Born in 1856, Sigmund Freud was raised in Vienna, Austria, as the son of a Jewish merchant. After completing medical school in 1886, Freud began practicing neurology, specializing in hysteria. Concluding that its origins were sexual in nature, he developed psychoanalytic techniques to encourage patients to recall past experiences. When female patients reported prepubertal sexual encounters with their fathers, Freud struggled with deciding whether these encounters were fantasies or actual events. He underwent self-analysis, and his theory of psychosexual development ultimately evolved from this process.

Freud indulged in cocaine to relieve his depression, but his addiction to nicotine caused his death from cancer of the mouth. In 1938, he left Vienna in poor health to seek refuge from the Nazis, who had destroyed his Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Freud died in London in 1939.

Freud divided personality into three components: id, ego, and superego. His concept of the id was influenced by Darwin. The id is the seat of instinctual drives, especially sex, food, and aggression. Operating on the pleasure principle, the id seeks immediate gratification and wants to avoid physical and psychic pain. It engages in primary process thinking, which is illogical and indulges in fantasy.

The id’s self-serving drive for pleasure conflicts with society’s norms for acceptable behavior. The ego emerges from this conflict, and works to keep the id out of trouble. It balances the id’s drives with society’s expectations by making decisions based on the reality principle—that is, delaying gratification until socially appropriate means for meeting instinctual drives can be found. The ego engages in secondary process thinking, which is realistic, and tries to solve problems.

The superego is the moral component of the personality. Emerging around ages 3 to 5 years, the superego represents an internalization of social standards for good and bad behavior. It is the individual’s way of policing his or her own behavior. When the superego becomes too demanding, the individual feels excessive guilt for failing to meet moral perfection. In the absence of a superego, the individual feels no remorse.