The Super-Ego and Shadows of Memory

“The experiences of the ego seem at first to be lost for inheritance; but when they have been repeated often enough and with sufficient strength in many individuals in successive generations, they transform themselves, so to say, into experiences of the id, the impressions of which are preserved by heredity. Thus in residues of the existences of countless egos; and when the ego forms its super-ego out of the id, it may perhaps only be reviving shapes of former egos and be bringing them to resurrection.” (The Ego and the Id, Chapter III)

I like this idea that in the super-ego are also the shapes of uncertain ancestors, revived for fresh hauntings. A part of what we are is unknown to us. Doesn’t it have to be that way? Perhaps most of what we are is unknown to us. The philosopher Jean-Luc Marion would call this the excess of self, a phrase I fell head over heals for in grad school The human-being contains measures of selfhood that plume outward beyond what our own consciousness can contain. Therefore a part of what we are is also beyond us. Marion’s point, commenting on Augustine’s Confessions, is that the excess of self is held by god—a part of what we are unfolds out of our own being and slips into the being of the maker.

Here, Freud gives us a different vision of excess, one granted by history’s steady, strong etching of itself into reality’s canvas. Our lives are filial, as another of my favorite theologians says in his book, A Time to Keep. There, Ephraim Radner is not so much saying that we come from parents, but trying to hone in on what must be true given this essential part of our lives.

We come from somewhere, and it seems that in the womb we get stamped by stories long in process. Or perhaps not so much stories as patterns of instinct. For if it is the id that carries this spiritual heredity, then it is instinct which we received from it, for the id does not ride on logic or perception, but the instincts of the pleasure principle—certain actions which the psyche finds easy enough to slip into by repetition under the belief that it will ease and soothe the stresses of life.

Now I’m thinking of all the ways certain people seem hell-bent on destroying themselves, as if by impulse. And I wonder what shadows of ancestors haunt their egos and call them away from seeing reality as it is in front of them, and instead draw them back into the id, where the old family vice, or the old family lie, or the old family secret simmers in a nice big pot of unbridled, untamed and untamable desire. Ironically, that desire might not be desire for the object they are after in point of action. The desire may be to end the very struggle constituted by the family line. That struggle, the story of which is told by the family line, never actually ends. For if it is true that the ghosts of past egos slip seamlessly from the id into the super-ego, then the struggle between the two-headed desire for life and death, love and solitude, complexity and the simplicity of falling back into the dirt; that struggle simply gets transferred to the next lucky, poor, beautiful soul—sorry, organism—in the story. Sorry, pattern of instinct.