Redpoll Id

Common Redpoll
Originally uploaded by Laura Erickson

I keep reading posts on listservs with titles like, "Need help with redpoll id." Now come on! I know all about Freud's psychic apparatus: the id, the ego, and the superego, and believe me, we redpolls are just not that driven by id,

the dark, inaccessible part of our personality, what little we know of it we have learnt from our study of the dream-work and of the construction of neurotic symptoms, and most of this is of a negative character and can be described only as a contrast to the ego. We all approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations... It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle.

HAHAHAHAHA! You watch a flock of us take off when a shrike flies in and tell me we don't have a collective will!

One of those snooty Hoary Redpolls told me that these posts aren't about Freudian psychology but about identification--apparently people have trouble telling us "Common" Redpolls from Hoaries. (Really, folks--we don't look a thing alike!) Well, if you're talking about identification, write Id., with a nice conspicuous capital I and a period. And if you pronounce it eye-dee, then write it as I.D. Get with the program, already!