- The unconscious instinctual component of personality that is present at birth
- The source of bodily needs and wants, emotional impulses and desires, especially aggression and sex drive
- It acts according to the pleasure principle
- Freud described the id as “the dark, inaccessible part of our personality”, our knowledge of it is limited to the analysis of dreams and neurotic symptoms, and it can only be described in terms of its contrast with the ego
- It has no organisation and no collective will: it is concerned only with the satisfaction of drives in accordance with the pleasure principle
- Freud described it as “the greatest reservoir of libido”, usually conceived as sexual in nature, the life instincts that are constantly seeking a renewal of life
- The seat of the unconscious mind controls the basic biological impulses.
- Breathing and Hunger
- Potentially socially unacceptable things like the desire for sex