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Page 1 of 2 Sigmund Freud (1932) from LECTURE XXXI (1932)
The Anatomy of the Mental Personality
Source: New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis (1933) publ. Hogarth Press.
With regard to the two alternatives - that the ego and the super-ego may themselves be unconscious, or that they may merely give rise to unconscious effects - we have for good reasons decided in favour of the former. Certainly, large portions of the ego and super-ego can remain unconscious are, in fact, normally unconscious. That means to say that the individual knows nothing of their contents and that it requires an expenditure of effort to make him conscious of them. It is true, then, that ego and conscious, repressed and unconscious do not coincide. We are forced fundamentally to revise our attitude towards the problem of conscious and unconscious. At first we might be inclined to think very much less of the importance of consciousness as a criterion, since it has proved so untrustworthy. But if we did so, we should be wrong. It is the same with life: it is not worth much, but it is all that we have. Without the light shed by the quality of consciousness we should be lost in the darkness of depth-psychology. Nevertheless we must try to orientate ourselves anew.  What is meant by 'conscious', we need not discuss; it is beyond all doubt. The oldest and best meaning of the word 'unconscious' is the descriptive one; we call 'unconscious' any mental process the existence of which we are obliged to assume-because, for instance, we infer it in some way from its effects but of which we are not directly aware. We have the same relation to that mental process as we have to a mental process in another person except that it belongs to ourselves. If we want to be more accurate, we should modify the statement by saying that we call a process 'unconscious' when we have to assume that it was active at a certain time, although at that time we knew nothing about it. This restriction reminds us that most conscious processes are conscious only for a short period; quite soon they become latent, though they can easily become conscious again. We could also say that they had become unconscious, if we were certain that they were still something mental when they were in the latent condition. So far we should have learnt nothing, and not even have earned the right to introduce the notion of the unconscious into psychology. But now we come across a new fact which we can already observe in the case of errors. We find that, in order to explain a slip of the tongue, for instance, we are obliged to assume that an intention to say some particular thing had formed itself in the mind of the person who made the slip. We can infer it with certainty from the occurrence of the speech-disturbance, but it was not able to obtain expression; it was, that is to say, unconscious. If we subsequently bring the intention to the speaker's notice, he may recognise it as a familiar one, in which case it was only temporarily unconscious, or he may repudiate it as foreign to him, in which case it was permanently unconscious. Such an observation as this justifies us in also regarding what we have called 'latent' as something 'unconscious'. The consideration of these dynamic relations puts us in a position to distinguish two kinds of unconscious: one which is transformed into conscious material easily and under conditions which frequently arise, and another in the case of which frequently arise, and another in the case of which such a transformation is difficult, can only come about with a considerable expenditure of energy, or may never occur at all. In order to avoid any ambiguity as to whether we are referring to the one or the other unconscious, whether we are using the word in the descriptive or dynamic sense, we make use of a legitimate and simple expedient. We call the unconscious which is only latent, and so can easily become 'conscious', the 'pre-conscious', and keep the name 'unconscious' for the other. We have now three terms 'conscious', 'preconscious', and 'unconscious', to serve our purposes in describing mental phenomena. Once again, from a purely descriptive point of view, the 'preconscious' is also unconscious, but we do not give it that name, except when we are speaking loosely, or when we have to defend in general the existence of unconscious processes in mental life. You will, I hope, grant that so far things are not so bad and that the scheme is a convenient one. That is all very well; unfortunately our psychoanalytic work has compelled us to use the word 'unconscious' in yet another, third, sense; and this may very well have given rise to confusion. Psychoanalysis- has impressed us very strongly with the new idea that large and important regions of the mind are normally removed from the knowledge of the ego, so that the processes which occur in them must be recognised-as unconscious in the true dynamic sense of the term. We have consequently also attributed to the word 'unconscious' a topographical or systematic meaning; we have talked of systems of the preconscious and of the unconscious, and of a conflict between the ego and the Ucs system; so that the word 'unconscious' has more and more been made to mean a mental province rather than a quality which mental things have. At this point, the discovery, inconvenient at first sight, that parts of the ego, too, are unconscious in the ego and super-ego, too, are unconscious in the dynamic sense, has a facilitating effect and enables us to remove a complication. We evidently have no right to call that region of the mind which is neither ego not super-ego the Ucs system, since the character of unconsciousness is no t exclusive to it. Very well; we will no longer use the word 'unconscious' in the sense of a system, and to what we have hitherto called by that name we will give a better one, which will not give rise to misunderstanding. Borrowing, at G. Groddeck's suggestion, a term used by Nietzsche, we will call it henceforward the 'id'. This impersonal pronoun seems particularly suited to express the essential character of this province of the mind-the character of being foreign to the ego. Super-ego, ego and id, then, are the three realms, 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 in what follows. But before we go on I must make a short digression. I have no doubt that you are dissatisfied with the fact that the three qualities of the mind in respect to consciousness and the three regions of the mental apparatus do not fall together into three harmonious pairs, and that you feel that the clarity of our conclusions is consequently impaired. My own view is should say to ourselves that we had no right to that we ought not to deplore this fact, but that we had no right to expect any such neat arrangement. ... You must not expect me to tell you much that is new about the id except its name. It is the obscure inaccessible part of our personality; the little we know about it we have learnt from the study of dream-work and the formation of neurotic symptoms, and most of that is of a negative character, 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 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 and gives them mental expression, but we cannot say in what substratum this contact is made. These instincts fill it with energy, but it has no organisation and no unified will, only an impulsion to obtain satisfaction for the instinctual needs, in accordance with the pleasure-principle. The laws of logic - above all, the law of contradiction - do not hold for processes in the id. Contradictory impulses exist side by side without neutralising each other or drawing apart; at most they combine in compromise-formations under the overpowering economic pressure towards discharging their energy. There is nothing in the id which can be compared to negation, and we are astonished to find in it an exception to the philosophers' assertion that space and time are necessary forms of our mental acts. In the id there is nothing corresponding to the idea of time, no recognition of the passage of time, and (a thing which is very remarkable and awaits adequate attention in philosophic thought) no alteration of mental processes by the passage of time. Conative impulses which have never got beyond the id, and even impressions which have been pushed down into the id by repression, are virtually immortal and are preserved for whole decades as though they had only recently occurred. They can only be recognised 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. It is constantly being borne in upon me that we have made far too little use for our theory of the indubitable fact that the repressed remains unaltered -by the passage of time. This seems to offer us the possibility of an approach to some really profound truths. But I myself have made no further progress here.
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