ID
Not the 2007 album by Polish songstress Anna Maria Jopek (although we’re sure finishing 11th in the Eurovision Song Contest would qualify you quite highly enough to survive a zombie apocalypse – if you have suffered the hardship of performing at Eurovision you can pretty much be guaranteed to survive anything.) Today we shall be discussing the id as part of the human psyche.
According to Freud in his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis in 1933, the id is ‘the dark, inaccessible part of our personality, what little we know of it we have learnt from our study of the dream-work and of the construction of neurotic symptoms, and most of this is of a negative character and can be described only as a contrast to the ego. We all approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations… It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organisation, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasue principle.’
In layman’s terms it is the crazy bit of our personality. The id is responsible for our basic drives such as food, water, sex, etc. It is essentially our biological instincts that are quashed by social and moral restraints. Put simply, who hasn’t wished they could just get up and walk round to the call centre and stab that cold caller in the head when they rang just as you were about to sit down to dinner? The reason you don’t do it? Because morally you know it’s wrong and society would condemn you and put you in prison (also call centres hide their numbers so you wouldn’t be able to find them anyway). But the instinct is there to cause damage to the caller as your sprouts go cold – this is your id in action.
When the apocalypse occurs, society will crumble around you and moral guidelines will become more blurred so your id will be allowed to run somewhat freer than it usually does. This is no bad thing as it will mean that you are allowing your subconscious to react to what your body needs in order to survive. Be careful, though. The id is disorganised and illogical. In some respects it is quite primal and if allowed to take control of your personality completely will turn you into something of a psycho. As a zombie-killing machine this will be most effective, but when dealing with other survivors it might not go down so well if you beat them to death in order to get their cornflakes.
Of course, how we apply the id to individuals can vary from case to case and in a zombie apocalypse we will all act and react in different ways. Some of us will retain our sense of moral values and community, whilst others will decide that they want to go completely nuts. During training it is marginally important to look at how our own psychology will affect our conduct and ultimately our chances of survival – maybe by booking occasional sessions with a psychotherapist to ensure we remain balanced and focused, but then there are those who believe it is a load of old tosh and that psychiatry is the last tool we will need in the quest to survive.
If that is the case then we in no way encourage you to follow a thorough personal psychological analysis of your own id. However, should you fall foul of a zombie attack due to a buried Oedipal complex deep within your own subconscious, don’t blame me.