QuestionsWho am I, really?The ego is not master in its own house
Who am I, really?No fixed self

The ego is not master in its own house

The third blow to human narcissism

Sigmund Freud 1856 · 1939Religion is an illusion born of the wish to be protected, as a child by its father.
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What it claims

The ego is not master in its own house: it is neither one, nor transparent to itself, nor sovereign.

Why

Part of our mental life escapes both our awareness and our will, and what consciousness reports of it is incomplete.

The same idea through history
Arthur Schopenhauer1819Freud himself names Schopenhauer as the great predecessor: his unconscious "will" is equivalent to the drives of psychoanalysis.
Sigmund Freud1917Freud makes it the third wound to human pride, after Copernicus and Darwin, and bases it on his practice with neuroses.
In short

"The ego is not master in its own house" is an argument by Sigmund Freud ("A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis" (1917), 1917) on the question "Who am I, really?" (answer: no fixed self). Its claim: The ego is not master in its own house: it is neither one, nor transparent to itself, nor sovereign. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P5). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 1 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

"A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis" (1917)
Valid with an implicit premise

Freud, a physician and the founder of psychoanalysis, wrote a short article for a journal in 1917. In it he explains why psychoanalysis is disliked: it wounds humanity's self-love a third time. Copernicus showed that the Earth is not the centre of the world. Darwin showed that man descends from animals. Psychoanalysis shows that the ego is not "master in its own house". Here the "ego" does not vanish: Freud does not say that no self exists. He says it is neither one, nor transparent to itself, nor sovereign: it is divided between forces, a large part of which remain unknown to it. That is why this argument is placed in "No fixed self", the closest camp.

P1The ego feels sovereign: it believes it is informed of everything that goes on in the mind, completely and reliably, and that its will reaches everywhere.
P2Yet the mind is not simple: it is a hierarchy of agencies, a tangle of impulses pressing independently, many of them opposed to one another.
P3In the neuroses, thoughts and impulses arise that the ego does not recognise and cannot drive away. Psychoanalysis shows they come from the ego itself: a part of its own mental life has withdrawn from its knowledge and from the rule of its will.
P4The mental is not the same as the conscious. Even in a healthy person, the reports consciousness gives are incomplete, often unreliable, and sometimes arrive when the act is already done.
P5 · implicit premiseAn ego that a part of its mental life escapes, divided into opposing forces and poorly informed, is not master of itself.
Therefore the ego is not master in its own house: it is neither one, nor transparent to itself, nor sovereign.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P5, the computer finds an ego that is divided, from which a part escapes, with incomplete awareness, and which is nonetheless master of itself, like a head of state who ignores much about his country but keeps the final decision. That is the weak point defenders of the unified self attack.
Valid with P5, which Freud does not state as a premise but which his conclusion assumes: if the ego is divided, if a part escapes it and its awareness is incomplete, then it is not master of itself. Without P5, nothing prevents a divided and poorly informed ego from still being, in the end, the one who decides.
Analogy. An absolute ruler thinks he governs his country, but only receives the reports his ministers choose to give him, and never goes down to hear what the people think. Decisions are made without him, sometimes against him. Freud says: the ego is that king.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Descartes (thought is always conscious) 1644 · attacks premise 4

By "thought" I understand all that takes place in us in such a way that we are immediately conscious of it. For Descartes, then, there is no thought of which the mind is not aware: the mind is transparent to itself, and the mental is the conscious.

Freud replies
Freud Freud's reply
Freud addresses this idea in the same article: the ego holds "mental" and "conscious" to be the same thing, despite the evidence that mental life contains far more than what becomes conscious. What goes on in the soul and what one knows of it are two different things.
Sartre (the censor must know) 1943 · attacks premise 3

The unconscious solves nothing: to let through only what is allowed, the censor must know what it represses, so it must know it. It is then a consciousness hiding something from itself, not a blind force. That is bad faith, a lie to oneself that remains conscious, not an unconscious.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1943, after the author's death (1939).
Kant (the unity of the "I think") 1787 · attacks premise 5

The "I think" must be able to accompany all my representations, otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought. Every experience therefore relates to one and the same subject. A single self is the condition of experience, even if it is not always in mind.

no reply
see the argument
We have not yet found a direct reply by Freud in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Our summary: Freud does not discuss this passage. One can answer for him that the unity of the "I think" is a formal condition of thought, not a self that knows everything about itself: Kant himself admits that the field of our obscure representations, of which we are not conscious, is immense (Anthropology, 1798, § 5). A Kantian would answer that a divided self still presupposes a single subject to which everything relates.