this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Psychology

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Is there a social equivalent to the id/ego/superego? (feddit.nl)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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We are familiar with the social "id" through mob dynamics, crowd control. But is there anything akin to the ego and superego for society or groups? Maybe the media act as a bit of a superego on societies...but maybe the concept just does not extend that easily.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Ok, but are they such useless concepts or defined in such a specific way that they have no equivalent in cognitive psychology? What were these categories superseded by in cognitive psychology?

I find them a useful shorthand in certain contexts when there is a tension between what one's instincts push you to do, what evaluated to be possible and what you judge that should be in an ideal world.

I just wanted to get an idea of how this manifests in crowds and societies, how individuals and advertising agencies can manipulate the "collective subconscious" (another concept that you may find obsolete, but is very useful when you analyze recurring characters in storytelling or aspects of aesthetics) and how those groups of people are aware of what is happening to them and judge the situation.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don’t think there are equivalents. We know that certain parts of the brain house, or are associated with, ways of thinking. The closest I can think of would be the PFC as equivalent to ego. But no, neither Freudian nor Jungian psychology are useful beyond certain English departments using Freud and/or Jung as a form of critical literary analysis (literary theory). It’s like how the Bohr model of the atom is still taught in schools even though it’s incredibly primitive, and physics has long moved past it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Eh, the Bohr model actually gets some things roughly right (line spectra in Hydrogen-like atoms), but that is only because it was good enough to happen to fit those specific data :) but ok, maybe instead of Freudian terms, I should use a more modern system like Schwartz's Internal Family Systems and try to extrapolate that: e.g. subpersonalities would become subcultures