(Roughly) Daily

More Animals in Midlife Crises at Rumpus (a site well worth poking around)…

As we help our therapists pay for those third homes, we might send deeply analyzed birthday greetings to Italian sociologist, criminologist, and statistician Alfredo Niceforo; he was born on this date in 1876.  Niceforo theorized that every person has a “deep ego” of subconscious antisocial impulses that represent a throwback to pre-civilized existence.  Counterbalancing this ego, and attempting to keep its latent delinquency in check, he posited, is a “superior ego,” a product of man’s social interaction.  Niceforo’s theory, which he published in 1902, clearly resembles– and seems to anticipate– the “id, ego, and super-ego” construction with which Freud replaced his original concept of the Unconscious. (Id, ego , and super-ego first appear in Freud’s work in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920.)

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