Loving thy Mother and the formation of the super-ego
The formation of the super-ego occurs by way of the Oedipus Complex.
Freud tells us that the simple version of the Oedipus Complex is a child—in this case, a boy—having a very natural and infantile love for the mother, perceiving the father as a threat to his being with the mother, and finally recognizing that his desire to overthrow the father and be with the mother is inconsistent with reality.
The ego, testing the Oedipal wish against reality, now realizes it must repress the whole ordeal. Here’s how Freud explains the three-way relation between the Oedipal complex, repression, and the super-ego.
“The child’s parents, and especially his father, were perceived as the obstacle to a realization of his Oedipus wishes; so his infantile ego fortified itself for the carrying out of the repression by erecting this same obstacle within itself.”
The erecting of this obstacle becomes the formation of the super-ego, a representation of exterior authority set up within the internal psychical system of the child. Freud goes on.
“It borrowed strength to do this [repress its Oedipus wish], so to speak, from the father, and this loan was an extraordinarily momentous act. The super-ego retains the character of the father…”
Now there is in the ego a representative, not merely of the father himself, but of what the father stands for in the triangle of Oedipal relations. That is, the father is the barrier to a wish and longing which the child realizes is wrong. This is why guilt features so strongly in such conversations, for it is almost like the super-ego is a means to shaming oneself for one’s desires.
This is where the rubber of Freud’s thought meets the road of our lives. The identification with the parents is a progressive act, and the strength of their condemnation of us will determine, Freud thinks, the strength of the super-ego’s ability to condemn us later on—hence the super-ego as the source of guilt. As that identification with the parents grows, the character of their stance against what they deem wrong will be like the sediment that precipitates into the growth of a large rock. Only this rock is like great weight of pressing down on our own self-perception.
“The super-ego retains the character of the father, while the more powerful the Oedipus complex was and the more rapidly it succumbed to repression (under the influence of authority, religious teaching, schooling and reading), the stricter will be the domination of the super-ego over the ego later on—in the form of conscience or perhaps of an unconscious sense of guilt” [emphasis mine].
