Freud and collocation: a psychodynamic interpretation of ‘make’ and ‘do’ in English

This study explores the relationship between everyday English verb choice and Freud’s structural theory of personality. Using a qualitative conceptual analysis, the research examines approximately 100 collocational expressions involving the verbs ‘ make’ and ‘ do’ , drawn from major learner dictionaries and the British National Corpus (BNC). Expressions were selected based on frequency, stability, and relative context-independence. The data were classified according to semantic orientation and interpreted through Freud’s id–ego–superego framework to investigate whether patterns of verb choice reflect underlying psychological structures. The findings suggest that ‘ make’ tends to align with instinctive or desire-driven actions, whereas ‘ do’ is associated with regulatory and task-oriented behavior. The study argues that linguistic collocation may encode traces of psychodynamic organization and offers theoretical implications for language teaching and translation, while acknowledging that these applications require future empirical validation.