Introduction
The Id is the Latin translation of Sigmund Freud’s “das es.” A direct English translation of “das es” is “the it.” This translation is used in the Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud. The id is the psychical agency in Freud’s structural topography of the psyche which is unconscious, containing repressed innate instincts and primordial objects and adapted or psychically determined drives and objects. For Freud, the goal of psychoanalysis is to tame and transform the energy and objects of the id, moving them to the ego and superego in the service of civilization.
The id has no formal place in religious and spiritual literature. Freud acknowledged that his “it” was significantly influenced by the physician analyst Georg Groddeck, whose “it” concept is both compatible with and divergent from Freud’s. Groddeck’s “it” is “all” and “The Other” of human experience, lending itself to interpretations of the innate presence of the Divine or the godhead in human...
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Teitelbaum, S. (2020). Id. In: Leeming, D.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24348-7_319
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