Freud and No More Parades

Sigmund Freud May 6 1856 - Sept 23 1939
* "In each individual there is a coherent organization of mental processes and we call this the ego. It is to the ego that consciousness is attached; the ego controls the approaches to motility- that is, to the mental agency which supervises all its own constituent processes, and which goes to sleep at night, though even then it exercises the censorship on dreams. From this ego proceeds the repressions...by means of which is sought to exclude certain trends in the mind not nearly from consciousness effectiveness and activity"(8).
*"We have come upon something in the ego itself which is also unconscious which behaves exactly like the repressed- that is, which produces powerful effects without itself being conscious and which requires special work before it can be made conscious"(9).-meaning that there is a coherent ego and the repressed which is split from it.
*"The ego is not sharply spererated from the id; its lower portion merges into it. But the repressed merges into the id as well and is merely a part of it.The repressed is only cut off sharply from the ego by the resistences of repression; it can communicate with the ego through the id.... We might add, perhaps, that the ego wears a 'cap of hearing'- on the one side only" (17-8).
*The ego seeks to bring the influence of the external world to bear upon the id and its tendencies, and endeavours to substitute the reality principle for the pleasure principle with reigns unrestrictidly in the id. For the ego, perception plays the part which in the id, falls to instinct. The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions"(19).
*In this view Tietjens is pure super ego, he tries to keep everything in control, yet cracks and Sylvia is pure id.
*"The functional importance of the ego is manifested in the fact that normally control over the approaches to motility, devolves upon it. Thus in its relation to the id, it is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own strength, while the ego uses borrowed forces.... Often a rider, if he is not to be parted from his hose, is obligated to guide it where he wants to go, so in the same way the ego is in the habit of transforming the id's will into action as if it were its own"(19)
*This fits in nicely with "What about the accursed obsession with O Nine Morgan that intermittently jumped on him? All the while he had been riding Schomburg the day before, O Nine Morgan had seemed to be just before the coffin-headed brute's off-shoulder. The animal must fall.... he had had the passionate impulse to pull up on the horse. And all the time a dreadful depression! A weight!...."(484).

Source:Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id.USA:W.W. Norton and Company. 1960.

*"Repression was one of the basic planks of Freud's theory of personality, which he defined as "turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious" (Freud ed. Freud 1991, 524) According to Freud, thoughts or feelings which cause anxiety are pushed into the unconscious, and the person then denies any awareness of the cause of the anxiety. If the repression is not completely effective, then the state of anxiety can be stimulated by the unconscious mind producing threatening feelings without the patient being aware of the reason for anxiety"(3)
*This is represented in No More Parades as the Tea-tray. Tietejens repression of emotions for Sylvia and O Nine Morgan.
*"Another characteristic of repression is "projection", in which internal perceptions are externalised and projected onto something else"(4)
*This is reflected in No More Parades when Tietjens is angry with Sylvia and projects his anger for her by angerly pointing out everyones feminine aspects in part one chapter two

Source: M.J. Geller Feud, Magic and Mesopotamia:How the magic works. November 1996.Folklore: 1997, Vol 108 1/2 .