It is popular nowadays to have a go at Sigmund Freud. Most people, including myself, who subscribe to Freud bashing have probably never read the great man's works and many of us, including me, probably have quite a distorted understanding of his main theories and ideas.

So, having thus completely demolished my own academic credibility, here is a piece of freewheeling, creative Freudian musing. If you want to read the great man in the original and then refute any, or all of my points in an academically systematic fashion, please feel free to do so.

I promise not to hold my breath while I wait for your replies. I believe he was prolific.

One of Freud's great contributions to popular psychological mythology is the discovery (invention?) of the psychodynamic mind. This is the idea that our minds are made up of three components, each performing a very different function. Mental health it is thought, in Freudian circles, is contingent upon these three psychic components establishing and maintaining a viable, working relationship.

The three elements are the ID, the SUPER-EGO, and the EGO.

Now I like to keep things simple, so my simple (and quite probably 'simplistic') explanation goes as follows.

The ID is a driver. It drives us to seek resolution of tension - so when we physically need food it drives us towards food by making us feel hungry. When we physically need to go to the loo, it makes us feel like we are going to wet ourselves if we don't find a loo soon. And when we need to procreate, it makes us feel horny. Oh, wait a minute....I think that last one might be a bit more complicated. Otherwise wouldn't I need several more wives and a much bigger house to accommodate my ever burgeoning progeny?

Oh well, I haven't got all day.

To sum it up, the ID is the part of our mind that generates urges, all of which are in some way linked to physical survival and the propagation of the species.

Then there is the SUPER-EGO. Frankly it's a pain in the a*se! Especially to someone like me. There is a school of thought locally which says I don't have one ( a SUPER-EGO, not an a*se). It's not true. I have just done my best over the years to ignore and suppress it.

Now some of you out there are highly successful, precisely because you have a well developed SUPER-EGO and others are successful because you have done your best to ignore it. But what does it do? Well, the SUPER-EGO basically tells you off all the time. It can be quite useful (I will try to explain how, but I am not the greatest advocate of super-egos. You might be better to speak to a high court judge, or Gillian McKeith, the dietary terrorist who frightens people into eating less on TV and only smiles when she is inflicting pain). The SUPER-EGO is what stops you weeing, or having sex, in public. Obviously, it doesn't work on Saturday nights in the centre of Bournemouth, but I think that may be to do with the pine trees, or being by the sea.

Freud's famous (and no doubt popularly distorted) example of the SUPER-EGO at work is potty training. We are all familiar with the idea of anal retentiveness and anal expulsiveness. You can usually find at least some anal retentives working for certain government departments. Government departments have lots of rules, and rules are what anal retentives thrive on. They inflict them on people who cannot understand them, then punish them for not understanding something which defies comprehension. Many of them actually also punish themselves in order to feel better, although there is one rumour that says, in punishing themselves, they are in fact not satisfying the demands of their SUPER-EGO, but the demands of their ID; but that would be perverse.

By the way, next week I may to discuss perversion in detail, so make sure you get a good night's sleep on Sunday.

Anal expulsives, on the other hand, if they have to work, in order to fund the satisfaction of their libidinous urges, put on stage make up and prance about in an incoherent and often embarrassing fashion. They seem happy, although some of them die young as a consequence of substance abuse.

By the way, whilst we are on this subject ('analism'), I would just like to say something about the war.

No not the war in 'Iraq my brains but I can't figure out how to get out of this mess, Tony', nor the war in Afghani-Satan', nor any of the other wars that Tony Blair and George Bush manage to kick off between me starting and finishing this week's newsletter, but the war between the anal retentives and the anal explusives.

The ANAL war has been raging for centuries: ever since a couple of wide boys in some long lost, ancient civilisation realised that the real power of religion was not in explaining the universe to everyone, but in acquiring control over people's minds. It is what I like to call the DOBM (Dawn Of Bogus Morality).

Anal retentives have overdeveloped SUPER-EGOs. Anal expulsives, like me, have entirely healthy, reasonable opinions and natural, libidinal needs which they go about satisfying in a refreshingly spontaneous and liberating manner.

Whose side are you on?

Anyway, back to the three part psyche.

The third part is the EGO. The EGO is nothing to do with how much time you spend admiring yourself in the mirror thinking about how attractively brief your pants are. It is the equivalent of the United Nations security council, and for some people I know, it is about as effective as the UN security council. There is a pattern, which some people get into...they 'sin' (that is 'anal-retentive-speak' for acting like a human being); then they beat themselves up for being a human being; then they repress their libidinal urges for as long as they can; and then they repeat the whole sorry process all over again. It's like life, 'but not as we know it, Jim'.

Used intelligently, the EGO can be quite useful. It is the only thing keeping me out of trouble (almost keeping me out of trouble).  My favourite way of the describing the function of the EGO is that it engages in something called reality testing. Reality testing is a pretty important facility for people like me who have furtive imaginations. It means we stop and think about consequences before launching into action. Well....sometimes. Whereas the SUPER-EGO says, 'you MUST not!', the EGO simply asks, 'what might happen if you do? Are you ok with that? OK then, if you really want to, go ahead and see what happens.' This is why I sometimes used to wake up at Heathrow airport surrounded by Japanese tourists several hours after I was due at my office in central London. This is how I know how much alcohol is safe for me to drink. Not because my SUPER EGO is nagging me, but because I have had an  experience. I have conducted experiments.

Lots of experiments.

Reality testing is also what stops us from catastrophising and engaging in other 'thinking errors'. Things go wrong, we get upset and we are just about to do the Roman trick of falling on our swords, when we realise that the fingernail we just broke trying to open a bottle of Dog Bolter beer with our bare hands will in fact grow back soon, and that we could just go to the corner shop and buy another bottle opener until the 43 other bottle openers, which we know we have somewhere in the house, turn up en masse, like a fleet of London buses on a Sunday school outing.

Talking of Romans, what has the ID got to do with the IDes of March? Possibly nothing. Possibly something. Possibly the ID and the IDes of March are what keep us alive to the possibility that someone out there may bear us ill-will and that we should watch our backs occasionally (but don't over-do it or you really will need a lot of therapy). Actually, I think it may be the SUPER-EGO that triggers paranoia, but you get my point.

It seems the ID isn't always geared up to our well being. For example, there is the risk of IDiocy. IDiocy is what the ID engages in if the EGO fails in its reality testing job: unprotected sex; taking on a debt you cannot afford to repay so that you can have limitless unprotected sex; employing people on instinct (which, if you think about it, is quite likely to be linked to fantasies about unlimited sex), rather than using a systematic recruitment and selection process: these are all examples of IDiocy.

Actually, the greatest form of IDiocy is IDolism. IDolism is the specific act of fooling your ego into thinking there is a simple answer to everything, thus absolving you of any need to think about anything in any evaluative sense ever again - for example, (and I know this might upset a few of you) - God, Money, The War on Terror, Nicole Kidman, Sausages, most forms of alcohol (excluding John Smith's Bitter which is bitter only in the sense that it is bitterly disappointing) and of course, unprotected sex (did I mention Nicole Kidman?) . I'm sorry about the 'God' bit, but that's how I see it. Obviously you can disagree with me and I will publish your response, as long as you sign it!

There is no simple answer. In fact, there is no answer at all. There are, however, more and more interesting questions. Once you create an answer you are dangerously close to becoming an IDolator; someone who has abdicated (should that read abIDcated) responsibility for the consequences of your own actions. Your ID has won and your fate is sealed. IDolators fear their IDs so much that they bow cravenly before the fanciful inventions of their tyrannical SUPER-EGOs.

To avoid such a fate, you need to develop your EGO because it will keep you from harm, without enslaving you. To develop your EGO experiment, evaluate and then develop your experimentation further on the basis of the feedback and learning you derived from your original experiment. I am not saying your SUPER-EGO never gets it right. It can be quite useful, and if you want to play safe..... nah; boring!

By the way, just to prove my point about the war, Microsoft has clearly joined the anal retentive camp. In attempting to create my own words, MS Word changed what I just wrote - 'abIDcated' - back to 'abdicated'.

The enemy is at the (Bill) Gates! Even my own computer has turned against me!

For those of you who are of a nervous disposition, and those who have been over-reliant, thus far, upon an almost inevitably self-limiting and distorting SUPER-EGO, here are some of the ways in which you can learn to love your ID a bit more.

IDylls.

Actually, Wagner's Siegfried Idyll is a great way to go off into an IDyll of your own. You can borrow this from Bournemouth music library (or pretty much any library I suspect). I wouldn't recommend the whole opera, though, unless you really can't think of anything better to do than count the hairs on your ankles one night.

In fact, any, profoundly relaxing music will aid and abet an IDyll. But if you really want to learn how to go into positively life-enhancing IDylls and to achieve a more meaningful kind of success and contentment you need to come on my IDiots, IDols, IDylls and RIDdles workshop (details will follow).

The whole issue about IDylls has of course been obfuscated by the puritanical tyranny of SUPER-EGOTISTICAL hordes of anal retentives who confuse IDylls with 'IDles'. I have some vague memory of a Dylan Thomas character who lies in a fishing smack in Swansea bay all day long, basking in the sun. I think he is called 'Nogoodboyo'. I seem to remember he became something of a folk hero when we were at school.

The greatest war crime the anal retentives have committed in recent decades, however, has been their wholly unjustifiable and vicious attack upon the IDiosyncrasies of humanity. The Blairites and creationists, in particular, (two especially unremitting and turgid cadres of the anal retentive army) have been instrumental in stifling IDiosyncrasies. For example, my three children attend three different schools and yet each one of them is taught exactly the same curriculum.  Why is this a problem? Because it means they are taught nothing uniquely original, leading them to feel that they have little or nothing, which they can call their own, to talk about. When I was at junior school, our headteacher used to take us on impromptu bird watching outings. I was never quite sure, from one day to the next, if he was going to teach us music or arithmetic, or show us a 16mm film of lions marauding on the Serengeti. There was always the possibility he would launch into a long debate with a classroom of 10 year olds about Martin Luther King and the equal rights movement that was happening there and then in the deep South of America. That's what I call an education.

What the anal retentives believe, is that by standardising and systematising everything, they will make the world safer and more efficient. People will behave in more predictable and more manageable ways. Society will become more governable and politicians will feel morally proud and justified in stripping away our liberties for the common good. Global business will have free rein to manipulate and exploit increasingly mindless hordes of lonely individuals  who have lost the power of original thought (and original 'sin'), and in this brave new world we will all be able to focus more of our resources upon the real crusade; the crusade to make everyone the same as 'us'.

It is somewhat ironic then, that the anal retentives' latest secret weapon in this crusade for social uniformity should be called an ID card!

HBT (UK) Ltd, never a company to lag behind, is already mounting the resistance.

Write to me now for your very own 'HBTUK' ID card. All I need to know is whatever it is that you really, really want (see exercise below). I will then send you a credit-card-sized, 'ID card'. with some simple instructions on how to achieve whatever it is that you really, really want.

This is a genuine offer, but as usual, you may have to wait a while as I may be engaging in some prolonged IDylls of my own.

Meanwhile, to get you started, here is one more aspect of the ID that you can call upon for support. Outlined below are some brief instructions on how to become an IDeomotorist.

IDeomotorists use IDeomotor movements to make important, life changing decisions. You can use them to decide if you want a cup of tea as well, but it is a bit long winded for that. With tea, it is better to just go for it. If it doesn't hit the spot, I can personally recommend a bottle of Dog Bolter as a practical alternative. 

IDeomotor movements are movements which are generated unconsciously. They are a sign that your body is responding to an unconsciously generated message. Something in your unconscious is trying to communicate with you!

With a little practice and training, you can begin to utilise your own capacity for IDeomotor movements and communication to great personal advantage. In fact this whole newsletter is a consequence of a decision that was signalled to me via an IDeomotor movement, as I was enjoying a prolonged Sunday morning IDyll in bed.

So here is this week's exercise. If you really want to learn how to do this properly, you'll need to come on the workshop. But just to get you started:

1. Go into a trance or an IDyll, whichever you prefer (see previous issues for instructions or call me, but not whilst you are driving).
2. Once you are truly and deeply relaxed, and somewhat detached from the shared universe, ask yourself an important question, like, 'what do I really, really want to do next with my life.....deep down, where it really matters to me personally?'
3. Ignore any obviously irrelevant trains of thought and sensations. Just go deeper into trance. You will know when something meaningful is happening.
4. Now, once you think you may have got something resembling an answer (and it might be a picture, or a feeling, or it might be words, phrases or even whole sentences), go back to your true self and ask your true self to say whether or not this really is what you really want to do next with your life. Ask your unconscious to raise your right index finger for YES, or your left index finger for NO. That's the ideomotor bit. Don't do it consciously. Just wait for one or other finger to move.
5. Wait for something to happen. It sometimes takes a minute or two, so be patient.
6. If you get a YES, ask what would be the first step to achieve this goal and repeat the steps above to check any responses you get.
7. If you get a NO, go back to step 2 and repeat the question in a different way - any way that makes sense to you personally.
8. If you don't get any answers at all, just congratulate yourself on being an independently minded, IDiosyncratic human being and wake up feeling refreshed and alive, knowing that when you are ready for the answer it will just pop into your head anyway.

Answers on a post card, or a giant sausage, please.

To apply for your ID card simply tell me what you really, really want to do next in your life and I will send you an appropriate ID card with some interesting suggestions for action.

Until next time.....

A NOTE ABOUT COPYRIGHT:

Basically, I work on 'abundance mentality'. The more I share, the more comes back to me. There a couple of rules I would like you to observe.

You can use the content of these newsletters in any context as long as you display the following statement in the quotes below:

"This material was created and is owned by Harvey Taylor and HBT (UK) Ltd. It may be used in any context for any life enhancing purpose provided this message is clearly displayed.

Where the use of this material generates a financial profit for the person or legal entity using it, these persons or legal entities will be responsible for informing Harvey Taylor and HBT (UK) Limited and will be required to share a reasonable portion of this profit with Harvey Taylor and HBT (UK) limited in proportion to the profit generated by the use of the said materials. "

Copyright © Harvey Taylor and HBT (UK) Ltd 15 April 2007. All Rights reserved.