14 BRAIN MECHANISMS AND LEARNINC; 



the throe reahns, regions or provinces into which we divide the mental 

 apparatus of the individual, and it is their mutual relations with which we 

 shall be concerned. 



'The id is the obscure, inaccessible part of our personality and can only 

 be described as being all that the ego is not. We can come nearer to the id 

 with images, and call it a chaos, a cauldron of seething excitement. We 

 suppose that it is somewhere in direct contact with somatic processes and 

 takes over from them instinctual needs. These instincts till it with energy, 

 but it has no organization and no unified will, only an impulsion to obtain 

 satisfaction for the instinctual needs in accordance with the pleasure 

 principle. Contradictory impulses exist side by side in it, without neutral- 

 izing each other or drawing apart; at most they combine in comprtMnise 

 formations under the overpowering pressure towards discharging their 

 energy. In the id, there is nothing corresponding to the idea of time. 

 Conative impulses which have never got beyond the id, and even impres- 

 sions which have been pushed down into it by repression, are virtually 

 immortal and are preserved for whole decades, as though they had only 

 recently occurred. They can only be recognized as belonging to the past, 

 deprived of their significance, and robbed of their charge of energy, after 

 they have been made conscious by the work of analysis, and no small part 

 of the therapeutic effect of analytic treatment rests upon this fact. Natur- 

 ally the id knows no values, no good and evil, no morality. There is 

 nothing in the id which can be compared to negation. Instinctual cathexes 

 seeking discharge — that, in our view, is all that the id contains. 



'The (\'o is directed onto the external world; it mediates perceptions of 

 it and in it are generated, while it is functioning, the phenomena of 

 consciousness. The ego has taken over the task of representing the external 

 world for the id. In the fulfilment of this function, it has to observe the 

 external world and preserve a true picture of it in the memory traces left 

 by its perception. The ego also controls the path cif access to motility, but 

 it interpolates between desire and action the procrastinating factor of 

 thought, during which it makes use of the residues of experience stored up 

 in memory. In this way, it dethrones the pleasure principle, which exerts 

 undisputed sway over the processes in the id, and substitutes for it the 

 reality principle, which promises greater security and success. The 

 relation to time, too, is contributed to the ego by the perceptual systems; 

 indeed, it can hardly be doubted that the mode in which this system works 

 is the source of the idea of time. What, however, especially marks the ego 

 out in contradistinction to the id is a tendency to synthesize its contents, to 

 bring together and unify its mental pr(^cesses, which is entirely absent from 



