222 Ideals in the Modern World
emphatically individual appetites. No one ever truly wants happi-
ness for others, for strangers. No one ever dreams of the eradication
of hunger or of peace in the world. But the Over- I too is defi ned by
desire. It wants command, it wants to be right, it wants to be the
ultimate impeccable judge. The Over- I wants to be stringent and
to be strict, and it wants its judgments to be binding for all time. In
short, it all too often wants to be God. The I, what does the I want?
The I wants to survive. The I wants to go on living— though maybe,
given the stresses upon it, the I does not want to go on living for-
ever. The I, Freud tells us, feels the unending pressure of the It and
its demands. Yet it does not always know what those demands are,
due to repression. (Freud replaces the quest for compassion and
courage with the quest for a certain kind of self- knowledge.) The I
also feels the pressure of the Over- I, which is always judging it, al-
most always fi nding it wanting, always trying to raise its standards.
And then there is the external world. To Freud the social world is
a place of barely veiled hostility. We men and women do not, on the
fundamental level, care all that much for one another. We are not
compassionate beings. In a certain way, the paranoid’s feeling is pre-
cisely the right one— the man walking toward him down the street
does wish him ill. Freud is a Darwinian: Freud sees us as all striving
against one another to feed and to procreate.
The ego, Freud says, in what may be the book that best defi nes
his sense of life, The Ego and the Id, is “a poor creature” in thrall to
three masters and accordingly susceptible to three kinds of danger:
“from the external world, from the libido of the id, and from the se-
verity of the super- ego. Three kinds of anxiety correspond to these
three dangers, since anxiety is the expression of a retreat from
danger. As a frontier creature, the ego tries to mediate between the
world and the id, to make the id pliable to the world and, by means
of its muscular activity, to make the world fall in with the wishes of
the id.... In its position midway between the id and reality, [the