Reconstructing a personality by understanding principles of the psyche

 The id is the seat of our impulses and operates by the pleasure principle and avoids the unpleasant such as hunger and being hot and cold. The fulfilment of basic drives also applies to comfort and sex as well as food and warmth. The id is the pure selfish desire instinct and typically seeks pleasure through immediate gratification and experiences un-pleasure or pain when this is thwarted.  It takes no account of the external world and is not affected by logic or reality. The id is the unsocialised part of our personality which wants to satisfy all our basic urges without waiting or being polite.
We are all born with the id in full force. It is unregulated and untouched by the constraints of the world outside our minds. In the adult, the id is entirely unconscious, while the ego and the superego extend from the conscious down into the unconscious. Freud saw the adult personality as being an iceberg with the ego and superego above the surface of consciousness, but the vast bulk of the id, which contains all our needs and wishes, lurks beneath in the unconscious.
The The id is part of the mind that includes hardwired, inherited, biological animal instincts that Freud said included Eros, the sex, life instinct, including the libido and Thanatos, the death instinct, responsible for aggression. The sex drive or libido Freud viewed as one of the primary sources of psychic energy that motivates the personality. The id is driven by the libido which is the collective energy of life’s instincts and will to survive. It contains all of our basic instincts that demand satisfaction, the id must be satisfied, it is also hard to reason with. A large part of the personality consists of desires and one’s attempts to satisfy them.
Conflicts with the realities of the external world cause the maturing child to develop the ego which which is the intelligent part of consciousness, the part that manages the conflicting forces of desire and restraint, or in other words it balances the demands of the id and the superego. The ego part of the psyche does this in such a way designed to get optimum rewards for the id at minimum cost. It tries to meet the demands of the id by negotiating the real world. The part of the psych that has to deal with reality becomes the ego and it is rational but purely practical and without morality or ethics.
The ego negotiates with the id and operates by the reality principle. To survive we must sometimes be realistic and plan for the future and the ego works on how to realistically meet the demands of the id, delaying or compromising gratification in order to achieve pleasure and avoid pain. The id cant always be allowed its own way so the ego often has to battle with the id.
It is the ego that experiences frustration when a desire is unmet or gets stifled. The ego’s main function is to mediate between the id’s demands and the external world around us, it is the voice of reason as it controls impulses and forms judgements on how to act. It is the moderator suspended between the id and the superego. The ego negotiates with the id to get what it wants without costing it too much in the long run. The ego accomplishes this important task by converting, diverting and transforming the powerful forces of the id into more useful and realistic modes of satisfaction. It attempts to harness the id’s power, regulating it in order to achieve satisfaction despite the limits of reality. The ego is under constant scrutiny by the superego. The ego itself tries to match up our inner world with the real world and is the part of the psyche that other people interact with directly.
Being a social animal involves give and take, we therefore have to develop a force of restraint within us. This is known in Freudian theory as the superego. This is the stored inferences we make from what our parents say to us during that stage of development when we do not have adequate critical skills or a reflexive knowledge to evaluate these. Such a stage of development may be termed a repressed infantile sexuality where we have to take for granted that some things are bad without having to experience them ourselves without the required skills necessary to do so. Conversely if an individual only listened to the demands of the superego,the behaviour would be so constrained that it would satisfy none of the demands of the id. The superego which keeps us on the straight and narrow, wants to do the right thing by imposing parental and societal values and telling us what we should and should not do. We hear the superego when we berate ourselves for thinking and acting in a certain way. There is much instrumental sense in the influence of the superego. Parents know that by exercising restraint the level of rewards can be much greater. This may be termed as a process of deferred gratification.
People without a significant superego are known as psychopaths or sociopaths. The lack of influence from the superego causes their behaviour to be selfish to a level which their community will not accept, or allow to continue. The superego becomes clear only when it confronts the ego with hostility. Superego takes its meaning from the word super which means above and looking down on the id ego battle. It expects your ego to be strong and effective in it’s struggles with the libido’s force. The superego is the conscience that stops an individual from doing wrong, particularly in the sense of being anti-social. The judgemental superego acting as our inner voice of conscience and control, and the ego, or self, try to mediate between the inner world and the reality of the world outside. Whereas the id and ego are selfish the superego considers others too.  
Morality and ethics feed into the superego which monitors the ego and the id and suppresses thoughts and behaviours with guilt  when the ego transgresses the moral rules, or gives into the id, and when it transgresses the ideal self. The ideal self combines the the aspirations and ambitions set out for the individual by family and society. Failure of the ego to live up to the ideal self also leads to guilt, but proper behaviour is rewarded by pride.  Morals or values feed into the superego from the family and wider society and works to control the impulses of the id, especially those which are taboo, such as lust or aggression.
The whole system is supposed to be self-correcting working via feedback loops based on the principle of tension reduction, seeking the path of thought and behaviour that gives rise to the least psychic tension. The ego has to serve three harsh masters and it has to do its best to reconcile the demands of all three. The three tyrants are the external world with its environmental triggers in the context of certain setting events, the superego, and the id.
Defence mechanisms are the means by which the conscious self, the ego, protects itself against the id which is the unconscious repository of the base urges, desires and illicit drives. Not all desires of the id are bad as my desire pushes me through life. It leads me to seek the things I need to survive. An overbearing superego and an unrealistic ideal self  can cause neurosis, anxiety and depression. When the critical voice of the superego leads to anxiety we can bring ego defences into play to prevent the anxiety from becoming overwhelming.
The ego uses defence mechanisms to help people reach a mental compromise when dealing with things that cause internal conflict. Common mechanisms that distort a sense of reality include denial, displacement,intellectualisation and projection. Humour, and sublimation and displacement are three more examples of defence mechanisms. Regression is another example from a range of defence mechanisms which are techniques used to reduce ego anxiety. A combination of defence mechanism such as denial, displacement and finally repression can lead to an organic psychosis. Freud said that one principle governing the personality was that the ego should be protected from anxiety and this is one reason that most of our motivations are unconscious. He argued that people subconsciously employ defence mechanisms when faced with anxiety or unpleasant emotions. These mechanisms help them to cope with memories or impulses that they find stressful or distasteful by tricking them into thinking that everyone is fine.
Theories of ego defences has contributed to humanistic therapies. Freud’s daughter and other successors developed a humane spin on Freud’s model of the self, in the form of ego psychology which focused on the mechanisms used by the ego to deal with the world, especially the ego defence mechanisms. Ego psychology argued that the ego was not defined by its constant internal battle with the id and the superego and was not governed soley by the need to reduce tension, and could be motivated by the feedback loops such as seeking novelty and mastering new skills.  
Humanistic therapies have been superseded by transpersonal psychology, and more recently by person-centred psychology. With person-centred psychology an individual’s needs are met in an appropriate unique and meaningful way that is important to the individual during. This has applications in episodes of behaviour that challenges in the context of environmental triggers of which examples are temperature, noise and light levels, in external setting events. An  internal setting event may include self-esteem when experiencing frustration over a task and may be remedied by a guided walk or switching to a preferred activity as examples of distraction techniques.

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