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Civilization and its Discontents

e is no possibility of all of its being carried through; all the regulations of the universe run counter to it (Freud, 1961, p. 23).

It is easy to see that the pleasure principle can be a great source of anxiety for man.

Ego, the domain of conscious life, stands against everything that represents the id. Ego is actually the part of the id which has been influenced by the external world. The ego gains energy by neutralizing (desexualizing) energy from the id. When the id energy is desexualized and becomes neutral, it can be used for rational action by the ego. The principle of neutralizing energy is Freud's reality principle. The pleasure principle of the id, under the influence of the external world, changes into the reality principle of the ego.

Ego in man can be at its peak when it's not in love. Normally, there is nothing of which we are more certain than the feeling of self, of our own ego. This ego appears to us as something autonomous and unitary, marked off distinctly from everything else. That such an appearance is deceptive, and that on the contrary the ego is continued inwards, without any sharp delimitation, into an unconscious mental entity which we designate as the id and for which it serves as a kind of facade--this was a discovery first made by psychoanalytic research, which should still have much more to tell us about the relation of ego to the id. But toward the outside, at any rate, the ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation. There is only one state--admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological--in which it does not do this. At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that 'I' and 'you' are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact (Freud, 1961, p. 12-13).

When man is in love, ego is cathecting energy in object. ...

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Civilization and its Discontents. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 10:20, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1682182.html