thumb|right|Geisel once called the fish in The Cat in the Hat "my version of Cotton Mather". Geisel once called the fish "my version of Cotton Mather", the Puritan moralist who advised the prosecutors during the Salem witch trials.Nel 2007, 40 Betty Mensch and Alan Freeman support this view, writing, "Drawing on old Christian symbolism (the fish was an ancient sign of Christianity) Dr. Seuss portrays the fish as a kind of ever-nagging superego, the embodiment of utterly conventionalized morality." Philip Nel notes that other critics have also compared the fish to the superego. Anna Quindlen called the Cat "pure id" and marked the children, as mediators between the Cat and the fish, as the ego. Mensch and Freeman, however, argue that the Cat shows elements of both id and ego.
thumb|right|Geisel once called the fish in The Cat in the Hat "my version of Cotton Mather". Geisel once called the fish "my version of Cotton Mather", the Puritan moralist who advised the prosecutors during the Salem witch trials.Nel 2007, 40 Betty Mensch and Alan Freeman support this view, writing, "Drawing on old Christian symbolism (the fish was an ancient sign of Christianity) Dr Seuss portrays the fish as a kind of ever-nagging superego, the embodiment of utterly conventionalized morality." Philip Nel notes that other critics have also compared the fish to the superego. Anna Quindlen called the Cat "pure id" and marked the. children, as mediators between the Cat and the fish, as the ego. Mensch and Freeman, however, argue that the Cat shows elements of both id and ego.