The Superego (n.) 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.
The Superego (n.) is an internal agency set up to keep watch over the disarmed self. It is a garrison in a conquered city.
The Superego (n.) is the sum of collective beliefs and values handed down by tradition — like the Torah for the orthodox Jew, a solidly entrenched system above the ego and the cause of many conflicts.
The Superego (n.) is civilization's garrison in a conquered city, set up within the individual to watch over his disarmed aggression.
The Superego (n.) ends the fear of being found out, because nothing can be hidden from it, not even thoughts.
The Superego (n.) torments the sinful ego with the old anxiety and watches for chances to get it punished by the outside world.
The Superego (n.) takes its first severity not from the father's harshness but from the child's own vengeful aggression against him: 'If I were the father and you the child, I'd treat you badly.'
The Superego (n.) draws its aggression from two sources at once: the punishing authority it carries on, and one's own unused aggression turned against that authority — in both cases, aggression displaced inward.
The Superego (n.) is easier to see in a culture than in a person: in the individual only its reproaches are heard, while its demands stay unconscious — and turn out to be the culture's precepts.
The Superego (n.) is external coercion moved indoors — the agency that turns the opponents of civilization into its vehicles.
The Superego (n.) speaks two sentences at once: 'You ought to be like your father' and 'You may not be like your father.'
The Superego (n.) is the obstacle the child built inside himself — he defeated the father by installing him, with strength borrowed from the father himself.
The Superego (n.) is the precipitate left in the ego when the Oedipal phase ends — two parental identifications fused, standing over the rest of the self.
The Superego (n.) is man's higher nature, and it is real: it is the parents we once admired and feared as small children, later taken into ourselves.
The Superego (n.) is the price of a long helpless childhood: by keeping the parents' influence alive, it keeps alive the conditions that created it.
The Superego (n.) is the ambassador of the inner world, the id, just as the ego is the ambassador of reality.
The Superego (n.) is where an old battle goes on: the struggle that once raged in the depths, never settled, is now fought in a higher region, like Kaulbach's Huns battling in the sky.
The Superego (n.) is a memorial of the ego's former weakness and dependence; the grown ego obeys it as the child once obeyed its parents.
The Superego (n.) reaches deeper into the id than the ego does, and so is farther from consciousness — morality lives closer to the passions than reason does.
The Superego (n.) speaks in words we once heard, but its force comes not from instruction or reading but from the id.