The super-ego: start with guilt

“The tension between the demands of conscience and the actual performance of the ego is experienced as a sense of guilt.” (The Ego and the Id, Chapter III)

I start this reflection with the quote about guilt because it’s existentially important (all my favorite philosophers and theologians wrote and thought about guilt as a major note in the melody of human existence). It’s also obvious and non-technical; one of those normal-people inroads I’m always seeking out so that I can make my way in to texts like these.

The feeling of having fallen short is a fairly ubiquitous trope in literature, so I’m going to assume I’m not the only one who experiences guilt as a broad, vague finger pointing out of some black abyss opening up from within my own soul. And part of the difficulty is that finger seems always to be pointing, always clamped down on my life as a whole. It needs no particular instance of stupidity or failure. The feeling can just be there, sizzling like a low-grade fever, the heat over which my own self-conception dubiously cooks. (I’m thinking of how Heidegger would call certain moods ontological, as in, they are not indexed to historical/perceptive reality, they are just existential facts of our constitution, how we’re put together. And I think guilt works that way, and I think that’s a good way to think about what Freud is doing here.)

Regardless, the question sits there in the ugly daylight, why does guilt persist even in the absence of failure, or at least without any recourse to particular instances of falling short?

The answer: the super-ego, or the ego-ideal.

Let me end this reflection by setting up the next few.

The ego-ideal is an identification inside the ego (the seat of consciousness) with the parents. Whatever the dynamic between that relational-emotional triangle precipitates in a permeant way through the this identification with them.

To understand this, I need to know, what sort of development ensues to create such an dentification; what, substantively, is this super-ego, and what is its functional relationship to the ego and the other psychological components in play; and, how does it condition the formation of a psyche, soul, person, etc.?