Ego, Super-Ego, Libido...
The most interesting one is the last -- Id.
Why?
Because we know very little about it. NTL, this is the biggest and most powerful part of ACTING.
The Trinity Idea: Christianity and Method Acting (Godhead, page is in Theatre Theory).
The (inner) conflict: from Oedipus to Hamlet
THE STRUCTURE OF THE MIND:
"Early Freud distinguished between the states in which an idea may be kept (conscious, preconscious or unconscious) and the way in which these systems may be organized. His clearest distinction may be found in the Metapsychological paper "The Unconscious." (1915a) Here he made it clear that the system Pcs. stands in crucial relationship to the other two systems, enabling communication between them and being the locus of censorship between them, as well as possessing important functions of its own such as the province of conscious memory, language, reality testing and the reality principle.
It is important to note that Freud postulated that there is a censor between the Cs. and the Pcs. and between the Ucs. and the Pcs. Thus ideas derived from the Ucs. may, by circumventing earlier repression, enter with intense energy levels into the Pcs. as they try to force themselves into consciousness. When, however, the level of intensity is such that it is noticed by the Pcs. and its censor it is recognized as being derivative of the unconscious and is repressed anew. Thus repression is seen now as not a n once for all activity: rather it is a continuous process and a constant struggle at all levels of the mind. This notion brought another problem into focus. It came to Freud's attention that although the mechanisms of defense belonged to the conscious system, as ego preservative, they themselves operated unconsciously. This led to the conclusion that consciousness could not be a central concept, and possible that it is necessary to distinguish between two types of unconsciousness.
Hence Freud postulated another schema or structure of the psyche which has had far reaching implications in our every day language and imagination of individual and social construction of the human psyche. This construction appeared in "The Ego and the ID." (1923) Here Freud distinguished the Ego (das Ich) as the conscious self. The ego, to Freud, is a active agency present from the beginning of life in some form that was controlled by something beyond it. This something beyond the ego was known as 'das Es' or the Id. This is the source of our impersonal and unconscious desires. It is the mysterious home of the repressed and fundamental instincts, but is also the source of energy, the original self, fueling the entire psychic system. But although all that is in the Id is unconscious, not all that is unconscious is in the Id. It is purely energetic, it is the ego and the Superego that are structural--i.e., can hold unconscious material in them.
With the introduction of the ID the notion of the Ego is said to have changed drastically. Thus the ego was no longer seen as primeval, but rather is a result or a development from he Id formed in two main ways. [1] The exigencies of the real world are the province of the ego, which is charged with bringing it to bear on the pleasure-seeking Id. But [2] the ego is formed by processes of internalization which are modeled on the somatic events with which the infant is familiar. An important point to not is the notion of a bodily ego which is represented by and a result of the bodily sensations. Thus, as the growing child has to give up the original desired sexual objects--the first rude excursion of the external world into the infant's mind--so the ego takes them on, internalizing them and in the process altering itself. Thus the ego becomes the home for lost desires and forsaken objects; it character is formed along the lines of the objects in the world which are interjected and absorbed along with the Id-originated psychic energy invested in them. As the ego become progressively stronger and further removed from the Id by continued external intrusions and disappointments, it gradually transforms the object energy of the id into its ego structures.
It is here that the superego begins development. In part what happens is that some of the internalized objects (the parents) are set up as 'ego ideals.' But at some point this intense internalization of the parents, couched in ambivalent terms, has the power to set up an agency of significant importance within the mind. This development is, of course, the resolution of the Oedipus complex where the child is forced to swallow her or his desires in the face of the power of the real world, and copes with it by forming identifications with both father and mother. Thus the contents of the superego operates as a king f carrot and stick. It is an ideal and a punishment, it compels obedience to an internal authority in the same way a child was once forced to obey an external authority. The ego strives to appease it and be loved by it, but it cannot escape the sense of guilt which arises from the superego's demands and criticisms. It is said to be 'supramoral' and cruel.
A critique of this structural understanding of the mind is that it is too impersonal and a mechanistic understanding of the workings of the mind. It has been called the stuff of physics and not psychology. Still this structural model allows for an understanding of external reality which was not the case in the economic and dynamic models. It does pay attention to the means by which the external reality and objects can enter into the mind of the child and have a formative role in psychological organization. It shows how objects of the external world become identified with an thus parts of the individual and social mind.
[ http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/gthursby/fonda/freud.html ]
Freud's theory of the unconscious, then, is highly deterministic, a fact which, given the nature of nineteenth century science, should not be surprising. Freud was arguably the first thinker to apply deterministic principles systematically to the sphere of the mental, and to hold that the broad spectrum of human behaviour is explicable only in terms of the (usually hidden) mental processes or states which determine it. Thus, instead of treating the behaviour of the neurotic as being causally inexplicable - which had been the prevailing approach for centuries - Freud insisted, on the contrary, on treating it as behaviour for which is meaningful to seek an explanation by searching for causes in terms of the mental states of the individual concerned. Hence the significance which he attributed to slips of the tongue or pen, obsessive behaviour, and dreams - all, he held, are determined by hidden causes in the person's mind, and so they reveal in covert form what would otherwise not be known at all. This suggests the view that freedom of the will is, if not completely an illusion, certainly more tightly circumscribed than is commonly believed, for it follows from this that whenever we make a choice we are governed by hidden mental processes of which we are unaware and over which we have no control.
The postulate that there are such things as unconscious mental states at all is a direct function of Freud's determinism, his reasoning here being simply that the principle of causality requires that such mental states should exist, for it is evident that there is frequently nothing in the conscious mind which can be said to cause neurotic or other behaviour. An 'unconscious' mental process or event, for Freud, is not one which merely happens to be out of consciousness at a given time, but is rather one which cannot, except through protracted psychoanalysis, be brought to the forefront of consciousness. The postulation of such unconscious mental states entails, of course, that the mind is not, and cannot be, identified with consciousness or that which can be an object of consciousness - to employ a much-used analogy, it is rather structurally akin to an iceberg, the bulk of it lying below the surface, exerting a dynamic and determining influence upon the part which is amenable to direct inspection, the conscious mind.
Deeply associated with this view of the mind is Freud's account of the instincts or drives. The instincts, for Freud, are the principal motivating forces in the mental realm, and as such they 'energise' the mind in all of its functions. There are, he held, an indefinitely large number of such instincts, but these can be reduced to a small number of basic ones, which he grouped into two broad generic categories, Eros (the life instinct), which covers all the self-preserving and erotic instincts, and Thanatos (the death instinct), which covers all the instincts towards aggression, self-destruction, and cruelty. Thus it is a mistake to interpret Freud as asserting that all human actions spring from motivations which are sexual in their origin, since those which derive from Thanatos are not sexually motivated - indeed, Thanatos is the irrational urge to destroy the source of all sexual energy in the annihilation of the self. Having said that, it is undeniably true that Freud gave sexual drives an importance and centrality in human life, human actions, and human behaviour which was new (and to many, shocking), arguing as he does both that the sexual drives exist and can be discerned in children from birth (the theory of infantile sexuality), and that sexual energy (libido) is the single most important motivating force in adult life. However, even here a crucial qualification has to be added - Freud effectively redefined the term 'sexuality' here to make it cover any form of pleasure which is or can be derived from the body. Thus his theory of the instincts or drives is essentially that the human being is energised or driven from birth by the desire to acquire and enhance bodily pleasure."
... Thinking is rehearsing, and very often rehearsing instead of acting.
Neuroses and The Structure of the Mind:
Freud's account of the unconscious, and the psychoanalytic therapy associated with it, is best illustrated by his famous tripartite model of the structure of the mind or personality (although, as we have seen, he did not formulate this until 1923), which has many points of similarity with the account of the mind offered by Plato over 2,000 years earlier. The theory is termed 'tripartite' simply because, again like Plato, Freud distinguished three structural elements within the mind, which he called id, ego, and super-ego. The id is that part of the mind in which are situated the instinctual sexual drives which require satisfaction; the super-ego is that part which contains the 'conscience', viz. socially-acquired control mechanisms (usually imparted in the first instance by the parents) which have been internalised; while the ego is the conscious self created by the dynamic tensions and interactions between the id and the super-ego, which has the task of reconciling their conflicting demands with the requirements of external reality. It is in this sense that the mind is to be understood as a dynamic energy-system. All objects of consciousness reside in the ego, the contents of the id belong permanently to the unconscious mind, while the super-ego is an unconscious screening-mechanism which seeks to limit the blind pleasure-seeking drives of the id by the imposition of restrictive rules. There is some debate as to how literally Freud intended this model to be taken (he appears to have taken it extremely literally himself), but it is important to note that what is being offered here is indeed a theoretical model, rather than a description of an observable object, which functions as a frame of reference to explain the link between early childhood experience and the mature adult (normal or dysfunctional) personality.
Freud also followed Plato in his account of the nature of mental health or psychological well-being, which he saw as the establishment of a harmonious relationship between the three elements which constitute the mind. If the external world offers no scope for the satisfaction of the id's pleasure drives, or, more commonly, if the satisfaction of some or all of these drives would indeed transgress the moral sanctions laid down by the super-ego, then an inner conflict occurs in the mind between its constituent parts or elements - failure to resolve this can lead to later neurosis. A key concept introduced here by Freud is that the mind possesses a number of 'defence mechanisms' to attempt to prevent conflicts from becoming too acute, such as repression (pushing conflicts back into the unconscious), sublimation (channelling the sexual drives into the achievement socially acceptable goals, in art, science, poetry, etc.), fixation (the failure to progress beyond one of the developmental stages), and regression (a return to the behaviour characteristic of one of the stages).
Of these, repression is the most important, and Freud's account of this is as follows: when a person experiences an instinctual impulse to behave in a manner which the super-ego deems to be reprehensible (e.g. a strong erotic impulse on the part of the child towards the parent of the opposite sex), then it is possible for the mind push it away, to repress it into the unconscious. Repression is thus one of the central defence mechanisms by which the ego seeks to avoid internal conflict and pain, and to reconcile reality with the demands of both id and super-ego. As such it is completely normal and an integral part of the developmental process through which every child must pass on the way to adulthood. However, the repressed instinctual drive, as an energy-form, is not and cannot be destroyed when it is repressed - it continues to exist intact in the unconscious, from where it exerts a determining force upon the conscious mind, and can give rise to the dysfunctional behaviour characteristic of neuroses. This is one reason why dreams and slips of the tongue possess such a strong symbolic significance for Freud, and why their analysis became such a key part of his treatment - they represent instances in which the vigilance of the super-ego is relaxed, and when the repressed drives are accordingly able to present themselves to the conscious mind in a transmuted form. The difference between 'normal' repression and the kind of repression which results in neurotic illness is one of degree, not of kind - the compulsive behaviour of the neurotic is itself a behavioral manifestation of an instinctual drive repressed in childhood. Such behavioral symptoms are highly irrational (and may even be perceived as such by the neurotic), but are completely beyond the control of the subject, because they are driven by the now unconscious repressed impulse. Freud positioned the key repressions, for both the normal individual and the neurotic, in the first five years of childhood, and, of course, held them to be essentially sexual in nature - as we have seen, repressions which disrupt the process of infantile sexual development in particular, he held, lead to a strong tendency to later neurosis in adult life. The task of psychoanalysis as a therapy is to find the repressions which are causing the neurotic symptoms by delving into the unconscious mind of the subject, and by bringing them to the forefront of consciousness, to allow the ego to confront them directly and thus to discharge them."
From Richard Hornby's preface: This book is written for those who act, those who teach acting, and those who are interested in seeing it. It is both a theoretical work and a call for action. This book is an unashamed attack on the American acting establishment ... The concepts derive from my graduate seminars in acting theory and history in the School of Theatre at Florida State University ... Much of the feistiness of those classes carries over into this book ... If my arguments serve only to stimulate new dialogue, they will have been valuable.
"Hornby examines conventions so ingrained in American acting training, that we're not even aware they're conventions any longer.
His main target is the indubitable Lee Strasberg and his followers. Hornby is not so much anti-Method as he is pro-Stanislavsky."
Psychiatrist to the stars, Martin Grotjahn, admitted he was attracted to movie stars because they could afford lavish fees. And yet, shortly before his death in 1988, he claimed that “... actors have no proper identity. When someone assigns them an identity, they can do that very well. But when they get off the stage, they collapse.... Even actors who seem to be the exception really are not.”
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