Social media and his representation of Id, Ego and Superego.

Alisson Barbosa
2 min readSep 23, 2021

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Twitter, Instagram and Facebook are present in our daily routine, but have you ever stopped to think about their relationship with our ID, Ego and Superego?

Freud, precursor of Psychoanalysis, for him our psychic apparatus is composed of 3 structures, they are Id, Ego, Superego.

Freud described id as the structure responsible for our wildest and most instinctive actions and thoughts (just like the animals), the id is responsible for the instant gratification and desires of our personality, carrying out actions without thinking about the consequences. Entering on social media universe, we can see the same reproduction of id with Twitter, as it is on Twitter that we type our desires or angrys, such as a desire to eat pizza, or stressful day at work, the desire to send the coworker going to hell, among other tweets.

Ego is the psychic structure responsible for conscious and unconscious functions. Conscious aiming to adapt to external reality, memory, perception, thought, attention, and unconscious as defense mechanisms and production of anguish. When the Ego is exaggerated it becomes harmful, as the individual suffers from the absence of a systemic view, fails to understand the dynamics of the whole, to realize that he is not alone, he makes choices aimed only at himself and for his own benefit. This reproduction is present within Instagram, where we post stories in a restaurant or our atractive night, locations and more locations… we perform a theater of our life, believing or wanting to show a happy life, expecting people to react at our stories, or comment on a certain photo, all to increase our Ego.

Superego is the structure responsible for censorship, the creator of barriers, the punitive one of our psychic apparatus, for Superego have consequences. We can reproduce it on Facebook right!? In fact, that’s where we have our family, people from work, the church and entire formal social bubble. So we do not consider it correct to reproduce our id inside it. That’s why Superego fits perfectly due to this barrier and social censorship that we delimit with our Facebook.

But what about TikTok, how can we fit it to our Psychic device?

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