It, Me, & Over-Me

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: 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…