ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud’s 1923 account of the Oedipus complex, castration, and penis envy went along with his developing an id-ego-superego model of the mind. Freud had implied that the ego was equivalent to the conscious mind. By 1923, however, he was convinced that, since resistance to becoming conscious of what is repressed and unconscious emanates from the ego, it too must be partly unconscious. Freud had redescribed psychological ills in id-ego-superego terms. He described symptoms of hysteria and other ‘transference neuroses’ as involving conflict between the ego and the id; ‘narcissistic neuroses’, such as melancholia, as involving conflict between the ego and the superego; and delusions in ‘psychoses’ as involving conflict between the ‘ego’ and ‘the external world’. With his id-ego-superego model of the mind, Freud redescribed psychological ills and their treatment in terms of strengthening the patient’s ego relative to their id and superego. The ego psychology version of psychoanalysis developed from this model has subsequently been variously modified and criticized.
