![]() ![]() ![]() For what else does each of the three protagonists of the mental apparatus represent if not a distinct facet of the individual's ambivalent relationship to his social environment? The id, with its blind defiance of all external considerations, stands in direct opposition to cultural requirements these requirements are nonetheless internalized in the superego, with its slavish and uncritical devotion to external law and the ego, with its compulsive urge towards mastery and control of externality, stands for yet a different facet of the same relationship between individual and society. ![]() By splitting the mental apparatus into three interacting but distinct mental agencies, Freud achieved more than a clear articulation of mental dynamics-he developed a complex and compelling view of the individual as both internalizing and resisting culture, and a view of society as both part of the individual and as an externality confronting him as an alien force. One of the most original and sometimes neglected contributions of Freud's late mental topography was the resulting transcendence of the old debates on man as 'by nature social' or as 'by nature antisocial' and the casting of a new and uniquely illuminating light on the relationship between the individual and his social environment. ![]()
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