The Misanthrope's Corner - changing ideas of Freudian ego - Brief Article - Column

Nobody talks about "Yankee ingenuity" anymore but it used to be a proud catchphrase. Americans were the people who could invent anything, from machines to ourselves.

We used the same technique for both. First, we discerned what was needed and produced it, then we identified the kinks and tinkered with them until we came up with a new, improved model. On the personal level we spoke unabashedly of "reinventing ourselves," celebrating the practice as an essential part of the American Dream.

As long as we confined our ingenuity to machines and self-improvement we had the advantage of dealing with physical matter. You might lose an arm in a machine or a spouse in a quest for a new image, but at least these things are tangible.

The same cannot be said for our latest venture. We're tinkering with concepts now, and the one we have decided to improve upon is so abstract that we don't even realize we're tinkering with it: Freud's theory of Ego, Superego, and Id.

The Ego is a nice young man with rosy cheeks and good prospects. The commonsense realm of the psyche, the Ego urges us to act out of self- interest; to do things that grease our path through life and make us look good, such as deferring to the boss, being neat and clean, and telling white lies. This Freudian Ego, once the American beau ideal, was derailed when the Sixties enshrined "authenticity" and demanded unconditional acceptance. We granted it, carefully refraining from finding fault with anybody for anything, until the new, improved American Ego brought about the collapse of civility that the best and the brightest bemoan and ponder on every op-ed page.

Freud's Superego is a teacher's pet in a Roman toga. The idealistic realm of the psyche, the Superego governs abstractions like duty, honor, nobility of spirit, and making decisions on "a matter of principle." But duty, honor, noble spirits, and matters of principle are lofty stuff, and we can't have that: Somebody might feel "threatened."

There is something Roman about lofty abstractions, but there is nothing Roman about easily threatened Americans unless you count the gelatinous blob that washes ashore at the end of La Dolce Vita. Give them a choice between acting on principle and following the bumper-sticker injunction to commit a random act of kindness, and they will take the bumper sticker every time. No country that has declared war on elitism can tolerate a Freudian Superego, so we have produced an American model, the Make-Nice PDQ. It runs on empty.

Thanks to Yankee ingenuity, the Id is but a shadow of its former self. The classic Id is the primitive member of the psychical triumvirate that horrifies the civilized Ego and the idealistic Superego by bringing us face to face with our unspeakable urges -- murder, rape, incest, and so forth. Americans have a plentiful supply of these, but we shunt them aside so that our Id can concentrate on more serious unspeakable urges such as racism, sexism, and homophobia. This is clearly not your father's Id: The Freudian Id is Mr. Hyde, but the American Id is Dr. Jekyll in a snit.

Freud reasoned that an Ego governed by social convention and a Superego governed by moral values would successfully "censor" the Id, leading to mental health and public safety. We, on the other hand, give the Ego free rein, censor the Superego, and let the Id censor us, and then wonder why mental health and public safety keep eluding us.

We are the world's most reluctant psychologists, craving the answers that insight alone can provide, yet loath to delve too deeply into human nature for fear of finding something we can't deal with. Shunning insight while noisily proclaiming that we "care about people" is awkward, however, so we have developed a compromise technique that might be called, with the usual American straight face, "unreflective insight." It is insight reduced to shallow, mawkish efforts to "understand" the suffering of the victim du jour by asking dumb questions ("What went through your mind when . . . ?") or by airing superficial documentaries on venerated neurotics like Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland, featuring a bathrobe-clad Hugh Hefner gassing about "the quality of vulnerability."

Being a writer has made me a lifelong practitioner of no-holds-barred insight, driven by an irresistible impulse to shovel through mountains of received bull to get to the bottom of things. My research tool is the unshockable member of the psychical triumvirate, the classic Id. Freud said we were supposed to censor it, but I release mine on its own recognizance to see what it can find out.

Take, for example, Andrea Yates. How did such an undesirable woman conceive all those kids in the first place? She looks like Olive Oyl crossed with Susan Sontag. What man would want to sleep with her?

Rusty Yates, that's who. When an unusually handsome man marries an unusually homely woman, all the sentimental slobs curl their toes and sigh, "Love is blind," but there's more to it than that. He may be a narcissist who needs to be the beautiful half of the couple. He may be an S.O.B. taking out kindness insurance to cover his true nature. Or he may be so insecure that he subconsciously picks a wife that other men won't try to take away from him.