ly, irrationally, instinctually driven. As Freud (1998: 2) labeled it, the id is “…a chaos, a cauldron of seething excitement.” The id has one purpose only-to give conscious expression to our instinctual need fulfillment. All humans instinctually crave food, shelter and warmth. These are instinctual needs arising solely from the fact that they allow one to survive but they also pleasure the individual who acquires them. This pleasurable affect is important because the id has no structure and no collective will, thus the impulses it expresses are based solely on the pleasure principle, i.e. it feels good so it is good. All of our psychic energy is focused upon the self, much as a small infant who cries when it wants its bottle (food), needs a dry diaper (body “shelter”), or yearns for its mother’s arms (warmth). In other words, as Freud (1998: 4) called it, the id is comprised solely of “Instinctual cathexis seeking discharge.” The id makes no distinction between what is good or bad, what is moral or immoral, or what is realistic or unrealistic; it only seeks to pleasure the myriad cathexes in its instinctual, animal-like impulse reservoir.
The ego represents the scales-of-wholeness in the sense that its function is to monitor the id and reality in such a fashion as to protect the individual from harm based on the instinctual, irrational nature of the id. It attempts to unify the id and the super-ego into a whole that is reality-based without completely sacrificing individual identity. This is important because the nature of the id, if we are talking about the continuum of a pendulum, is completely at one extreme of the pendulum swing. Were it not for the affects of the ego upon the id’s completely instinctual nature we would surely self-destruct, “The ego has taken over the task of representing the world for the id, and so of saving it; for the id blindly striving to gratify its instincts in complet...