More pop-art psychoanalysis: The Id, the Ego and the Super-Ego

Here’s how I’ve ultimately come to understand the inner workings of my psyche:
I’ve since come to think of the components of my psyche as represented by figures familiar in pop culture, sort of halfway between an archetype and an avatar, so as to translate their function and drive more easily and achieve a thorough understanding of myself and my reactions to the outside world.

My Id is Patrick Bateman, a character from a Bret Easton Ellis book, American Psycho, which was also a movie starring Christian Bale.
Bateman represents the basic needs of mankind, albeit in an extreme, twisted manner, but everything he does boils down to atavistic cravings for sex, money, violence, buying expensive things he doesn’t really need, and masking his shortcomings by enforcing his (alleged) superiority over women.

My Ego, and I like to think this one kind of goes for everybody else as well as to me, is Batman. Because that’s how we all perceive the world around us, see? Struggling to be the best, struggling to accept that no matter what you do it’s not nearly enough, struggling to beat the rest, struggling to coping with an ever-growing paranoia of having the rest of the world against you, maybe up to the point where you actually come up with this really bright idea of placing a spy-satellite high up in the atmosphere to watch over the friends you believe have had you brainwashed a few years ago.
And maybe thinking that choosing to wear black is actually a mandate as opposed to an option. But it does make you look thinner, which is always preferable.

Last but not least, my Super-Ego couldn’t be anyone less than Don Johnson’s character Sonny Crockett from Miami Vice, circa 1985, in the very same vein (and I have just figured out this one bit right now) John Wayne was used as Jesse Custer’s conscience and moral drive back in the Vertigo Preacher series a few years back.
There’s just something about that whole New Wave, cocky, sexy unshaven streetwise blue-eyed all-American corn-fed ladies’ man with authority issues and perpetually clad in designer clothes ensemble, that just kills me: Guy walks around skimming at all the darkness and the foul deeds and the bad people in life, also survives Vietnam before that, and never ever veers off being the consummate knight errant stepping out of the shadows, bursting with panache and bad-boy attitude, knowing exactly just the thing to say to look both cool & tough at the same time- the perennial lone ranger- and ending every damn sentence with pal just because he’d probably get away with it anyway.
(See, you can almost hear a post-Genesis, pre-Disney movies Phil Collins singing in the distance now…)


And now, so as to drive the point home, the following conversation illustrates the inner-workings of my Id, Ego and Super-Ego in shaping up my psyche:

The Id, or, Patrick Bateman: Kill! Maim! Dismember!
The Super-Ego, or, Don Johnson’s Sonny Crockett: Surf’s up, pal. Lose the axe, Bateman. Just drop it: let it go. We’ve caught you, pal. It’s over.
The Ego, or, Batman: You’re all against me…