The Ego and the Id

In 1923 Freud introduced the model of the mind that most people know today: the id, the reservoir of drives; the ego, which deals with reality; and the superego, the inner voice of conscience formed from parents and society. He had earlier divided the mind into conscious and unconscious, but he now finds that part of the ego itself is unconscious, and that people can suffer from a guilt they do not know they feel. He compares the ego to a rider trying to guide a horse that is much stronger than he is.

It is a short and fairly technical book, but these three terms entered everyday language, and the later works of psychoanalysis build on them. This translation, by Joan Riviere, was published in 1927 by the Hogarth Press, run by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Read it after Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which it continues.

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) grew up in Vienna in a Jewish family and trained as a neurologist. After studying hypnosis with the famous Charcot in Paris, he began listening to his patients talk freely about their dreams and memories, and developed from this practice a new theory of the mind and a new kind of treatment: psychoanalysis.

From his consulting room at Berggasse 19 he published The Interpretation of Dreams and a stream of books that changed psychology, literature and everyday language. In 1938, after the Nazis took over Austria, he fled to London, where he died the following year. A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis is the best place to begin.