It, Me, and Over-Me

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

Although the current 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 a century of unnecessary confusion and “discussion” (aka, bitter intellectual squabbling) for analysts, psychotherapists, psychologists, and lay-people alike.

The original German terms are:

So the very first point to make is that 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 cope with the world or 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 correct translations, but from German into Latin, not English. The Freudian terms were mistranslated this way because they gave psychoanalytic theory the pompous gravity and authority of Latin, which probably appealed to the translator’s ego.

But, of course, English isn’t Latin; and worse yet, ego had already been in common use in English from at least 200 years before Freud’s first translator decided to use the word.

The confusion comes from the fact that where the Latin word ego refers simply to an individual person’s sense of self, the English word ego carries the extra connotation of selfishness, grandiosity, and narcissism. This connotation extends back at least as far as 1714, 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 which long antedate the 1924 translation:

I personally find the latinate transaltions irritating because they ignore these pre-existing meanings, and thereby create a confusing conceptual overlap which makes it difficult for non-academics and 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.

The It, The Me, and The Over-Me

The It

The It is 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 flora. 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:

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

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, 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.

Over-Me Dominance

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.

Me Dominance

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…