The Structure of Personality
Sigmund Freud (1917) believed that personality has three structures: the id, the ego, and the superego. One way to understand the three structures is to consider them as three rulers of a country
(Singer 1984). The id is king or queen, the ego is prime minister, and the superego is high priest.
The id is an absolute monarch, owed complete obedience; it is spoiled, willful, and self-centered. The id wants what it wants right now, not later. The ego, as prime minister, has the job of getting things done; it is tuned into reality and is responsive to society’s demands. The superego, as high priest, is concerned with right and wrong; the id may be greedy and needs to be told that nobler purposes should be pursued.
The id is the Freudian structure of personality that consists of instinct, which is the individual’s reservoir of psychic energy. In Freud’s view, the id is unconscious; it has no contact with reality. The id works according to the pleasure principle, the Freudian concept that the id always seeks pleasure and avoids pain.
It would be a dangerous and scary world if our personalities were all id. As young children mature, for example, they learn they cannot slug other children in the face. They also learn they have to use the toilet instead of their diapers. As children experience the demands and constraints of society, a new structure of personality is formed—the ego, the Freudian structure of personality that deals with the demands of reality. The ego is called the executive branch of personality because it makes rational decisions. Whereas the id is completely unconscious, the ego is partially conscious. It houses our higher mental functions—reasoning, problem solving, and decision making, for example. The ego abides by the reality principle, the Freudian concept by which the ego tries to bring the individual pleasure within the norms of society. Few of us are cold-blooded killers or wild wheeler-dealers; we take into account the obstacles to our satisfaction that exist in our world. We recognize that our impulses cannot go unrestrained. The ego helps us test reality, to see how far we can go without getting into trouble and hurting ourselves.
The id and ego have no morality. They do not take into account whether something is right or wrong.
In contrast, the superego is the Freudian structure of personality that is the moral branch of personality. The superego takes into account whether something is right or wrong. The superego is what we often refer to as the “conscience.” Like the id, the superego does not consider reality; it doesn’t deal with what is realistic, only with whether the id’s impulses can be satisfied in moral terms.
Freud considered personality to be like an iceberg; most of our personality exists below the level or awareness, just as the massive part of an iceberg is beneath the surface of the water.

Name: __________________________________________________________ Date: ________________ Period: __________
Lord of the Flies Psychoanalytic Perspectives
And the Structure of Personality
After reading Freud’s theory of how the mind is divided, identify several characters from the novel whose actions appear to fall under any or all of Freud’s divisions. Find specific quotations from the text to support how these characters might represent the id, the ego, and/or the superego.
Character Id, Ego, or Superego Evidence from text (with #s)