Origins of Values An Outline of Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud With environmental influences that begin at birth, and perhaps in utero, a portion of the id undergoes special development and begins to act as an intermediary between the id and the world around us. This psychological region is known as the ego. Ego controls voluntary movement, and is responsible for self preservation. To this end, the ego develops awarenesses of external stimuli, stores these in memory, avoids certain excessive stimuli and deals with moderate stimuli through adaptation. Most significantly, the ego learns to modify situations in the external world to its own advantage.
Through the course of childhood and its attendant parental and cultural instruction, the ego forms within it a particular psychological aspect that Freud refers to as the superego. This aspect of our psychology takes over the functions of external instructors.
So, what does that say to us about how we establish our values and preferences?
Freud's theory would probably say that we have evolutionary based instinctual drives -- id based drives -- to prefer certain things; we develop over time a consciousness of ways to interact with our external world to get what we want -- ego based drives -- and we have a set of culturally and parentally induced shoulds and should nots -- superego based drives -- that spend a good amount of time in a tension-producing conflict between what we value and what we prefer.
Ego pursues pleasure and tries to avoid unpleasure. Superego will work, to the degree it is present, to restrict the ego to those pleasures considered appropriate by the environment in which it is developed. As the tension increases, we experience displeasure or "unpleasure" as Freud terms it in this book. And as we lower the tension between these drives we experience pleasure.
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