Freud - Complete Works (657 page)

  
¹
Now that we have distinguished between the
ego and the id, we must recognize the id as the great reservoir of
libido indicated in my paper on narcissism (1914
c
). The
libido which flows into the ego owing to the identifications
described above brings about its ‘secondary
narcissism’.

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   But, whatever the
character’s later capacity for resisting the influences of
abandoned object-cathexes may turn out to be, the effects of the
first identifications made in earliest childhood will be general
and lasting. This leads us back to the origin of the ego ideal; for
behind it there lies hidden an individual’s first and most
important identification, his identification with the father in his
own personal prehistory.¹ This is apparently not in the first
instance the consequence or outcome of an object-cathexis; it is a
direct and immediate identification and takes place earlier than
any object-cathexis. But the object-choices belonging to the first
sexual period and relating to the father and mother seem normally
to find their outcome in an identification of this kind, and would
thus reinforce the primary one.

   The whole subject, however, is so
complicated that it will be necessary to go into it in greater
detail. The intricacy of the problem is due to two factors: the
triangular character of the Oedipus situation and the
constitutional bisexuality of each individual.

   In its simplified form the case
of a male child may be described as follows. At a very early age
the little boy develops an object-cathexis for his mother, which
originally related to the mother’s breast and is the
prototype of an object-choice on the anaclitic model; the boy deals
with his father by identifying himself with him. For a time these
two relationships proceed side by side, until the boy’s
sexual wishes in regard to his mother become more intense and his
father is perceived as an obstacle to them; from this the Oedipus
complex originates.² His identification with his father then
takes on a hostile colouring and changes into a wish to get rid of
his father in order to take his place with his mother. Henceforward
his relation to his father is ambivalent; it seems as if the
ambivalence inherent in the identification from the beginning had
become manifest. An ambivalent attitude to his father and an
object-relation of a solely affectionate kind to his mother make up
the content of the simple positive Oedipus complex in a boy.

  
¹
Perhaps it would be safer to say
‘with the parents’; for before a child has arrived at
definite knowledge of the difference between the sexes, the lack of
a penis, it does not distinguish in value between its father and
its mother. I recently came across the instance of a young married
woman whose story showed that, after noticing the lack of a penis
in herself, she had supposed it to be absent not in all women, but
only in those whom she regarded as inferior, and had still supposed
that her mother possessed one. In order to simplify my presentation
I shall discuss only identification with the father.

  
²
Cf.
Group Psychology
(1921
c
),
loc. cit.

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   Along with the demolition of the
Oedipus complex, the boy’s object-cathexis of his mother must
be given up. Its place may be filled by one of two things: either
an identification with his mother or an intensification of his
identification with his father. We are accustomed to regard the
latter outcome as the more normal; it permits the affectionate
relation to the mother to be in a measure retained. In this way the
dissolution of the Oedipus complex would consolidate the
masculinity in a boy’s character. In a precisely analogous
way, the outcome of the Oedipus attitude in a little girl may be an
intensification of her identification with her mother (or the
setting up of such an identification for the first time) - a result
which will fix the child’s feminine character.

   These identifications are not
what we should have expected, since they do not introduce the
abandoned object into the ego; but this alternative outcome may
also occur, and is easier to observe in girls than in boys.
Analysis very often shows that a little girl, after she has had to
relinquish her father as a love-object, will bring her masculinity
into prominence and identify herself with her father (that is, with
the object which has been lost), instead of with her mother. This
will clearly depend on whether the masculinity in her disposition -
whatever that may consist in - is strong enough.

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   It would appear, therefore, that
in both sexes the relative strength of the masculine and feminine
sexual dispositions is what determines whether the outcome of the
Oedipus situation shall be an identification with the father or
with the mother. This is one of the ways in which bisexuality takes
a hand in the subsequent vicissitudes of the Oedipus complex. The
other way is even more important. For one gets an impression that
the simple Oedipus complex is by no means its commonest form, but
rather represents a simplification or schematization which, to be
sure, is often enough justified for practical purposes. Closer
study usually discloses the more complete Oedipus complex, which is
twofold, positive and negative, and is due to the bisexuality
originally present in children: that is to say, a boy has not
merely an ambivalent attitude towards his father and an
affectionate object-choice towards his mother, but at the same time
he also behaves like a girl and displays an affectionate feminine
attitude to his father and a corresponding jealousy and hostility
towards his mother. It is this complicating element introduced by
bisexuality that makes it so difficult to obtain a clear view of
the facts in connection with the earliest object-choices and
identifications, and still more difficult to describe them
intelligibly. It may even be that the ambivalence displayed in the
relations to the parents should be attributed entirely to
bisexuality and that it is not, as I have represented above,
developed out of identification in consequence of rivalry.

   In my opinion it is advisable in
general, and quite especially where neurotics are concerned, to
assume the existence of the complete Oedipus complex. Analytic
experience then shows that in a number of cases one or the other
constituent disappears, except for barely distinguishable traces;
so that the result is a series with the normal positive Oedipus
complex at one end and the inverted negative one at the other,
while its intermediate members exhibit the complete form with one
or other of its two components preponderating. At the dissolution
of the Oedipus complex the four trends of which it consists will
group themselves in such a way as to produce a
father-identification and a mother-identification. The
father-identification will preserve the object-relation to the
mother which belonged to the positive complex and will at the same
time replace the object-relation to the father which belonged to
the inverted complex: and the same will be true,
mutatis
mutandis
, of the mother-identification. The relative intensity
of the two identifications in any individual will reflect the
preponderance in him of one or other of the two sexual
dispositions.

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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 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.

   The super-ego is, however, not
simply a residue of the earliest object-choices of the id; it also
represents an energetic reaction-formation against those choices.
Its relation to the ego is not exhausted by the precept: ‘You
ought to be
like this (like your father).’ It also
comprises the prohibition: ‘You
may not be
like this
(like your father) - that is, you may not do all that he does; some
things are his prerogative.’ This double aspect of the ego
ideal derives from the fact that the ego ideal had the task of
repressing the Oedipus complex; indeed, it is to that revolutionary
event that it owes its existence. Clearly the repression of the
Oedipus complex was no easy task. The child’s parents, and
especially his father, were perceived as the obstacle to a
realization of his Oedipus wishes; so his infantile ego fortified
itself for the carrying out of the repression by erecting this same
obstacle within itself. It borrowed strength to do this, so to
speak, from the father, and this loan was an extraordinarily
momentous act. The super-ego retains the character of the father,
while the more powerful the Oedipus complex was and the more
rapidly it succumbed to repression (under the influence of
authority, religious teaching, schooling and reading), the stricter
will be the domination of the super-ego over the ego later on - in
the form of conscience or perhaps of an unconscious sense of guilt.
I shall presently bring forward a suggestion about the source of
its power to dominate in this way - the source, that is, of
its compulsive character which manifests itself in the form of a
categorical imperative.

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   If we consider once more the
origin of the super-ego as we have described it, we shall recognize
that it is the outcome of two highly important factors, one of a
biological and the other of a historical nature: namely, the
lengthy duration in man of his childhood helplessness and
dependence, and the fact of his Oedipus complex, the repression of
which we have shown to be connected with the interruption of
libidinal development by the latency period and so with the
diphasic onset of man’s sexual life. According to one
psycho-analytic hypothesis, the last-mentioned phenomenon, which
seems to be peculiar to man, is a heritage of the cultural
development necessitated by the glacial epoch. We see, then, that
the differentiation of the super-ego from the ego is no matter of
chance; it represents the most important characteristics of the
development both of the individual and of the species; indeed, by
giving permanent expression to the influence of the parents it
perpetuates the existence of the factors to which it owes its
origin.

   Psycho-analysis has been
reproached time after time with ignoring the higher, moral,
supra-personal side of human nature. The reproach is doubly unjust,
both historically and methodologically. For, in the first place, we
have from the very beginning attributed the function of instigating
repression to the moral and aesthetic trends in the ego, and
secondly, there has been a general refusal to recognize that
psycho-analytic research could not, like a philosophical system,
produce a complete and ready-made theoretical structure, but had to
find its way step by step along the path towards understanding the
intricacies of the mind by making an analytic dissection of both
normal and abnormal phenomena. So long as we had to concern
ourselves with the study of what is repressed in mental life, there
was no need for us to share in any agitated apprehensions as to the
whereabouts of the higher side of man. But now that we have
embarked upon the analysis of the ego we can give an answer to all
those whose moral sense has been shocked and who have complained
that there must surely be a higher nature in man: ‘Very
true,’ we can say, ‘and here we have that higher
nature, in this ego ideal or super-ego, the representative of our
relation to our parents. When we were little children we knew these
higher natures, we admired them and feared them; and later we took
them into ourselves.’

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   The ego ideal is therefore the
heir of the Oedipus complex, and thus it is also the expression of
the most powerful impulses and most important libidinal
vicissitudes of the id. By setting up this ego ideal, the ego has
mastered the Oedipus complex and at the same time placed itself in
subjection to the id. Whereas the ego is essentially the
representative of the external world, of 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.

   Through the forming of the ideal,
what biology and the vicissitudes of the human species have created
in the id and left behind in it is taken over by the ego and
re-experienced in relation to itself as an individual. Owing to the
way in which the ego ideal is formed, it has the most abundant
links with the phylogenetic acquisition of each individual - his
archaic heritage. 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. It would be vain, however, to attempt to localize the ego
ideal, even in the sense in which we have localized the ego, or to
work it into any of the analogies with the help of which we have
tried to picture the relation between the ego and the id.

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