Thursday, April 28, 2016

Id and It

The Latin 'id' means 'it'.  It thus signifies a singular, non-human entity.  But, Freud uses it mean an unorganized manifold of drives.  Furthermore, one of those drives is that of reproduction, a process which is hardly non-human, and which is the ground of a multiplicity for which the most apt pronoun is 'we'.  So, one of his diagnostic tools, by means of which psychological disorders are to be cured, treats a fundamental vital process in a human organism as if it were an inhuman alien force, thus raising the question of its own soundness, a methodological problem that Freud does not seem to address.

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