The Ego, the Id, and Power as “Non-Domination”

Image Credit: Freud Museum London

We enter the scene of a drama in Freud’s The Ego and the Id:

The ego is therefore the heir of the Oedipus complex, and thus is the expression of the most powerful impulses and the most important libidinal vicissitudes of the id. By setting up this ego ideal, the ego has mastered the Oedipus complex at the same time placed itself in subjection to the id. Whereas the ego is essentially the representative of the external world, of reality, the super-ego stands in contrast to it as the representative of the internal world, of the id. Conflicts between the ego and the ideal will, as we are now prepared to find, ultimately reflect the contrast between what is real and what is psychical, between the external world and the internal world. (Freud, The Ego and the Id, 32)

In Freud we have the human mind as the scene of a drama with actors each having motivations and forces that are their own. This drama is fundamentally one of creation, delegation, loss, negotiation and compromise — of winners and losers — and simultaneously the creation of new capabilities to handle the process.

The id creates the ego as it finds unsatisfactory ground for the attainment of its desires in the external world. The ego’s defining function is to negotiate between the acceptable norms of the external world and the unfiltered desires of the id. In the process, the ego creates the super-ego (or ego-ideal) delegates to it the authority to negotiate between itself and the id (which is also itself).

As the “heir of the Oedipus complex,” the ego (and its super-ego) are the agents of loss — they create the loss by sublimating the sexual energy of the id into other “identifications”. Thus at the same time the loss they create is a form of satisfaction. There is no model of domination here. Repression cannot, in other words, be read as complete control over the other. Rather, more correctly, repression is both simultaneously an imposition of loss and help with dealing with that loss.

There are political and democratic lessons to be learned here.

In Freud we have a self whose main skill is negotiating, compromising and making the best of loss at the moment that it is responsible for imposing the loss. It creates faculties and capacities whose sole functions are to handle the compromises that are necessary for getting on in the world. It’s important to realize in this context that these negotiating faculties — ego and super-ego — are not free-standing entities separate from the id. As Freud repeatedly points out, they are creations of the id and are thus a part of the id.

An important implication: if the ego is created by the id as it attempts to get on in the world, the loss is self-imposed and a condition of existence. Self-imposed loss is a condition of existing in the world as a moral individual who needs to get along with others. One must bring loss to oneself, and in the process create the capabilities within oneself to deal with it. It is also the ability to help the other cope with the loss that s/he inevitably undergoes in the negotiation.

The ego bears the history of these losses and compromises. It does not start anew each time: “the ego is a precipitate of the abandoned object-cathexes and thus it contains the history of those object-choices.” (24)

This is what a democracy should be at its best. There are winners and losers and we inevitably bear the history of how we deal with this. Constructing the terms on which loss can simultaneously be a compromise is the fundamental human skill for Freud — it is baked in — and should be our fundamental political skill, contrary to McConnell’s pronouncement that “Winners make policy and losers go home.” (If only McConnell’s party gave a shit about policy, this might be an interesting point of debate.)

The institutions we create including the policies and laws brought about by them are and should be fundamentally about dealing with the inevitability of loss. They create loss and thus should be prepared, like the id’s ego, to deal with it.

In Freud, we thus find a form of “control” that is not about domination, but about compromise and service to the other who suffers loss:

… the ego can obtain control over the id and deepen its relations with it — at the cost, it is true, of acquiescing to a large extent in the id’s experiences. When the ego assumes the features of the object, it is forcing itself, so to speak, upon the id as a love-object and is trying to make good the id’s loss by saying “Look, you can love me too — I am like the object.” (24, emphasis added)

This is the model of a healthy body politic. It is “one” — but it is not and cannot be unified. Losers can never “go home”; they can never be fully repressed and dominated. In fact, the object of repression (the id) creates the very mechanism (the ego) for dealing with the inevitable need for loss so that repression doesn’t become domination. The ego is necessarily a negotiating and compromising body.

The events of the world will create winners and losers. Dealing with loss is both natural and inevitable. It does no good to dominate the losers. This way madness and neuroses lie.