What Do We Mean by "Id"?

THIS PAPER GREW OUT OF questions that arose during investigation of a different metapsychological field. I had been asked by a research group with which I am associated to prepare a list of ego functions, which seemed a request for a description of a group of clinical events, either observed or assumed from observations. My first step had been a search through the literature for relevant quotations; apart from a few authors who have offered listings of ego functions, this involved a wider search through the writings of others, to extract from them what seemed to be "ego functions" implied though often not so named. I knew before I started that I would find the term "ego" used in a variety of ways, a point made by a number of writers, e.g., Rapaport (19); and I knew that many, especially the older publications, would need a lot of thought in translating what the authors refer to when they use the term "ego," as clarity in the definitive concept of "ego" would seem an essential prerequisite to deciding what functions could validly be attributed to this instance. (One might put it the other way around, and end up by offering the list of "ego functions" as a way of defining what is meant by "ego" [11].) This seemed a big enough task, but as I read and abstracted it became clear that another problem of definition was involved. If, as Freud states, "the id can be described only as a contrast to the ego" (8), then clearly definitions of "id" and "ego" correlate and sustain each other; so an essential problem emerging in attempting to list functionings was where to draw the line, i.e., which "functionings" should be regarded as "id functions" and which as "ego functions";