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This is a study of the It. The sentence ‘I live’ is replaced by the idea ‘I am being lived by the It’.
I have no answer to the question of what the It is. Yet I can give some clues as to how the following statements should be read.
The three-year old child talks of himself in the third person, stands away from himself, acts as if there is a different personality clothed in his skin who is being lived by something else. The concept and word I is learned rather late by the child, at a time when he is capable of thinking and acting reasonably. This fundamental fact should never be forgotten. It leads to the idea that the I is merely an outward appearance, an expression of the It.
At the moment of birth the child starts to breathe. He acts with a purpose by adjusting to the new conditions of life and the new atmosphere, an action which, looked at without prejudice, seems to be as well reasoned as a man's escape from a burning house or the opening-up of an umbrella when it starts to rain. There are similarities between our reflex actions and conscious actions. This raises the question whether there is a difference between conscious and unconscious life, and the possibility has to be considered that everything which we call the conscious expression of a personality is really the disguised working of the unconscious, the It, one of whose measures is the compulsion towards self-deception.
From the human semen and the human ovum a human being is made, not a dog or a bird; there exists an It which enforces the making of a human being and builds up the human body and the human soul. This It supplies its creature, the personality and ego of a human being, with nose, mouth, muscles,