Id, Ego, and Superego

Victorian Era

In the Victorian Era, it was all about man and man only. The man was the bread winner, the man was the one who made decisions, and the man was in charge of basically everything. The female, however, was the considered angel of the household. She followed the rules and never left the house. She had to stay in the house and provide a comforting home by cooking food, cleaning, and taking care of the kids. The Victorian Era was described as women being in the outer circle and men being in the inner circle. Women had no rights. The Id, Superego, and Ego play an important role in this era. Let us look at the women’s perspective. The superego would be the society with the rules that women were inferior to men and they didn’t know better. The id was the part that wanted out of this whole thing and “get loose” or be free in the society to do what they see fit, to make decisions, and be somebody. The ego is mostly played out in the women because she was constantly trying to balance the id and superego. She wanted to be free and do what she wanted and show her true emotions, but she didn’t want to get in trouble in today’s society, she doesn’t want her husband’s reputation to crumble.

A perfect example of this would be a play called Overtones where there were these two main characters, Harriet and Margaret, who had the id part which were called Hetty and Maggie. These women were in the Victorian Era so they would constantly come over to each other’s house to drink tea. While they’re outer parts would speak in a positive, dainty, and proper manner, the other part, they’re IDs, would be jealous of each other and each other’s husbands. It truly showed the ways of the Victorian Era and Freud’s Psychoanalytic theory.

Today’s Era

Today’s Era is rather confusing in a sense that we are repressive, yet regressing. This era is repressive because we are constantly trying to hide everything that is considered negative and that could panic our nation into chaos. We do this, YET we don’t. You see, there are things that we hide, but things that we still show. Sounds confusing right? Let me give you an example. 9/11 was considered one of the most impacted times in our American History. We panicked, everyone thought we were going to die and we had a feeling that people were going to have to go to war. We were doing the right thing...in the beginning. We went to Afghanistan to try to find Bin Laden and to no avail; we couldn’t find him so what we did? We, or the president I should say, decided to go to a place where it had nothing to do with the 9/11 incident and that was Iraq. The American people were confused like “Why?” of course the president needed a reason so he said that they were hiding weapons of mast destruction, which later on we found out was false. Indeed, it would seem the president is hiding something, but what? Bin Laden perhaps? Who knows, but what we do know is that our Era we’re repressive for one thing and not repressive for others. We are regressing as well. Americans are getting stupider by the day. When we are told to not smoke and we see the warnings and not to take