THE ID

 
To paraphrase Martin Gray's definition of 'Pyschoanalytic Criticism', Sigmund Freud's theory of human pyschology parallels the trinity; the EGO is the conscious mediator between the ID, (incidentally an acronym for Instinctive Desires) and the SUPEREGO, the censor prohibiting the ID, according to the strictures imposed by reality.

If desire comes from the instinct to live well, it is also a desire for order as well as bodily pleasures. Perhaps order is instinctive not necessarily intellectually framed.

Simple evanescent thoughts that appear in the mind prompting the actions of the body but that capacity presupposes a certain stability in the physical world where the embodied beings reside. So a certain degree of order is already prevalent if not evident in the nature of things. We are those who have to integrate into it, since we do not even know what gives us the authority to even do so, but we have to live so we build. So we should integrate and assimilate into that nature by using compatible materials that come from as close as possible in a nearby quarry.

The EGO is the architect of the individual's being. He has the potential to understand how to bring about order from chaos but first there is an even more pressing need to deliver clean water to the million inhabitants of his city, by scientific truth and without the aid of mechanical pumps. The point is that in our time the EGO makes lots of phone calls to get things organised but once upon a time, he had to write many letters giving eloquent orders, twice, because there was no XEROX in the office.

When Le Corbusier said that a house was a machine for living in, he was joking. but it became a huge narrative, like how many jokes do and some still don't get it.

In a house, people are the moving parts, but people are not machine parts. So by definition, a things that is not made up of moving machine parts is not a machine. A house is not a machine at all! Never mind what for! So you cannot build houses using just mechanical logic. It has to have something else. 'What-that-is', is what is in question.

This is how modernism works: the SUPEREGO's method is to suggest to the mind; "Make it sheer! Make it glow! Make it soapy, so sexy, so shiny!" The ID, in his rather bumbling way, would prefer something more joyful, something fuzzier in the fantasy, somehow more pleasing. When it comes to aesthetics the EGO is torn. He sees the truth in nature and in the wishes of realistic people but he does not wish to appear foolish among his peers. The peers ally with the SUPEREGO in his mind. It could be that the modern EGO just needs a more spacially literate imagination so he doesn't believe in some non-existent power structure inside the conventions of some pagan semiotic authorisation.