Id

Literary/ Cultural Context Note

Robert Clark (The Literary Encyclopedia)

The Literary Encyclopedia. WORLD HISTORY AND IDEAS: A CROSS-CULTURAL VOLUME.

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Concept (psychoanalysis)

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Date of occurrence 1923

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When dealing with this term it is useful to realise that the Latinate term was added to the Freudian lexicon during the early translation of his work into English. The original German was “das Es”, “the it”, and derived via the psychiatrist Georg Goddeck from Friedrich Nietzsche’s

Beyond Good and Evil

, indicating drive of the impersonal in our nature, whether this impersonal be the force of ideas or of biological instinct. It’s usage is therefore part of the post-Darwinian recognition that human beings are not sovereign creatures of mind but the consequences of biological and social forces which are greater than the individual will.

In Freud’s second topography of the mind – the tripartite division of id [Es, “it”], ego [Ich, “the I”] and super-ego [Über-Ich, the

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313 words

Citation: Clark, Robert. "Id". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 22 October 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=534, accessed 23 November 2024.]

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