I used to see a little comic strip called the Wizard of Id. It might have been in the newspaper my Granny used to get, I’m not sure. But I remember reading it, and not really getting any of the gags. The only thing I did get was that it was a play somehow, on the idea of the Wizard of Oz. At some point too, I realised that ‘Id’ meant something clever – although it was only years later that I understood what.
The Wizard of Id is more accessible as an adult: I now recognise the Wizard character as a darkly humorous character, fed up with the uselessness of himself and the other characters, and liable to zap people who annoyed him. But at least he was a Wizard, unlike the Wizard of Oz, who, it turns out was just a little man hiding behind a curtain and projecting an exaggerated version of himself by means of the proverbial ‘smoke and mirrors’.
For Freudians the ‘id’ is the unconscious, instinctive, drive that leads us to behave in animalistic ways – like zapping annoying people. The ‘ego’ is effectively the part of the id that has been shaped by interaction with reality, and has learned to behave in socially acceptable ways. You don’t have to accept Freudian thinking fully to recognise these traits in our lives, our instinctive drives are sometimes only barely covered by smoke and mirrors, our desire to manipulate or worse – coerce lurks barely concealed below the surface.
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