What is the Id?
The id is a term developed by Sigmund Freud to describe a part of the brain. He also used the terms ego and superego to describe the two other part of the brain, that along with the id, drive the personality. The id is specifically all our uncomplicated needs for pleasure, food, and survival. To Freud the id represented the instinctual behavior of each person, or as Bill Murray puts it in the film What About Bob? the “I need, I need, I need,” that sets up a constant dialogue with the rest of the self. According to Freud, the id cares not about whether its needs are rational or detrimental. It is a common undercurrent that sometimes causes us to behave in selfish or destructive ways when we are not using our egos and superegos to control the id. It’s not always that the id is bad or good, or has any kind of moral value. It is amoral, rather than immoral, since the id does not contain the moral controls. Instead the superego has this job and gradually asserts morality onto the id to make
