superego

psychoanalysis

Sigmund Freud

is a part of the ego that is taken over and turned against the rest of the ego. With the same harsh aggressiveness that the ego would have liked to satisfy on other, extraneous individuals.

something very remarkable, which we should never have guessed and which is nonetheless quite obvious. His aggressiveness is introjected, internalized... it is, in point of fact, sent back to where it came from-- that is, it is directed toward his own ego. There it is taken over by a portion of the ego, which sets itself over against the rest of the ego as super-ego and which now in the form of 'conscience' is ready to put into action against the ego the same harsh aggressiveness that the ego would have liked to satisfy on other, extraneous individuals. [1953a:123] (in Paul 1998:393)

is a psychic system that forces us not only to 'make the free choice' to obey social sanctions, but also to see it as a choice an to enjoy it or to suffer the feeling referred to as guilt.

This reflexivity undermines the notion of the Post-Modern subject free to choose and reshape his identity. The psychoanalytic concept that designates the short-circuit between the repression and what it represses is the superego. As Lacan emphasised again and again, the essential content of the superego's injunction is 'Enjoy!' A father works hard to organise a Sunday excursion, which has to be postponed again and again. When it finally takes place, he is fed up with the whole idea and shouts at his children: 'Now you'd better enjoy it!' The superego works in a different way from the symbolic law. The parental figure who is simply 'repressive' in the mode of symbolic authority tells a child: 'You must go to grandma's birthday party and behave nicely, even if you are bored to death I don't care whether you want to, just do it!' The superego figure, in contrast, says to the child: 'Although you know how much grandma would like to see you, you should go to her party only if you really want to if you don't, you should stay at home.' The trick performed by the superego is to seem to offer the child a free choice, when, as every child knows, he is not being given any choice at all. Worse than that, he is being given an order and told to smile at the same time. Not only: 'You must visit your grandma, whatever you feel,' but: 'You must visit your grandma, and you must be glad to do it!' The superego orders you to enjoy doing what you have to do. What happens, after all, if the child takes it that he has a genuinely free choice and says 'no'' The parent will make him feel terrible. 'How can you say that!' his moth er will say: 'How can you be so cruel! What did your poor grandma do to make you not want to see her''' (zizek 1999: london review of books)

is a psychic system that makes use of excessive feelings of guilt. This guilt, paradoxically, is at root, not a guilt it forces upon us for not obeying its orders, but rather a guilt in us over giving ground to the superego relative to our desires. In short, it shames us for being a sheep to the desires of the other.

The superego, with its excessive feeling of guilt, is merely the necessary obverse of the Ego-Ideal: it exerts its unbearable pressure upon us on behalf of our betrayal of the 'law of desire.' The guilt we experience under the superego pressure is not illusory but actual 'the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one's desire,' [3] and the superego pressure demonstrates that we effectively are guilty of betraying our desire. (Zizek 'how to read lacan' : 69)

is an internal agency set up to keep watch over the disarmed self. It is a garrison in a conquered city.

The superego is thus, for Freud, in a very 'Roman' metaphor, an internal agency set up to keep watch over the disarmed self 'like a garrison in a conquered city' (1953a:124 in Paul 1998:393)

is not related to moral conscience. It is, on the contrary, the anti-ethical agency, the stigmatization of our ethical betrayal.

What follows from these precise distinctions is that, for Lacan, superego 'has nothing to do with moral conscience as far as its most obligatory demands are concerned' [2]: superego is, on the contrary, the anti-ethical agency, the stigmatization of our ethical betrayal. (zizek 'how to read lacan' 69)

is today, not the insistence of repression, judgment, taboo, and guilt, but rather it is the obscene enjoining of one to 'enjoy'.

Take the new definition of the superego. No longer the instance of repression and judgment, of taboo and guilt, the superego has today become something obscene, whose perpetual injunction is : 'Enjoy !' (Jameson 2006 : pdf. )

is the deposit of centuries of public opinion.

[T]he unconscious is not just a receptacle for all unclean spirits and other odious legacies from the dead past'such as, for instance, that deposit of centuries of public opinion which constitutes Freud's 'superego.' It is in very truth the eternally living, creative, germinal layer in each of us, and though it may make use of age-old symbolical images it nevertheless intends them to be understood in a new way. Naturally a new meaning does not come ready-made out of the unconscious, like Pallas Athene springing fully-armed from the head of Zeus... a living effect is achieved only when the products of the unconscious are brought into serious relationship with the conscious mind.

is that part of the personality which is soluble in alcohol.

superego, n.Definitions

superego