Relationship between Id, Ego & Superego

According to Freud and traditional psychology the Id represents the raw uncontrolled and ungratified needs and desires of a person. The only goal of the Id is to seek gratification of desire. Then there is the Ego, which is basically the personality that regulates the Id in fulfilling desires. The ego is your personality and your sense of “I am”. Conflict occurs when the ego suppresses the Id on an unconscious level.

The Superego is the Self Ideal that commands on the Ego. The Superego includes how the ego would like to see itself or what it thinks it should be like. It represents the cultural ideals and expectations, which can cause pain and suffering to the ego in satisfying the desires of the Id. The ego is trapped in the middle and pulled in opposite directions by the unsatisfied Id and superego.

The superego arguably is the collective ego of society. It is like the ego average of society- like Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious. It represents mankind’s current spiritual state of misunderstanding. It represents the illusions of the world.