I’ve been thinking a lot about writing — why people write and, in particular, why I write — and other such silly navel-gazing-type thoughts, and I figured I’d explore some of those ideas through some (albeit very basic) application of writing rationale to various philosophies, as least as best as I understand them with my intro-philosophy and intro-psychology education. If people seem interested, I might turn this into a series. (Suggestions?) But, just so you know, this is likely all bunk, and should be read as such even if it does make for an interesting exploration of how these theories could be applied to the very modern activity of writing for the web, particularly personal and professional blogging.

First up: Freud.

What first got me thinking about this was my vague misuse of the word “ego” oft applied to cover the act of basic narcissism. Writing a blog is something of an act of narcissism, true. But while we might be happy to say that someone who blogs profusely is pretty much displaying big ego (as in “Look at his blog! What kind of ego does it take to think people want to read that crap!”) is that what we really mean… or is it even applicable?

Id, ego and superego, as I follow, were Sigmund Freud’s round-about way of abstractly explaining the various aspects of human behavior in a context that united our various driving habits of personality. As I get them, id refers to the pleasure-seeking part of our mind, ego to reality-seeking part, and superego to the moral-conformity part of our meat-computers. This hardly supports our narcissism definition.

So, let’s take them one at a time:

Id

At first glance the pleasure-seeking id doesn’t seem to apply — at least not to a non-writer who probably thinks of writing as more a chore than a bit of pleasure. While one could argue that there is pleasure to be found in writing, it is hardly measurable to think of writing and typing as very similar to an unconscious-kind-of-short-term pleasure like eating or other instant-gratification drives. Perhaps it comes down to the desire to create, a kind of emotional libido, that soothes an instinctive urge to produce something, or see our words in the wild. I suppose this could be a form of written extroversion, or something, filling the spaces with typed words rather than sounds and voices.

There is another aspect to this, however. Freud broke down the id into the factors of life-seeking and death-seeking. I’m not sure he meant that deep down we were all suicidal or something, but the latter is often applied to the universal search for peace and quiet, escape, or solitude. In this way, writing might be deemed to fulfill an id desire through escape or the isolation of bits of reality in an attempt for our minds to find peace between the activities of our lives. That is to say, by writing about something we are forcing ourselves to focus and drown out the rest of reality while we isolate a single element of information and re-create it in the form of a description or narrative. This can be at once cathartic, peaceful, and (one could argue) as powerful as closing (or killing) the idea from our minds by committing it to paper. Wham! Instant gratification. (Got a light?)

Ego

Building off the whole id theory, ego seems to couple that desire to parcel and package the events of our lives and actions for the immediate benefit, catharsis, of the moment, and thus then rationalize it with a long term pay-off: perhaps one could think of the ego role in writing a blog as archiving the momentary recording our own personal histories, thoughts, and ideas for the purpose of later reflection or idealization of those events. Or, that is to say, the id mind wants it now and the ego mind thinks it wise to save it for later. I suppose one could even go so far as to argue that, in the context of Freud’s theory, we are first building single facets of a fantasy to escape from reality, and then through the written word, constructing an elaborate history of ourselves as a single long-term perspective of that reality.

Ego then really is a little bit (or maybe a whole lot) of narcissism, but only because by writing the elements of a blog we are pretty much writing our own little me-as-protagonist fantasy novels, building a collection of recorded non-fiction narratives clouded by own own perceptions and memories, be they good or bad, right or wrong, whole or fragmented.

Superego

Of course, as the guilt-generating core of our minds, the role of the superego in blogging is mostly external. In contrast to the id need to escape and partition reality and the ego-mind need to save those partitions for personal rationalization, the superego part of the mind seeks to balance this action with a moral and social obligation to contribute to a society wider than ourselves. Freud’s idea was that the superego was a kind of abstract internal father figure, the old man of the child minds telling those kids to go mow the lawn, wash the car… or just do something. Less abstractly, I suppose this could be applied to the concept of blog publication in the sense of a relieving of guilt and a fulfilling of obligation — perhaps even a perceptual de-isolation of that aforementioned historic fantasy world — towards an audience one assumes is comprised of peers and other people who need to relate to the mind (and the body therein encompassing) at a rational, emotional, or personal level. Then do we publish our blogs because part of us would feel guilty otherwise? Or because we’d write it down anyhow and blogging completes the circle of societal participation than is only half-done with a private diary? Maybe without the superego we would simply construct elaborate self-histories and never share.

And so all this seems to be summarized neatly by the following redefinition of the three famous constructs: id is satisfied when I commit a thought to words, ego is satisfied when I save those words for later, and superego is satisfied when I publish them for the world. I write therefore I am. Or, something of a Freudian blog is borne.

Then, I could just be making this all up. I have always been a little skeptical of the whole Freud thing and folks who attempt to explain their own actions through it. …oh, right.