ABSTRACT
Freud’s last metapsychological work, The Ego and the Id, with its tripartite theory of the mind, continued his shift away from “the psychology of the id” to “the psychology of the ego,” and from the repressed forces of the mind to the repressing forces, within both the mind and the culture. The book’s ontogenetic account of how our “higher nature” is formed out of our “lower,” emphasizing “identification,” “introjection,” and “reaction-formation,” acknowledges the role of cultural models and ideals in the process and seems to render Freud’s phylogenetic/Lamarckian account superfluous. It also seems to undermine the dignity and value of that “higher nature.” Nevertheless, Freud insisted otherwise, stubbornly clinging to phylogenetic explanations, and did so for essentially moral ends: to discredit all illusory beliefs in the goodness of our nature and its perfectibility under the right social and political conditions. Such beliefs were, in Freud’s mind, not merely wrong, but downright evil.
