Abstract

The mind is not unitary. Despite enduring Cartesian influences, the idea that mental activity is the work of an assortment of processes remains one of the more plausible guiding assumptions of psychological research. Freud endorsed a distinctive variant of this broader explanatory commitment. Beginning with his earlier metapsychological works, he slowly developed a view of the mind as a collection of closely related systems. Famously, these ultimately became known as the id, ego, and super-ego. Like much of Freud’ s work, the structural model was largely based on observation of fractures in the mental edifice resulting from various forms of psychopathology. The etiology of such cases was traced to destructive conflicts between the three central components. But while conflict is indeed definitional of these relations, it need not lead inexorably to the deployment of primitive defenses or to pathological outcomes. Freud described the workings of relatively typical minds in this way, with the constant tension between systems resolvable by way of ongoing negotiation. The model thus aspired to a full explanation of the varieties of mental life. All told, it is probably fair to say that it has had limited influence on psychological research outside the psychoanalytic tradition, although there is continuing interest in its relation to contemporary work in the cognitive sciences, including neuroscience.