Id ego superego examples in movies movie#

In so far as such categorisations are possible at all, most movies probably contain elements that can be considered to belong to all three components ( The Sixth Sense is a film in which it would be possible to locate all three of these topical areas as rather equally distributed, I think, in a way that perhaps accounts both for its success and for its unresolved contradictions). Of course, it goes without saying that the boundaries here are neither hard nor fast. This would include 'worthy' movies designed to teach us important lessons about the crimes and prejudices of the past, movies whose goal is to make us realise just how wrong we have been all this time, movies that show us that we are the problem, and so on: you know, the kind of movies favoured by the Oscars and all that (but not limited to those kind of movies). You know, the usual junk (but this is not really to say there can't be good ego movies).Ī super-ego film would be a third kind of movie, not just one that thematises questions of guilt, but movies that are intended as a kind of super-ego for the audience. By the end of the movie, the audience is supposed to have travelled along the same journey with the main characters, emerging with a better understanding, renewed faith, a sense of hope, to have grown just a little, become just a little bit better person, or whatever.

Id ego superego examples in movies movie#

Every conventional movie that presents a character's 'conflict' and then resolves that conflict through the narrative would have some relationship to this kind of 'ego' film. Such films try to expose us to contents found in the dark depths of our soul, for better or worse.Įgo films would be all those that try to negotiate with the id and find a 'healthy' pathway through our relationship to our fears, desires and guilt. So, then, this is to suggest, for example, that there are 'id' films, such as, for instance, horror movies whose aim is to tap into individual and collective fears, but where fear and desire are inextricably linked, so that our 'primal' fears cannot be divorced from our primal drives.

Leaving that to one side, however – which obviously means I'm guilty of doing the very thing of which I am accusing film theory, but where I am telling myself this is OK because it is within the confines of a Criticker post rather than an academic treatise – it does seem to me to be possible, in a very/too simple way, to divide films according to Freud's second topography.

But I also tend to think that so-called 'film theory' tends to do this applying in a rather cavalier way, without paying sufficient attention to the fundamental questions of what kind of thing a movie is and what it means to interpret a film in any way whatsoever, let alone psychoanalytically. Nevertheless, in my view, the medium of film is one that invites artistic constructions with a significant psychological aspect, and this more or less justifies the idea of applying psychoanalytic concepts (hence for instance the popular notion that every monster movie is really about a hero who projects his repressed feelings outward with such force that they assume material, monstrous form). These are not questions I can deal with here. Obviously this raises several theoretical questions, first among which is whether this tripartite division remains useful or valid in psychology today, and second among which is on what basis psychoanalytic categories can be extended to collective or aesthetic objects such as films. The premise underlying this post is that it may be useful to divide movies according to the components of Freud's 'structural model' of the psyche: id, ego, and super-ego.