Writing as Id’s Way to Overdo Ego and Super-ego

‎Back then on college, I used to study Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis. It was such a rigorous subject to handle almost no students in my class liked it, which is why I’ve been still questioning up to the very second: “So what’s actually the gist of it?”

I took two separate classes of English literary analysis both in my junior year of my under graduate program in 2004 and master degree‎ circa 2007. Both classes only slightly touched on Freud’s propositions and left me in curiosity still.

Yet, now I can tell you I have a better grasp of the subject. Kudos to growing older after years!

I totally can better relate to the theory these days after experiencing it myself and identifying the three ‎intangible constructs Freud proposed decades ago. Id, as long as my memory serves right, acts like an agile, wild, energetic child. It acts based upon sheer instinct, sudden impulse, biological urges, and so forth. While Ego is a personality in reality, as a result of innumerable number of compromise between Id and Super-ego. So what’s Super-ego frankly? It can be briefly defined as our moral standards, a set of rules played and influencing all of personalities in the background.

That being said, Paulo Coelho has some points to ponder. It’s true that we are not who we want us to be. There are some things in our life which cannot be compromised or completely removed ‎in spite of the consequence that we are being part of a people, a society with a certain set of norms (read: expectations). Id is so much under pressure that it sometimes starts to leak through dreams at night, or creative works like literary pieces, without our knowledge. Super-ego is morality, norms, dogmas that a person embraces which at the same time bind him. In other words, id is the wild side of us, super-ego is the most civilized, idealized version of us. Meanwhile, ego is who we are in reality, a result of clashes between the urges of id and super-ego. Ego is built through perpetual accumulations of compromises between our willingness and societal demands.

To me, id deserves its way to ‎express itself. The suppression of id would, I guess, result in psychic imbalance. And we know imbalance is the root of most of problems in life. It’s either because we do too little or too much. It’s always been an eternal quest to achieve the ideal, the sought-after balance.

This is exactly where writing is needed. It may help our id to channel its primal urge without having to enrage super-ego (which keeps dictating us) or disgrace ego (because it is ego which has to deal with a society).

That brings me to the resolution of 2015: I want to write more and better. And I promise I will write more prolifically and professionally in 2015 and years ahead.