Freud referred to his theoretical models of the mind (or psyche, as he sometimes called it), as his metapsychology. His earliest metapsychological theorizing occurred in the 1890s when he proposed neurological structures and mechanisms capable of producing the dreams and symptoms of hysteria he saw in his psychotherapy practice. He sketched his ideas in 1895 in Project for a Scientific Psychology. Believing the nervous system was too poorly understood to enable him to specify detailed mechanisms for all the psychological phenomena that interested him, Freud decided to avoid neurological technicalities by expressing his metapsychology in completely psychological terms. Freud’s most famous descriptions of “psychical localities” appeared in a short 1923 work entitled The Ego and the Id. Here he argued that the psyche is constantly influenced by three different kinds of demands that inevitably conflict with one another. First are the instincts: biologically based urges arising from within the body, for nourishment, warmth, sexual gratification, and so on. A second kind of demand is imposed by external reality; in order to survive, a person must learn to manipulate the environment to avoid physical dangers and obtain proper resources for satisfying the instincts. Third, Freud recognized that moral demands influence the mind independently of the instincts and external reality. Sometimes people refrain from satisfying their impulses because they think it would be wrong, even if there is nothing in the physical environment to prevent them from doing so.
Freud’s 1923 model proposed three separate systems representing the three kinds of psychic demands. He postulated the id as the origin and container of unconscious, powerful impulses and energies from the instincts. Then he hypothesized a “perception-consciousness system,” abbreviated as pcpt.-cs., that conveys information about external reality to the psyche. This system not only produces immediate consciousness of whatever is being perceived, it also leaves behind memories that remain open to future consciousness in a region of the psyche Freud described as “preconscious.” Moral demands, arising independently of instincts and external reality alike, presumably originated from a separate part within the psyche that Freud called the superego. The id, the pcpt.-cs. (external-perception system), and the superego all introduce differing and conflicting demands into the psyche, which must sort them out and achieve some sort of compromise. Freud’s term for the part of the psyche that governed these compromises was the ego.
Increasingly, the older Freud saw everyday life as dominated by other, less dramatic ego compromises he called defense mechanisms. Collaborating in this theorizing was his youngest daughter Anna Freud. As a defense mechanism, displacement is the redirection of an impulse toward a substitute target that resembles the original in some way but is psychologically safer. A woman who suffers the taunts of her boss in silence might displace her anger by yelling at her husband and children when she gets home, for example. The defense mechanism of projection occurs when one does not directly acknowledge one’s own unacceptable impulses, but attributes them to someone else instead. In intellectualization, an emotion-charged subject is directly approached, but in a strictly intellectual manner that avoids emotional involvement. A somewhat related defense mechanism is rationalization, in which people act because of one motive but explain the behavior (to themselves as well as to others) on the basis of another, more acceptable one. The defense mechanism of identification, the unconscious adoption of the characteristics of some other emotionally important person, acquired considerable theoretical importance in Freud’s later writings. He suggested that in the process of mourning, for example, a bereaved person may unconsciously keep a lost loved one alive by “internalizing” and taking on his or her characteristic behaviors and attitudes.
Source: Fancher, R. E., & Rutherford, A. (2017). Pioneers of Psychology: A History (5th ed.). W.W. Norton And Company
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