Id

Literary/ Cultural Context Note

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  • The Literary Encyclopedia. WORLD HISTORY AND IDEAS: A CROSS-CULTURAL VOLUME.

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When dealing with this term it is useful to realise that the Latinate term was added to the Freudian lexicon during the early translation of his work into English. The original German was “das Es”, “the it”, and derived via the psychiatrist Georg Goddeck from Friedrich Nietzsche’s

Beyond Good and Evil

, indicating drive of the impersonal in our nature, whether this impersonal be the force of ideas or of biological instinct. It’s usage is therefore part of the post-Darwinian recognition that human beings are not sovereign creatures of mind but the consequences of biological and social forces which are greater than the individual will.

In Freud’s second topography of the mind – the tripartite division of id [Es, “it”], ego [Ich, “the I”] and super-ego [Über-Ich, the

313 words

Citation: Clark, Robert. "Id". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 22 October 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=534, accessed 19 March 2024.]

534 Id 2 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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