers will note that this translation is also incorrect, strictly speaking. I’ve chosen to use me rather than I because of the differences in how the two words are used in English. Me feels closer and more personal, as in “Let’s talk about me.”