Horse and rider, probably from Boetia, Greek, Archaic Period, c.550 BC (terracotta)

This statuette of a horse and rider dates from the 6th century BC. The horse is boldly decorated with stripes, with strong eyes and three rows of dots on its chest. The rider clings to striped horse's mane and is represented without legs. The highly stylized figure merges man and animal into one entity, the rider seeming to grow from the horse’s back. Although their significance is not clear, models and carvings of horses and horsemen were always popular in ancient Greece in graves or on tombstones. They may well have been intended to underline the heroic character of the dead person as a warrior or a hunter. Freud used the metaphor of a man riding a horse to describe the relation between the ego and id: “ The functional importance of the ego is manifested in the fact that normally control over the approaches to motility devolves upon it. Thus in its relation to the id it is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own strength while the ego uses borrowed forces. The analogy may be carried a little further. Often a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego is in the habit of transforming the id’s will into action as if it were its own. ” This figure is an especially apt image for this metaphor because Freud conceived the ego as emerging out of the id, just as the horse and rider are joined into one body.