The Appeal of Unrestrained Id in Grown-up Fictional Characters

[I'm using the qualifier 'grown-up' instead of 'adult' so as not to give the impression this blog entry is about porn - that discussion is for another day]

[Also, "id" as in id, ego and superego, from Freud's model of the psyche]

And when I say, fictional characters, I'm only referring to 2: Dr Sheldon Cooper from TV show The Big Bang Theory and Ignatius Reilly from the novel A Confederacy of Dunces. (I'm sure there are many other such id unrestrained characters in fiction - indeed in real life - but these are the 2 I've encountered most recently, so they're what I'm going with). I haven't studied psychology, or specifically, Freudian psychology, so I'm probably being a little free (unrestrained?) with my interpretation of unrestrained id. I'm defining the id as being that part of the brain/mind that wants what it wants - now! - and won't be told, especially by any other part of the brain/mind, to modify its wants and the behaviours which result from these wants. It's a perfectly acceptable condition in a baby, not so much in a 30-year-old.

The behaviours manifested by the unrestrained ids of Sheldon Cooper and Ignatius Reilly, and the reactions to these behaviours by their friends and family, are both disturbing and amusing. For Sheldon, the epitome of his behaviour is his overwhelming "need" to have his own spot on the couch:

“In the winter, that seat is close enough to the radiator to remain warm yet not so close as to cause perspiration. In the summer, it’s directly in the path of a cross breeze created by opening windows there and there. It faces the television at an angle that is neither direct, thus discouraging conversation, nor so far wide as to create a parallax distortion.”

For Ignatius, it's his compulsive eating, especially of the hot dogs he's meant to be selling in his capacity as a hot dog vendor. Another pivotal, and disturbing and amusing, trait of both characters is their narcissistic enjoyment of their intelligence. Sheldon's IQ is at genius level, and Ignatius believes himself to be a genius, though he does most likely have a high IQ (as well as some culinary skills):

"I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labours, I make an occasional cheese dip."

A possible explanation of the unrestrained ids of these characters could include an analysis of their 'arrested development'. In Sheldon's case, his accelerated intellectual development and scholastic achievements were acquired in the absence of normal childhood developments, with the reult that he's experiencing his childhood in his late 20's. With Ignatius it's harder to pin down, perhaps an over-pandering mother and an absent father - at some point someone really needed to give him a firm kick in the ass.

While I enjoy watching/reading these characters I wouldn't want to spend much time with them in real life. They're both verbose, egotistical, elitist snobs, and Ignatius is constantly belching and farting. So why are they popular fiction archetypes. I think, partly, it's a case of living vicariously through them. Inside all of us is a self-absorbed baby, wanting its own spot on the couch and to eat as much junk food as it can shovel into its mouth. But we wouldn't last long in the real world behaving in this way; people wouldn't want to share a couch with us and our arteries would eventually clog up and we'd die.