The super-ego becomes over-severe, abuses the poor ego, humiliates it and ill-treats it, threatens it with the direst punishments, reproaches it for actions. For Freud, the super-ego is the internal father who tells the ego the rules of the world: but it can be a violent and unforgiving father. The super-ego is much like the conscience, it directs the ego in the sense of what is right and wrong, what needs to be done, how quickly, and how well. The super-ego, however, has the job to look over this poor “I” already struggling between instinct and social expectation. The horse is the “it” that needed to be controlled by the “I” so together they could be useful. Freud often compared the relationship between the ego and the id to be like that of a man on a horse. The ego (I) has the job of managing the passions that come from our “it” and the real social world on the outside (we can’t just grab things we want, we need to do it in a ‘civilised’ way). That makes it a bit easier to understand, doesn’t it? The id (it) is the most animalistic part of us, our passions and our aggressions, our greed, slovenliness, and our desires. By “over-I” Freud meant a part of the self that observes (and judges) the “I”: “We see how one part of the ego sets itself over against the other, judges it critically and, as it were, takes it as its object” ( The Ego and the Id ). Freud used simple language and simply distinguished between the “I” (ego) the “it” (id) and the “over I” (super-ego). What most people don’t know is that these words, translated from Freud’s original German, make the concepts more complicated than they need to be. Many people are familiar with Freud’s splitting of the personality into three main parts, the id, the ego, and the super-ego. But what is it that motivates them, and what can we learn from it? Can you have too much of a good thing? What does it really take to become an Olympian? Most of us non-Olympians would agree that we don’t have what it takes to make it into the qualifying heats let alone find ourselves on that platform waiting to receive our medal.
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