ristic of man. Further, the property of consciousness has a topographical reference; for processes in the id are entirely unconscious, while consciousness is the function of the ego's outermost layer, which is concerned with the perception of the external world (Freud, 2000).
By 1930, in the classic monograph Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud would characterize the ego as the "immediate feeling" of being in the world, "the feeling of our self, of our own ego. This ego appears to us as something autonomous and unitary" (Freud, 1961, pp. 12-13). Even so, the superego continually supervenes ego experience, fostering the ego's internalization of and trade-offs with external influences in the form of conscience, or, alternatively, the authority of civilization and the demands of organized society (Freud, 1961, p. 74). The id, which seeks gratification through libidinous expression but which may also seek gratification through aggression (one form of the death instinct), may also be inhibited by the claims of the superego.
Conflict between these components may be internalized as guilt or bad conscience (Freud, 1961, p. 72ff), or it may be externalized, as abundant evidence of enactment of aggressive and destructive impulses at both the individual and social level explains. On the other hand, there is a wealth of evidence in the professional literature that individual egos are constantly subsumed by the suasional power of the environment in which they operate. The need for social acceptance, in other words, often outweighs the drives of the ego, id, and libido. Equally, it may outweigh the influence of reason. In a classic clinical study of its kind, Asch (1951) asked groups of four to estimate the length of lines. Three were confederate researchers, and one was the "nanve" subject. The confederates deliberately and confidently gave wrong answers. In more than 25% of the cases, the nanve subjects agreed with the majority opinion, c...