ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis divides the personality into three main divisions, which include biological needs, socially acquired inhibitions, and the testing of reality. The new-born infant is a biological organism characterized by nutritive, excretory, and allied necessities, and by capacity to be impelled by sexual impulses when certain glands shall have matured. Very few of the primitive biological needs of the individual can be directly gratified, owing mainly to the restrictions which are imposed by representatives of the particular social order into which the individual is born. When these restrictions are no longer dealt with as obstacles in the outer world, but are observed on the basis of acquired modifications of behaviour, the individual has achieved a new and important personality structure, which is technically known as the “super-ego”. The perceiving of external relationships, and the modification of impulses in the light of current reality, are the special functions of the third division of the personality, the “ego”. In the technical language of psychoanalysis, the original biological needs are the “id”, the inhibitions are the super-ego, and the reality adaptations occur in the ego. About the proper connotation is conveyed by speaking of personality as divisible into the realms of impulse, conscience, and reason, although some distortion is involved in this usage, inasmuch as the conscience and the reason are not categorically different from the impelling drives of the individual, but rather complications which arise in the process of elaborating drives in relation to one another and to surroundings.
