Id or subego? Some theoretical questions for clinicians.
This paper began with definitions and it will end with one; albeit a tentative one. Subego: The postulated realm of the mind derived from the infant-mother experience culminating in the development or maldevelopment of a partial sense of self as sensate, effective, and autonomous. A structure for driving and interpreting experience through largely unconscious visual imagery, a structure in a state of constant communication and overlap with the ego and superego. Reviewing what I have written leads to this afterword. Perhaps the present conceptualization of the id gives physiology and animal behavior a bad name. Perhaps we would advance structural theory more if we reserved the term "id" for the distorted state of wish fulfillment resulting from compromised parental malnurturing of the "good enough infant." Intrapsychic activities must to some degree be inimical. A better conceptual balance needs to be struck between their harmonious and antagonistic functioning. This condensed preliminary communication was intended to suggest some ways in which, in the spirit of Loewald, experience can give meaning to theory and theory can become a beacon for hardy clinicians seeking new avenues of exploration.
Downey
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D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D006801:Humans; D007060:Id; D009769:Object Attachment; D010553:Personality Development; D011574:Psychoanalytic Theory; D011575:Psychoanalytic Therapy; D013475:Superego