Superego

superego (surmoi)

The term 'superego' does not appear until quite late in Freud's work, being first introduced in The Ego and the Id (Freud, 1923b). It was in this work that Freud introduced his so-called 'structural model', in which the psyche is divided into three agencies; the EGo, the ID and the superego. However, the concept of a moral agency which judges and censures the ego can be found in Freud's work long before he locates these functions in the superego, such as in his concept of censorship. Lacan's first discussion of the superego comes in his article on the family (Lacan, 1938). In this work he distinguishes clearly between the superego and the EGO-IDEAL, terms which Freud seems to use interchangeably in The Ego and the Id. He argues that the primary function of the superego is to repress sexual desire for the mother in the resolution of the Oedipus complex. Following Freud, he argues that the superego results from Oedipal identification with the father, but he also refers to Melanie Klein's thesis on the maternal origins of an archaic form of the superego (Lacan, 1938: 59-60). When Lacan returns to the subject of the superego in his 1953-4 seminar, he locates it in the symbolic order, as opposed to the imaginary order of the ego: 'the superego is essentially located within the symbolic plane of speech' (Sl, 102). The superego has a close relationship with the Law, but this relationship is a paradoxical one. On the one hand, the Law as such is a symbolic structure which regulates subjectivity and in this sense prevents disintegration. On the other hand, the law of the superego has a 'senseless, blind character, of pure imperativeness and simple tyranny' (Sl, 102). Thus 'the superego is at one and the same time the law and its destruction' (Sl, 102). The superego arises from the misunderstanding of the law, from the gaps in the symbolic chain, and fills attempt to avoid the ambiguity and equivocation of discourse, it is precisely this ambiguity which psychoanalysis thrives on.

Suggestion has a close relation with TRANSFERENCE (E, 270). If transference involves the analysand attributing knowledge to the analyst, suggestion refers to a particular way of responding to this attribution. Lacan argues that the analyst must realise that he only occupies the position of one who is presumed (by the analysand) to know, without fooling himself that he really does possess the knowledge attributed to him. In this way, the analyst is able to transform the transference into 'an analysis of suggestion' (E, 271). Suggestion, on the other hand, arises when the analyst assumes the position of one who really does know.

Like Freud, Lacan sees hypnosis as the model of suggestion. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud shows how hypnotism makes the object converge with the ego-ideal (Freud, 1921). To put this in Lacanian terms, hypnotism involves the convergence of the object a and the I. Psychoanalysis involves exactly the opposite, since 'the fundamental mainspring of the analytic operation is the maintenance of the distance between I - identification - and the a' (S11, 273).

superego (surmoi) The term 'superego' does not appear until quite late

  in Freud's work, being first introduced in The Ego and the Id (Freud, 1923b). It

   was in this work that Freud introduced his so-called 'structural model', in

   which the psyche is divided into three agencies; the EGo, the ID and the

  superego. However, the concept of a moral agency which judges and censures

  the ego can be found in Freud's work long before he locates these functions in

  the superego, such as in his concept of censorship.

      Lacan's first discussion of the superego comes in his article on the family

(Lacan, 1938). In this work he distinguishes clearly between the superego and

  the EGO-IDEAL, terms which Freud seems to use interchangeably in The Ego and

  the Id. He argues that the primary function of the superego is to repress sexual

  desire for the mother in the resolution of the Oedipus complex. Following

Freud, he argues that the superego results from Oedipal identification with the

father, but he also refers to Melanie Klein's thesis on the maternal origins of an

  archaic form of the superego (Lacan, 1938: 59-60).

      When Lacan returns to the subject of the superego in his 1953-4 seminar, he

  locates it in the symbolic order, as opposed to the imaginary order of the ego:

   'the superego is essentially located within the symbolic plane of speech' (Sl,

102). The superego has a close relationship with the Law, but this relationship

  is a paradoxical one. On the one hand, the Law as such is a symbolic structure

   which regulates subjectivity and in this sense prevents disintegration. On the

  other hand, the law of the superego has a 'senseless, blind character, of pure

imperativeness and simple tyranny' (Sl, 102). Thus 'the superego is at one and

  the same time the law and its destruction' (Sl, 102). The superego arises from

  the misunderstanding of the law, from the gaps in the symbolic chain, and fills

out those gaps with an imaginary substitute that distorts the law (see E, 143;

   see Lacan's almost identical remarks on the censorship: 'Censorship is always

   related to whatever, in discourse, is linked to the law in so far as it is not

   understood'   - S2, 127).

       More specifically, in linguistic terms, 'the superego is an imperative' (Sl,

   102). In 1962, Lacan argues that this is none other than the Kantian categorical

imperative. The specific imperative involved is the command 'Enjoy!'; the

   superego is the Other insofar as the Other commands the subject to enjoy. The

   superego is thus the expression of the will-to-enjoy (volontÈ de jouissance),

   which is not the subject's own will but the will of the Other, who assumes the

   form of Sade's 'Supreme Being-in-Evil' (Ec, 773). The superego is                   an

   'obscene, ferocious Figure' (E, 256) which imposes 'a senseless, destructive,

purely oppressive, almost always anti-legal morality' on the neurotic subject

   (Sl, 102). The superego is related to the voice, and thus to the invoking drive

   and tO SADISM/MASOCHISM.

The super-ego is the faculty that seeks to police what it deems unacceptable desires; it represents all moral restrictions and is the "advocate of a striving towards perfection" ("New Introductory Lectures" 22.67). Originally, the super-ego had the task of repressing the Oedipus complex and, so, is closely caught up in the psychodramas of the id; it is, in fact, a reaction-formation against the primitive object-choices of the id, specifically those connected with the Oedipus complex. The young heterosexual male deals with the Oedipus complex by identifying with and internalizing the father and his prohibitions: "The super-ego retains the character of the father, while the more intense the Oedipus complex was and the more rapidly it succumbed to repression (under the influence of discipline, religious teaching, schooling and reading), the more exacting later on is the domination of the super-ego over the ego—in the form of conscience or perhaps of an unconscious sense of guilt" ("Ego and the Id" 706). Given its intimate connection with the Oedipus complex, the super-ego is associated with the dread of castration. As we grow into adulthood, various other individuals or organizations will take over the place of the father and his prohibitions (the church, the law, the police, the government). Because of its connection to the id, the superego has the ability to become excessively moral and thus lead to destructive effects. The super-ego is closely connected to the "ego ideal."

More

The superego is one of the three agencies making up the psychic apparatus in Freud's second topography, the structural theory (1923b). It results essentially from the internalization of parental authority. From the outset, as psychoanalysis uncovered the defensive conflict that arose from a repressed unconscious (childhood sexuality), it encountered the need to posit a repressing agency, a censor associated with self-esteem. In contrast with hypnosis, which put the censor to sleep, psychoanalysis is essentially aimed at acknowledging and working out of the ego's resistances.

As early as "On Narcissism: An Introduction" (1914c), Freud already deemed the ego ideal to be autonomous. Two works of Freud's dating from the early 1920s firmly differentiated between the ego and the superego (ego ideal) and integrated this distinction into the whole set of Freud's metapsychological reworkings of the period. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c), to describe the functioning of groups, Freud developed a generalized conception of identification in which individuals identified their egos by creating a common ideal, incarnated in a leader. The Ego and the Id (1923b) went on to link the superego as a mental agency to the recognized fact that the greater portion of the ego was unconscious. Within the psychic apparatus, the superego makes permanent the effects of the infant's dependence on primary objects, and it is just as insusceptible of complete integration into the ego as the id and its instinctual impulses. The term "superego" itself indicates that the superego dominates the ego; the tension between the two agencies take the form of moral anxiety.

Freud did not detach the superego from the ideal (one of its functions). The superego is responsible for transmitting the constraints that culture exercises over the individual, and for imposing the necessary and ultimately excessive sacrifices of instinct demanded by civilization. It is also the carrier of a cultural past that each subject must appropriate and master (the reference being to Goethe's Faust) through processes of object idealization and sublimation of the instincts. The main dynamic remains the conflict-laden work of differentiation between the ego and the superego. How the superego is transmitted (it is formed in the image of the parents' own superegos), establishes itself, and develops entails in the final reckoning that the Freudian superego is an intersubjective and even intergenerational agency.

When, in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930a), Freud raised the issue of a (collective) cultural superego, he was revisiting his earlier reflections on the origins of civilization in Totem and Taboo (1912-1913a). There, evoking the myth of the primal horde, he had associated the killing of the primal father with the prohibition on incest. After investigating the genesis of guilt in Civilization and Its Discontents, he attempted, in Moses and Monotheism (1939a), to account for the strength of tradition. With the concept of the superego, Freud tackled the thorny subject of what human-kind elevates and makes sublime. Strictly opposed to any kind of spiritual approach, which the theme of the conscience readily encouraged, he focused on the concrete development and instinctual aspects of agency.

In seeking to expose the structural dimension of the split between the ego and the superego, Freud based his findings on two pathological phenomena: delusions of observation and manic-depressive psychosis. In delusions of observation, the monitoring and judging internal agency (the superego) is reprojected outward. Manic-depressive psychosis illustrates the cyclic operation of the moral conscience and the changes that occur in the relationship between the ego and the superego: in melancholic self-reproach, the superego persecutes the ego, and in manic euphoria, the ego and its ideal coincide (as in the ritual festivity of a carnival).

From the ontogenetic viewpoint, the superego is "heir to the Oedipus complex." This means that the advent of the superego prolongs the core affective relationships of childhood by rendering permanent the conditions that brought about its establishment. The identifications that constitute the superego are the bearers at once of parental prohibitions and of instinctual cathexes relating to the parents as objects, cathexes that these identifications replace according to a regressive logic in which the wish to be like dislodges the wish to have (Freud, 1933a, p. 63). Broadly speaking, the identifications of the superego owe their autonomy, their constraining role vis-à-vis the ego, to the child's crucial dependence on its objects. "At the beginning . . . what is bad is whatever causes one to be threatened with loss of love" (Freud, 1930a, p. 124). If establishing the superego through identifications has far-reaching consequences, this is because the relationship of the ego to the superego reproduces the relationship of the child to the all-powerful parents. Real anxiety related to the parents is transformed into moral anxiety arising from the tension between the ego and a superego that draws no distinction between the wish and the act. The superego first appears, therefore, as the upshot of a regressive defensive process that tends to lend permanence in mental reality to a world determined above all by parental desire and parental protection. Freud conceived of religious belief as underpinned by a projection outward of the child's superego, motivated by a nostalgia for the father. This helps explain why the task of the ego during adolescence is to escape from the authority of the superego.

In Freud's detailed metapsychological description of the genesis and development of the superego, the superego begins to form very early on, and this formation involves permanent rearrangements of identifications and changes in their very nature as they become less narcissistic and more symbolic.

There is thus a clear dividing line between a primitive realm of the superego (as described by Melanie Klein) and a distinctly postoedipal realm. The primitive realm is founded on archaic mechanisms (identification with the aggressor and the law of talion [an eye for an eye]). In the postoedipal realm of the superego, a bisexual superego "consisting of these two [paternal and maternal] identifications in some way united with each other" (1923b, p. 34) bears the mark of the subtle mental developments that for Freud are specific to the phallic phase and the "complete" Oedipus complex (love and hate for each parent, identification with both). Under this later configuration, the structuring effects of the castration complex and the integration of the fantasy of the primal scene make it possible for the superego to resolve and protect the ego from what are now incestuous wishes. Successful development of the superego is indicated by the individual's acquisitions of culture during the latency phase and by an ability of the individual to traverse the reactivation of instinctive desires that occurs in adolescence and to achieve autonomy. Progression along these lines correlates with a reduction of the superego's demands to essential social rules alone, with its gradual detachment. Such progression tends to turn the superego into a more purely symbolic agency. The profoundly paternal character of Freud's superego has been further developed by Jacques Lacan's concept of the Name of the Father. A consequence is the possibility of a more personal ego ideal. All these modifications of the superego depend on the desexualization inherent to the identification process, for desexualization allows a secondary narcissism in which the ability to idealize and sublimate buttress the cathexis of new objects and social bonds.

At the clinical level, making the superego into a mental agency was one of Freud's theoretical responses to the difficult practical problems posed by certain kinds of resistance—needs for punishment, negative therapeutic reactions, moral masochism—that represent diverse expressions of unconscious guilt. Freud observed how the superego had a general propensity for cruelty, for a severity out of all proportion to that of the child's actual upbringing. This was a crucial insight, for it led him to recognize the endogenous, instinctual origin of cruelty and hence to form the hypothesis of the destructive death instincts.

Unconscious guilt was thus seen in essence as turning such destructiveness back against oneself. This explains the paradoxical fact that the superego is made stronger by the renunciations it imposes, and that anxiety is increased even by misdeeds never performed (as witness crimes committed out of a sense of guilt). The narcissistic desexualization involved in the process of identification, upon which the superego is founded, permits a diffusion of instincts whereby the superego tends to become the focus of a liberated death instinct (the "pure culture of the death instinct" seen in melancholia).

By contrast, the proper functioning of the postoedipal superego, which results in a dynamic of conflict between the ego and the superego, presupposes that the environment allows a balanced apportionment of love and discipline that result in a fusion of instinct. The coherent superego that results makes for a tempered guilt capable of underpinning a sense of responsibility in the subject.

Quotes

"Nothing forces anyone to enjoy (jouir) except the superego. The superego is the imperative of jouissance - Enjoy!"

See Also

• Activity
• Agency
• Anxiety
• Castration complex
• Censorship
• Civilization
• Cruelty
• Defense
• Depression
• Ethics
• Graph of Desire
• Guilt
• Humor
• Id
• Ideal Ego
• Identification
• Imago
• Latency period
• Law
• Libidinal development
• Melancholy
• Oedipus complex
• Prohibition
• Psychic apparatus
• Psychic causality
• Self-hatred
• Self-punishment
• Unconscious

References

• Freud, Sigmund. (1912-1913a). Totem and taboo. SE, 13: 1-161.
• ——. (1914c). On narcissism: an introduction. SE, 14: 67-102.
• ——. (1921c). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. SE, 18: 65-143.
• ——. (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1-66.
• ——. (1930a). Civilization and its discontents. SE, 21: 57-145.
• ——. (1933a). New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. SE, 22: 1-182.
• ——. (1939a). Moses and monotheism: Three essays. SE, 23: 1-137.