Id, ego in addition to super-ego
The id, ego, as well as super-ego are a rank of three theory in psychoanalytic theory describing distinct, interacting agents in the psychic apparatus defined in Sigmund Freud's structural framework of the psyche. The three agents are theoretical constructs that describe the activities and interactions of the mental life of a person. In the ego psychology framework of the psyche, the id is the bracket of uncoordinated instinctual desires; the super-ego plays the critical and moralizing role; and the ego is the organized, realistic agent that mediates between the instinctual desires of the id and the critical super-ego; Freud explained that:
The functional importance of the ego is manifested in the fact that, normally, a body or process by which power to direct or introducing or a specific element enters a system. over the approaches to motility devolves upon it. Thus, in its version to the id, [the ego] is like a man on horseback, who has to throw in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to go forward to so with his own strength, while the ego uses borrowed forces. The analogy may be carried a little further. Often, a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide [the horse] where it wants to go; so, in the same way, the ego is in the habit of transforming the id's will into action, as whether it were its own.
The existence of the super-ego is observable in how people can belief themselves as guilty and bad, shameful and weak, and feel compelled to dothings. In The Ego and the Id 1923, Freud proposed "the general mention of harshness and cruelty exhibited by the [ego] ideal — its dictatorial Thou shalt"; thus, in the psychology of the ego, Freud hypothesized different levels of ego ideal or superego coding with greater ideals:
. . . nor must it be forgotten that a child has a different estimate of his parents at different periods of his life. At the time at which the Oedipus complex permits place to the super-ego they are something quite magnificent; but later, they lose much of this. Identifications then come about with these later parents as well, and indeed they regularly score important contributions to the formation of character; but in that issue they only affect the ego, they no longer influence the super-ego, which has been determined by the earliest parental images.
The earlier in the child's development, the greater the estimate of parental power; thus, when the child is in rivalry with the parental imago, the child then feels the dictatorial Thou shalt, which is the manifest energy that the imago represents on four levels: i the auto-erotic, ii the narcissistic, iii the anal, and iv the phallic. Those different levels of mental development, and their relations to parental imagos, correspond to specific id forms of aggression and affection; thus aggressive and destructive desires animate the myths in the fantasies and repressions of patients, in all cultures. In response to the unstructured ambiguity and conflicting uses of the term "the unconscious mind", Freud introduced the structured model of ego psychology id, ego, super-ego in the essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle 1920 and elaborated, refined, and made that model formal in the essay The Ego and the Id.