Little Julie Malema - the prime id(iot?) of the ANC

I've been thinking about Julius "Little Julie" Malema.

Yeah, I know, it's pretty weird. I could, after all, be thinking about Charlize "Golden Globes" Theron or Nicolas Sarkozy's wife Carla Bruni ("the botty that drove Jeremy Gordin potty") or Jesse Duarte or Radio 702's Mandy Weiner or my Pilates instructor, Brett Starkowitz (aka Mike Hunt), or even 702's Stephen Grootes.

But I'm thinking about Little Julie. What can I say? I am a committed Seffrican. I feel that understanding Little Julie could help reconciliation and the brotherly love project in our land.

Think about it. Who is Little Julie? What is Little Julie? What is the sub-text of Little Julie? What is Little Julie in Aramaic? What does he symbolise? What does he do for those ANC folk? Why do they keep him around? After all, he's funny but he's not that funny.

And it struck me that Little Julie is the "id" of the ANC. Remember Sigmund Freud's id, ego, and superego? May I refresh your memory? (The info that follows comes, by the way, mainly from Wikipedia. But don't worry; I've been involved with this shit for years, I won't mislead you.)

The terms "id," "ego," and "super-ego" were not Freud's own. They were latinisations by his translator, the super-weird but brilliant James Strachey. Freud himself wrote of "das Es," "das Ich," and "das Über-Ich" - "the It," "the I," and the "Over-I" (or "Upper-I"). So, to the German reader, Freud's original terms were more or less self-explanatory.

(Incidentally, I know most people don't read books much any more, specially not fat books. But if you ever have a spare month or so, and you want to do yourself a favour, you should read the intro to Michael Holroyd's massive biography of Lytton Strachey, the bearded faygel who revolutionized the field of historical biography. The intro's mainly about Lytton's brother, James - wonderful stuff.)

Anyway, movin' right along, as a tall American woman of my acquaintance used to say: the id, ego, and super-ego are functions of the mind rather than parts of the brain and do not necessarily correspond one-to-one with actual somatic structures of the kind dealt with by neuroscience. (In other words, Sigi made ‘em up; don't open up your skull to look for them - they're not there.)

In his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933), Freud described the id thus: "It is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality... . We call [the id] a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations... It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organisation ... [it strives only] to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs ..."

Or, to put it more simply - in the words of an American internet textbook - "Freud believed that the id is based on our pleasure principle. In other words, the id wants whatever feels good at the time, with no consideration for the reality of the situation. When a child is hungry, the id wants food, and therefore the child cries. When the child needs to be changed, the id cries. When the child is uncomfortable, in pain, too hot, too cold, or just wants attention, the id speaks up until his or her needs are met. The id doesn't care about reality, about the needs of anyone else, only its own satisfaction." (In other words, don't smack your child; it's not her fault that she's crabby; it's that vershtunkende id.)

There you go; need I say more? Little Julie is the living incarnation of the ANC's collective id. He says everything that ANC members really want to say. "Nationalise the mines (i.e. take ‘em away from the honkies)." "Shoot the boers." "Zuma's babe? She had a good time; she asked for taxi fare; plain as the nose on my face; so what was all that politically correct folderol about?"

Want some money? You tell the guys that your company must win the tender - after all, you're an ANC office bearer. Don't like the big mommies Helen Zille and Patricia de Lille? Have a little tantrum and call them nasty names. Be a big baby all the time, all day. It's very satisfying. And so on.

The ego, however - and now we move up the body, so to speak, from the stomach, genitalia and alimentary canal - "is based on the reality principle. The ego understands that other people have needs and desires and that sometimes being impulsive or selfish can hurt us in the long run. It's the ego's job to meet the needs of the id, while taking into consideration the reality of the situation."

Or as Freud put it: "...The ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world ... The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions ... In its relation to the id, [the ego] is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse ..."

So who's the ANC's ego? Well, Thabo Mbeki was pretty much that, wasn't he? He may have been driven by many of the same desires that motivate Malema. But he understood the external world, and knew that if these desires were articulated too openly or pursued too hastily the ANC would end up hurting itself in the long run. Of course his own id was up to all sorts of odd stuff, and occasionally the pot would bubble over, and he would end up arguing that HIV and Aids were figments of some deranged Caucasian imagination, and so on.

Freud is said to have used the word "ego" to mean "a set of psychic functions such as judgment, tolerance, reality-testing, control, planning, synthesis of information, intellectual functioning, and memory" - all the functions that Little Julie doesn't have and that Mbeki did.

And that Pravin Gordhan has. And Jeremy Cronin. And also Trevor Manuel, though he sometimes does let the id off the leash a bit, such as when he whacked a photographer at Polokwane with an umbrella, but that was more playing the Cape flats bruiser, his sort of alter ego (which is a whole other concept, with which we will deal next week, class).

And the super-ego? Well, one definition of the super-ego is that "it aims for perfection. It comprises that organised part of the personality structure ...that includes the individual's ideals, spiritual goals, and the psychic agency (commonly called ‘conscience') that criticises and prohibits the individual's drives, fantasies, feelings, and actions."

Actually someone - I don't think it was Freud - wrote that "The Super-ego can be thought of as a type of conscience that punishes misbehaviour with feelings of guilt. For example: having extra-marital affairs." So I suppose JGZ doesn't have much of a super-ego. Maybe they don't have them on that side of the Drakensberg?

Who can the ANC's super-ego be? Well there is... umm.... Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu? Nelson R Mandela? But this is maybe where the rule of law and the constitution have to step in.

We also have a bunch of super-egos - or maybe that should be super egos (no hyphen, if you follow my drift) - in the media. They're forever telling the politicians how to behave and how they (the politicians) have lost their moral compasses (which is to presume they owned some in the first place) and they're forever issuing jeremiads about the end of the Seffrican world as we know it. Ach, but they're journos - not real super-egos, right?

Well, I have analysed the ANC body politic - its id, ego, and super-ego. The doctor is in. R250 a session. Send ‘em my way, Gwede - though not the prime id(iot), please. I'm too old for babies.

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