The ego interprets the world for the id and protects it from that world. To fulfill its function, it must be rational, logical, and aware of time.

What Freud called resistance is then seen as a response to great fear of those repressed feelings and an unconscious unwillingness to experience them, not because they are morally reprehensible, but because they are dangerous and painful.

imperatives? The pressures we put on ourselves, and the workings of the superego, infuriate the id. All the narcissistic id wants is to gratify its desires for comfort, pleasure, and dependency, but instead it is being pressured to be a responsible adult. The result may be emotional pain, sadness, anger, and, cumulatively, rage.

“The ego is after all only a portion of the id, a portion that has been expediently modified by the proximity of the external world with its threat of danger.”

The ego is aware of dangerous goings-on in the unconscious and that these feelings are striving to come to consciousness, so it takes steps, sometimes quite dramatic steps to be sure, to see that the danger and emotional pain remain contained.

And as if things were not complicated enough, the mind has developed still another trait—the superego—that Freud viewed in moral terms. As he saw it, the superego insists that you not only have to survive, but you have to survive as a successful, achieving individual.