English▸ noun Psychoanalysis the part of the mind in which innate instinctive impulses and primary processes are manifest. Compare with ego, and superego:
the conflict between the drives of the id and the demands of the cultural superego.
– ORIGIN 1920s: from Latin, literally ‘that’, translating German es. The term was first used in this sense by Freud, following use in a similar sense by his contemporary, Georg Groddeck.