For this week's subject, dealing with the inner critic, I've been using the Freudian

schema to introduce the subject, not to say I'm particularly a Freudian, but I find just the basic generic

schema that Freud offered for the human psyche is useful to discuss this topic.

So bear with me.

I think it'll be clear why I'm going to be introducing this.

So just to review for those of you who are unfamiliar,

at first Freud suggested that there was two main components of the human

psyche. The first component for unconscious realm that we're not aware of is

what he called the id and it's a reservoir of all

these impulses we have and they're not particularly concerned with the constraints of the world around us, good taste, proper judgment,

there's simply impulses to express sexual impulses and seeking

sensual pleasures and they're also aggressive impulses.

And we're pretty much born.

Freud speculated with these impulses of sensuality and aggression.

And these are not very smart impulses.

They're largely in a part of the psyche,

the unconscious realm, where we have very little control over them in terms

of when they begin to arise.

The ego, the second part of the psyche is the realm of consciousness that allows us to guide how we seek pleasure in the world and constrain how we act out on aggression.

The realm of the ego is to really postpone or compromise or limit the flow of our impulses so that we don't get ourselves in a lot of trouble.

If we act out on every single aggressive impulses, we'd be kind of

fucked. Most of us would be in jail. And so the ego was according to Freud a reality principle.

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