Id Freud conceived the id as the unconscious instinctual component of personality that is present at birth, the source of bodily needs and wants, emotional impulses and desires, especially aggression and the sexual drive. The id acts according to the pleasure principle—the psychic force oriented to the immediate gratification of impulse and desire.

Freud described the id as the dark, inaccessible part of our personality. Understanding of the id is limited to the analysis of dreams and neurotic symptoms, and it can only be described in terms of its contrast with the ego. It has no organization and no collective will: it is concerned only with the satisfaction of drives by the pleasure principle. It is oblivious to reason and the presumptions of ordinary conscious life: contrary impulses exist side by side, without canceling each other. . . There is nothing in the id that could be compared with negation. Nothing in the id which corresponds to the idea of time. The id knows no judgments of value: no good and evil, no morality.

Developmentally, the id precedes the ego. The id consists of the basic instinctual drives that are present at birth, and by the pleasure principle. id, part of which then develops into a structured ego, a concept of self. Freud describes the id as the great reservoir of libido, the energy of desire, usually conceived as sexual, the life instincts that are constantly seeking a renewal of life.

• vegetative actions of body controlled by autonomic nervous system

• ID
  • primitive and instinctive component of personality.
  • inherited (i.e., biological) components of personality present at birth
    • sex (life) instinct
    • Eros (which contains the libido)
    • aggressive (death) instinct