Super-Ego: Substance and Source

“The broad general outcome of the sexual phase dominated by the Oedipus complex may, therefore, be taken to be the forming of a precipitate in the ego, consisting of these two identifications [mother and father] in some way united with each other. This modification of the ego retains its special position; it confronts the other contents of the ego as an ego ideal or super-ego.”

When I try to tell my friends about this stuff, I usually have to do some apologetic needle-threading around the phrase “sexual phase” in reference to infancy. I don’t think Freud meant sexual in the way we mean sexual. Often, he will use another phrase, “the object choice of the id.” The sexual phase defined by the Oedipus complex would be the phase in which our primary object choice—that which our energetic attachments move toward—is found in our parents.

What would ‘object choice of the id mean?’ The id, that unconscious portion of the psyche to which the ego is bound, is characterized by the pleasure principle. The pleasure principle is a psychical mechanism that works to decrease “mental excitations,” i.e. any stressors to the body or mind. Pleasure, in this sense, is whatever brings the psychic system back to a place of rest or calm. The object choice of the parent seems clearly to be operating as this sort of attachment—one that soothes and pacifies. The object choice of the id, then, is a sort of love-attachment that operates under the logic of the pleasure principle.

Also grabbing my notice here: Freud’s claim that it is these two identifications with the parents which will come to claim special importance in the ego. The fact that he calls it a ‘modification’ is specifically helpful. The super-ego is a portion of the ego, that part of the mental apparatus which is in touch with the outside world, re-tuned and dialed via the id.

“Whereas the ego is essentially the representative of the external world, or reality, the super-ego stands in contrast to it as the representative of the internal world, of the id. Conflicts between the ego and the ideal will, as we are now prepared to find, ultimately reflect the contrast between what is real and what is psychical, between the external world and the internal world.”

But in what way does the super-ego represent the internal world when it is a representation of the parental relation?

Remember that this occurs as a means to repressing the object-choice of the Oedipal period. What is being repressed is not the parent itself, but the choice of the one parent and desire to overthrow the other in order to be win themselves the sole position as the beloved. It is a repression of that particular desire as a means to pleasure (the sort of pleasure described above).

The super-ego is not, therefore, the precipitate merely of the parents, but the way in which the child experienced their own love for, competition with, and condemnation from the parents, as well as their own inner feelings of shame or guilt that go along with the ego after recognizing that this desire is inconsistent with exterior reality.

It is as if the ego is using the id against itself. It is as if the conscious mind is recognizing its body’s psychic longings and developing a way to allow those longings to continue without embarrassment or real-world mistake. That is, the super-ego is the ego’s prop to distract the id, it is the ego with lipstick on, saying to the id, in Freud’s words, “I am so very like the object-choice.” What a fancy little trick.

Two things I’m interested in going forward: how does this modify the relationship to the parents? and can those twists in relationality borne out by the child’s internalizing and cementing awkward and shame-begetting dynamics be assuaged by any work done by either party to smooth out the situation?

Also, what deeper aspects of the id’s substantive reality get tangled up with us through the super-ego’s authoritative presence over our conscious lives? As a teaser, here’s Freud:

“What has belonged to the lowest part of the mental life of each of us is changed through the formation of the ideal, into what is highest in the human mind by our scale of values.”