Author: Jacqueline Moore

id – what drives us to gratify our needs, these our are innate instinctual drives for satisfaction in things like food, safety and sex this uses the “pleasure principle” –  this is the need to immediately satisfy this innate instincts but we can’t be immediately gratified as babies so we learn “learned helplessness” – have to rely heavily on people around us and the environment (unconscious)

ego – “conscious-self” – day to day awareness, how we perceive the world, what we experience in everyday life, what controls our innate desires so that we satisfy our needs when its practical, reasonable and socially acceptable – basically the balance between the id and the superego. ego reality principle operates the ego, this is how you parents teach you to reasonably satisfy these needs, when it is done appropriately it leads to well adjusted adults.

superego – provides the moral standards by which ego operates (unconscious), how we wish we could behave and how our societal and emotional expectation reign in these instinctual desires.

These 3 elements of the mind can be understood by the Jockey analogy: ego is the jockey, id is the horse and superego is the track- A good jockey can account for a bad track and a wild horse, essentially meaning that the Id finds balance and compromise between the superego and the ego.

 

Source: PSYC 260 Textbook

http://www.simplypsychology.org/psyche.html

http://psychology.about.com/od/theoriesofpersonality/a/personalityelem.htm

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Ego,_superego,_and_id

http://www.esoteric.msu.edu/VolumeV/Blake.htm

http://bahumuth.chaosnet.org/blake.html

http://www.swedenborg.com/emanuel-swedenborg/influence/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emanuel_Swedenborg

The church that Swedenborg led, New Jerusalem Church, is the only church on record that is known to have had William Blake in attendance.  According to the Esoteric article, “Even when Blake seems to be making purely theological statements, there are inevitable links to be drawn to Swedenborg’s diatribe against the Christian Churches and the way they have duped man into spiritual inaptitude. This dimension is not always expressed with full clarity in Blake’s writing without familiarity with the source texts to which he alludes.” It also states: “There was a widespread tendency among Swedenborgians to turn their prophet’s teaching into a social gospel that fitted a radical and anticlerical outlook of the late eighteenth century.” This tendency can be identified in Blake’s writings throughout Songs of Innocence and Experience.

In an article on Swedenborgs influence, Blake was known to have created paintings based on the writings of Swedenborg. it also states that: “Blake was strongly attracted to Swedenborg’s vision of divine love pervading the universe and giving life to all of creation”. Blake owned several of Swedenborg’s major works and was attracted to the radical ideas and the romantic movement that were prevalent in Swedenborg’s writing. Both Swedenborg and Blake believed in the underlying spiritual force to the world but rejected the ritual and dogma of organized church. Blake still maintained christian values, which were heavy influences in his work but still possessed a opposition to the church and the clergy as he supported the ideas of the church but not the implementation, specifically because he disliked organization of the church.