Freud and the Ideal Self 221
For Freud au then tic character (nonintoxicated character) is con-
fl ict. Character is not essentially confl ict with the external world,
though such confl ict is an inevitable a part of life. Character is
internal confl ict. We are all at war within ourselves. There is no
au then tic stability to the inner life, and the dynamics of the inner
life’s strug gle are often beyond the reach of consciousness. We are,
according to Freud, perpetually at internal civil war.
Why are we creatures of confl ict from Freud’s perspective? We
are internally divided. In Freud’s fi rst map of the mind, which he
unveils in 1900, we are split into two parts, which he calls the I and
the It, or the ego and the id. The It is by far the most im por tant: it
is the seat of the drives. The id is the source of the wishes, aggres-
sive and erotic, that the I does not wish to acknowledge or act upon.
In Freud’s second map of the mind, which he unveils in 1914, we
are composed not of two but of three agencies: the I, the It, and the
Over- I, or the superego. We possess (and are possessed by) not one
but two inner forces of authority. The fi rst, the I, is largely identical
with consciousness. But the second, the Over- I, is about as avail-
able to the conscious mind as the It generally is. Freud says early in
his career that a dream is the disguised fulfi llment of a repressed
wish. Had he truly revised his theory of dreams in accord with his
later fi ndings, he would have said that the dream is a disguised ful-
fi llment of a repressed wish or the disguised fulfi llment of a re-
pressed (and often irrational) demand. What we call an anxiety
dream is a dream of the superego; a dream of desire is a dream of
the id.
Freud’s is a vision of the Self— and nothing but the Self. That is,
he off ers us a vision of humanity as defi ned by desire. (Could hu-
mans be defi ned by anything else? The contemporary individual
has a diffi cult time imagining how this could be.) Every component
of the Freudian self is defi ned by what it wants— for itself. The id
desires the immediate satisfactions of the appetites, yes. They are