Chapter – 1c (continued)

Just imagine an infant screaming itself blue for milk. It doesn’t know what it wants in any adult sense; it just knows that it wants it and it wants it now. The infant in the Fruedian view is pure, or nearly pure id. And id is nothing if not the psychic representative of biology. This is what Frued called as the Primary process.

As the child gets older, the neurons or the brain develops and from the state of ‘Id’ it changes to ‘I’. This is what Frued called as ‘ego’. To fulfill its requirements of ‘for me’, judging the circumstances, it learns to ‘ask’ or to ‘take’ what it wants. This is what Frued called as ‘Secondary process’. At the child grows, the ego struggles to keep the ‘id’ happy and it meets with obstacles in the world (when its demands are unreasonable and against norms). And it keeps a record of all the rewards and punishments meted out, when reaching for its demands. The record of things to avoid and strategies to take becomes the ‘super ego’. This super ego is also known as ‘conscience’.

It is as if we acquired, in childhood, a new set of needs and accompanying wishes. Unfortunately, these new wishes can easily conflict with the ones from the ‘id’. The superego represents society, and society often wants nothing better than to have you never satisfiy your needs at all.

Right from birth there is always a conflicting whirlpool blowing in the mind. ‘Id’ which is the representative of biological matter of our body, the ‘self’ called the ‘ego’, and the 'Conscience' which is the 'super ego' is always in constant conflict.

Freud once said ‘life is not easy !’
The ego -- the "I" -- sits at the center of some pretty powerful forces: reality; society, as represented by the superego; biology, as represented by the id. When these make conflicting demands upon the poor ego, it is understandable if it -- if you -- feel threatened, feel overwhelmed, feel as if it were about to collapse under the weight of it all. This feeling is called 'anxiety', and it serves as a signal to the ego that its survival, and with it the survival of the whole organism, is in jeopardy.
Freud mentions three different kinds of anxieties: The first is 'realistic anxiety', which you and I would call 'fear'. Actually Freud did, too, in German. But his translators thought "fear" too mundane! Nevertheless, if I throw you into a pit of poisonous snakes, you might experience realistic anxiety.
The second is 'moral anxiety'. This is what we feel when the threat comes not from the outer, physical world, but from the internalized social world of the superego. It is, in fact, just another word for feelings like shame and guilt and the fear of punishment.
The last is 'neurotic anxiety'. This is the fear of being overwhelmed by impulses from the id. If you have ever felt like you were about to "lose it," lose control, your temper, your rationality, or even your mind, you have felt neurotic anxiety. Neurotic is actually the Latin word for nervous, so this is nervous anxiety. It is this kind of anxiety that intrigued Freud most, and we usually just call it anxiety, plain and simple.