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Freud's attempts at a general conceptualization of the id remained somewhat vague. All of them pose many questions and leave the door open to much speculation. We have had to ask ourselves not only: “What did Freud mean by this concept?” but even more important: “How can we fit these conceptualizations into the whole framework of our psychoanalytic theory and practice?”
Apart from various attempts at a general conceptualization, Freud also used the concept id to draw implications and make assumptions that took the more general conceptualization for granted. This also applies to all psychoanalysts who use structural concepts.
Freud's important attempts at conceptualization were the following:
In The Ego and the Id (1923) he said:
I propose to take it into account by calling the entity which starts out from the system Pcpt. and begins by being Pcs. the ‘ego’, and by following Groddeck in calling the other part of the mind, into which this entity extends and which behaves as though it were Ucs., the ‘id’ [p. 23].
The id was said to contain “the passions” (p. 25) and to be “totally non-moral” (p. 54). In the New Introductory Lectures (1933), Freud stated:
It [the id] is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality; what little we know of it we have learnt from our study of
Page 29the dream-work and of the construction of neurotic symptoms, and most of that is of a negative character and can be described only as a contrast to the ego. We approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations. We picture it as being open at its end to somatic influences,1 and as there taking up into itself2 instinctual needs which find their psychical expression in it, but we cannot say in what substratum. It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts [instinctual drives], but it has no organization, produces no collective will,3 but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure princ