In psychoanalysis, the structure of personality is the model Sigmund Freud proposed in 1923: an id that holds the drives, an ego that deals with reality, and a superego that holds conscience and ideals. The APA Dictionary of Psychology calls it the structural model. (APA Dictionary of Psychology)

Later analysts asked how well a particular person’s personality holds together. Otto Kernberg’s answer is a scale of personality organization running from neurotic through borderline to psychotic (Hörz-Sagstetter and colleagues, Current Psychiatry Reports, 2021), assessed by interview and used in treatment planning. (Hörz-Sagstetter and colleagues, Journal of Personality Assessment, 2018)

He did not mean three little people living in the head. He asked his readers to picture "the areas of colour shading off into one another that are to be found in modern pictures." (Freud, "New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis," 1933) The parts describe a conflict. The conflict is the point.

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What is the structure of personality in psychology?

In psychoanalysis, the structure of personality divides the mind into three components: the id, the ego and the superego. According to Freud, they are always interacting. The id represents the drives, the ego represents the outside world, and the superego represents moral standards. They want different things and have to settle with one another. The APA Dictionary describes the structural model as "the view that the personality comprises three divisions or functions." (APA Dictionary of Psychology)

Freud’s own summary takes one sentence: "Super-ego, ego and id, then, are the three realms, regions or provinces into which we divide the mental apparatus of the individual." (Freud, 1933)

Most of the settling happens out of awareness. The settlements a person reaches again and again are what others come to recognize as character.

How did the structural model replace the topographic model?

The topographic model, Freud’s first map of the mind, sorted mental life by awareness into unconscious, preconscious and conscious. The APA Dictionary dates it to 1900 (APA Dictionary of Psychology) and records that Freud proposed the structural model "in 1923 to replace his earlier topographic model." (APA Dictionary of Psychology)

The reason lay in treatment. Near something painful, a patient’s associations would fail. Freud called this resistance. It came from the ego, the part supposed to be conscious, yet the patient knew nothing of it. "We have come upon something in the ego itself which is also unconscious, which behaves exactly like the repressed." (Freud, "The Ego and the Id," 1923)

A map drawn by awareness could no longer explain the conflicts that make people ill. Freud wrote that "we land in endless confusion and difficulty" when trying "to derive neuroses from a conflict between the conscious and the unconscious." In its place he put "the antithesis between the organized ego and what is repressed and dissociated from it." (Freud, 1923)

By 1933 he wrote: "we will no longer use the word ‘unconscious’ in the sense of a system." (Freud, 1933) Being unconscious became a quality any of the three agencies could have. The old region became the id.

What is the id?

The id is the part of the personality that holds the drives and wants them satisfied now. The APA Dictionary says that "it has no inner organization and operates in obedience to the pleasure principle." (APA Dictionary of Psychology)

According to Freud, the id seeks immediate gratification of its desires. It knows only the pleasure principle: tension should be discharged now, whatever the cost. In his later theory its instincts are of two kinds, Eros, the life and sexual drives, and a destructive drive.

Freud called it "the obscure inaccessible part of our personality," and reached for an image: "a chaos, a cauldron of seething excitement." (Freud, 1933)

Inside the id, Freud observed, "Contradictory impulses exist side by side without neutralizing each other or drawing apart." It keeps no calendar either: impressions pushed into it by repression "are virtually immortal and are preserved for whole decades as though they had only recently occurred." (Freud, 1933) That is how a slight from thirty years ago can arrive as fresh as this morning’s.

Nor is the id wicked. "Naturally, the id knows no values, no good and evil, no morality." (Freud, 1933) Judgement comes from elsewhere.

What is the ego?

The ego is the organizing part of the personality, the part that perceives, thinks and acts, and that has to reconcile the id with reality and with conscience. In the APA Dictionary’s analytic definition, the ego enables a person "to perceive, reason, solve problems, test reality, and adjust the instinctual impulses of the id to the demands of the superego." (APA Dictionary of Psychology)

Its job is to mediate between the id, the superego and the outside world. Where the id follows the pleasure principle, the ego follows the reality principle: it seeks ways to satisfy the id’s desires that the world will allow, which often means delaying gratification. Freud described it as "that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world." (Freud, 1923)

His best known image is a rider. The ego is "like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse." (Freud, 1923)

Then came the honest part: "Often a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego constantly carries into action the wishes of the id as if they were its own." (Freud, 1923) A fair number of decisions get made this way.

What is the superego?

The superego is the part of the personality that watches and judges: conscience, together with the ideals a person measures themselves against. The superego opposes the id’s impulses and holds the ego to moral standards. The APA Dictionary defines it as "the moral component of the personality that represents parental and societal standards." (APA Dictionary of Psychology)

In The Ego and the Id Freud described "a differentiating grade within the ego, which may be called the ego-ideal or super-ego." (Freud, 1923) Ten years later, in the New Introductory Lectures, he wrote: "I will henceforward call this function in the ego the ‘super-ego’." (Freud, 1933) He allowed the ordinary word only grudgingly: "you may call it, but in a whisper, the conscience." (Freud, 1933)

In his account the superego emerges later in development and begins with the parents: "When we were little children we knew these higher natures, we admired them and feared them; and later we took them into ourselves." (Freud, 1923) From then on it "observes, guides and threatens the ego in just the same way as the parents acted to the child before." (Freud, 1933)

Guilt is how the superego measures the gap: "The tension between the demands of conscience and the actual attainments of the ego is experienced as a sense of guilt." (Freud, 1923)

One observation still surprises people: a harsh superego does not require harsh parents. Freud found that "the super-ego may reflect the same relentless harshness even when the up-bringing has been gentle and kind, and avoided threats and punishment as far as possible." (Freud, 1933) Kind parents can raise a child with an unforgiving superego, and nobody need be to blame.

How do the id, ego and superego interact?

The id, ego and superego interact by negotiation, and the ego does the negotiating. The id presses with its impulses, the superego judges by its moral standards, the outside world sets limits, and the ego tries to manage a result all three will accept.

In Freud’s words, "The poor ego has a still harder time of it; it has to serve three harsh masters, and has to do its best to reconcile the claims and demands of all three." (Freud, 1933)

Each master brings its own anxiety: "reality anxiety in face of the external world, moral anxiety in face of the super-ego, and neurotic anxiety in face of the strength of the passions in the id." Small wonder, he thought, that people "so often cannot repress the cry: ‘Life is not easy’." (Freud, 1933)

What comes out of the negotiation is usually a compromise, and compromises are what an observer actually sees: a symptom, a habit, a trait of character.

What happens if the id, ego and superego are out of balance?

Freud never pictured a perfect balance between the id, ego and superego. Trouble starts when one of the three components wins too often. When the id’s impulses win, behavior turns impulsive. When the superego wins, the result is harsh self-criticism and a guilt that no achievement settles. When the ego can only manage by leaning hard on its defenses, it pays in distorted reality, as the next section describes. The aim of analysis, in Freud’s words quoted below, is to strengthen the ego, the part that has to mediate between the other two.

What are defense mechanisms?

Defense mechanisms are the ego’s unconscious ways of protecting itself from the anxiety that inner conflict produces. The APA Dictionary defines a defense mechanism as "an unconscious reaction pattern employed by the ego to protect itself from the anxiety that arises from psychic conflict." (APA Dictionary of Psychology)

The best known list comes from Anna Freud’s The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, first published in German in 1936. (Anna Freud, 1936) She listed nine already described in the literature: "regression, repression, reaction-formation, isolation, undoing, projection, introjection, turning against the self and reversal." Then she added "a tenth, which pertains rather to the study of the normal than to that of neurosis: sublimation, or displacement of instinctual aims." (Anna Freud, 1936)

Defenses are not in themselves a sign of trouble. The APA entry notes that they "range from mature to immature, depending on how much they distort reality." In recent theories they "are seen as normal means of coping with everyday problems and external threats." (APA Dictionary of Psychology) What matters is which defenses a person leans on, and what they cost.

What are Kernberg’s levels of personality organization?

Otto Kernberg’s levels of personality organization describe how well a person’s personality holds together, on a scale "ranging from normal/neurotic personality organization (NPO) to borderline personality organization (BPO) to psychotic personality organization (PPO)." The levels are judged across "identity, primitive defense mechanisms, and reality testing." (Hörz-Sagstetter and colleagues, 2021)

Kernberg introduced the middle level in a 1967 paper, "Borderline personality organization." (Kernberg, 1967) The neurotic level "includes an integrated identity, use of mostly mature defense mechanisms and stable reality testing." The borderline level "is characterized by impaired identity, the use of mostly primitive defense mechanisms, and fluctuating difficulties with reality testing." At the psychotic level, "the suspension of reality testing is a core feature." (Hörz-Sagstetter and colleagues, 2021)

Identity here means, in the words of the team behind the Structured Interview of Personality Organization (STIPO), "one’s sense of self and significant others." (Stern and colleagues, Journal of Personality Assessment, 2010) At the neurotic level that sense is integrated. At the borderline level it is impaired. In one case the review describes, a patient assessed at the borderline level showed "fluctuating self-evaluations from idealization to derogation" and relied on "primitive defenses such as splitting, projection, externalization." (Hörz-Sagstetter and colleagues, 2021)

Borderline organization is not the same as borderline personality disorder. In the model it is the level where severe personality disorders in general begin: "the threshold for fulfilling a severe PD is the level of BPO." (Hörz-Sagstetter and colleagues, 2021) The practice’s page on personality disorders describes this kind of difficulty as "The trouble that does not feel like a symptom, because it feels like you."

None of this can be self-assessed. Kernberg described his structural interview in 1981 (Kernberg, 1981), and the STIPO was later designed "for the dimensional assessment of identity, primitive defenses, and reality testing." (Stern and colleagues, 2010) An article is not an interview.

What does personality organization mean for treatment?

The level of personality organization helps decide which treatment fits and how long it may need to run. Interviews based on Kernberg’s model, one research group writes, "provide the clinician with specific implications for prognosis and treatment planning." (Hörz-Sagstetter and colleagues, 2018)

One study followed 326 outpatients with mood or anxiety disorders for five years. Its first practical conclusion: "Short-term therapy gives faster benefits for neurotic patients but not for patients with higher level borderline personality organization." Its second: "Sustained remission from symptoms is more probable after long-term than short-term therapy." (Knekt and colleagues, Psychology and Psychotherapy, 2017) These are group findings, not a forecast for any one person.

For the more severe end of the range there is transference-focused psychotherapy, "a manualized evidence-based treatment for borderline and other severe personality disorders that is based on psychoanalytic object relations theory." (Yeomans and colleagues, Psychotherapy, 2013)

Severity changes the first step too. The 2021 review reports that patients at the psychotic and lower borderline levels "were more likely to drop out of treatment." (Hörz-Sagstetter and colleagues, 2021) The practice’s page on personality disorders is plain that for anyone in crisis or in danger of self-harm, "exploratory analytic work is not the right first step." If that is where you are, call or text 988, or call 911.

The id, ego and superego in everyday life

In everyday life, the id, ego and superego show up as small negotiations that never feel like negotiations: what a person allows themselves, what they forbid, and what they arrange not to notice. He thought it "very probable that the extent of these differentiations varies very greatly from person to person." (Freud, 1933)

Three examples, invented for illustration:

  • The alarm goes at 6:30. The wish to stay in bed is the id’s. The knowledge that the 7:10 train will not wait comes by way of the ego. The thought that people who oversleep are lazy is the superego’s. The compromise is ten more minutes and breakfast standing up.
  • A man is unfailingly, slightly too warmly, polite to the colleague who got the promotion he wanted. That is reaction formation, in which unacceptable impulses "are denied and are replaced in consciousness with their opposite." (APA Dictionary of Psychology)
  • A woman raised by gentle, encouraging parents rereads a short email to her manager four times at midnight, certain its one typo will be noticed. Her conscience is harsher than anyone who raised her, as Freud said it can be. (Freud, 1933)

In none of these does the person feel a conflict. They feel a mood, a habit, a trait, which is how the three components usually look from the inside. When the same compromise is made over and over across a life, it starts to look like fate, and psychoanalysis has a name for that too: repetition compulsion.

Questions people ask

Does the superego control the id and the ego?

The superego does not control the id directly. The superego watches and judges the ego, and the ego does the controlling. Freud wrote that the ego’s "every movement is watched by the severe super-ego," which "punishes the ego with the feelings of tension which manifest themselves as a sense of inferiority and guilt." (Freud, 1933)

Is the ego the same as the self?

Not in psychoanalysis. The APA Dictionary’s first sense of ego is "the self, particularly the conscious sense of self." Its psychoanalytic sense is "the component of the personality that deals with the external world and its practical demands." (APA Dictionary of Psychology) Neither meaning has much to do with vanity.

Is Freud’s structural model still used?

Yes, in revised form. The ego’s defenses are still one of the three domains on which Kernberg’s levels of organization are assessed. (Hörz-Sagstetter and colleagues, 2021)

Interviews built on his model are "coherent with the alternative model for personality disorder diagnosis" in Section III of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). (Hörz-Sagstetter and colleagues, 2018) He asked for patience: "Do not judge too harshly of a first attempt at picturing a thing so elusive as the human mind." (Freud, 1933)

Can personality organization change?

Psychoanalysis assumes that the balance between the parts can shift, and research has found that personality organization can change during psychotherapy. The 2021 review reports: "Changes in personality organization predicted both symptom and personality improvement during psychotherapy." (Hörz-Sagstetter and colleagues, 2021)

Freud said the object of analytic treatment was "to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the super-ego," and summed it up: "Where id was, there shall ego be. It is reclamation work, like the draining of the Zuyder Zee." (Freud, 1933) How much changes differs between people, and the practice’s page on personality disorders is plain about the pace: "this is measured in years, not months."

Begin with a conversation

Personality organization cannot be read off a page. It shows itself over time, in how someone speaks about themselves and others. This practice offers psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, with online sessions only, for residents of Washington, DC, Florida and Michigan, and (through PsyPact) participating PSYPACT jurisdictions including Maryland and Virginia. The first 15-minute consultation is free, and carries no obligation. To arrange one, contact the practice.

About Dr. John J. Hartman

John J. Hartman, Ph.D. is a board-certified psychoanalyst (FABP) with over 50 years of clinical experience. He holds a B.A. from Harvard College and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Michigan, with psychoanalytic training at the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute. A former tenured Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Michigan, he is a training and supervising analyst and has published six books and numerous peer-reviewed papers. He practices online and is licensed in DC, Florida and Michigan, with PsyPACT authorization across more than 40 states.

References and further reading