According to Freud, the Id (Instinctual Drives) functions in the irrational and emotional part of the mind, the Ego functions as the rational part of the mind, and the Superego can be thought of as the moral part of the mind, a manifestation of societal or parental values.
Now, there are two elements here. As adults, as all my readers are, we contribute to the instilling of societal and / or parental values on our children and by and large those values are what were instilled in us by our own parents and society of the time when we were growing up.
Obviously, somewhere along the line the values themselves keep changing to suit changing circumstances, like for instance what happened when a predominantly rural society evolved into a predominantly urban one. An inability to change ourselves to comfortably fit into the changed circumstances causes stress and related health problems. Such inability also translates into social strife and problems like racism, casteism, communalism etc, with all of which we are very familiar.
Most of the values by which I live were taught to me in my childhood by my parents, other elders in the family and also teachers. Similarly, the values that my son lives by were taught to him by me, his mother and other elders in the family as well as his teachers in schools. After the formal education was over, we picked up other values through societal influences, sometimes even going against the values held sacrosanct by the family, clan cast etc.
That ability to go against highly held values of the immediate environment to fit into a larger and different framework, is the one single value that I would teach to others. That one value of using one’s thought process (the ego) to overcome the taught values (the superego) despite emotional resistance (Id} would be the making of a stress free life.
To be able to do that, one needs a mindset that is different from most people possess. This is something that all of us instinctively recognise but something I learnt formally from a remarkable book Mindset The New Psychology Of Success by Carol S Dweck.
I strongly recommend this book to all my readers.
This topic has been suggested by Ashok for the weekly Friday Loose Bloggers Consortium where currently five of us write on the same topic every Friday. Ashok who has been rather irregular assures me that he will be writing on this topic this week. I hope that you have enjoyed my contribution to that effort. The four other bloggers who write regularly are, in alphabetical order, Ashok, gaelikaa, Maxi, and Shackman. It is also very likely that we will see the founder inspiration for the LBC, The Old Fossil, back blogging again.Do drop in on their blogs and see what their take is on this week’s topic. Since some of them may post late, or not at all this week, do give some allowance for that too!