Freud - Complete Works (756 page)

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

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   No doubt you will expect me to
give you more than a mere illustration when I inform you that we
have found out all kinds of things about the formation of the
super-ego - that is to say, about the origin of conscience.
Following a well-known pronouncement of Kant’s which couples
the conscience within us with the starry Heavens, a pious man might
well be tempted to honour these two things as the masterpieces of
creation. The stars are indeed magnificent, but as regards
conscience God has done an uneven and careless piece of work, for a
large majority of men have brought along with them only a modest
amount of it or scarcely enough to be worth mentioning. We are far
from overlooking the portion of psychological truth that is
contained in the assertion that conscience is of divine origin; but
the thesis needs interpretation. Even if conscience is something
‘within us’, yet it is not so from the first. In this
it is a real contrast to sexual life, which is in fact there from
the beginning of life and not only a later addition. But, as is
well known, young children are amoral and possess no internal
inhibitions against their impulses striving for pleasure. The part
which is later taken on by the super-ego is played to begin with by
an external power, by parental authority. Parental influence
governs the child by offering proofs of love and by threatening
punishments which are signs to the child of loss of love and are
bound to be feared on their own account. This realistic anxiety is
the precursor of the later moral anxiety. So long as it is dominant
there is no need to talk of a super-ego and of a conscience. It is
only subsequently that the secondary situation develops (which we
are all too ready to regard as the normal one), where the external
restraint is internalized and the super-ego takes the place of the
parental agency and observes, directs and threatens the ego in
exactly the same way as earlier the parents did with the child.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

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   The super-ego, which thus takes
over the power, function and even the methods of the parental
agency, is however not merely its successor but actually the
legitimate heir of its body. It proceeds directly out of it, we
shall learn presently by what process. First, however, we must
dwell upon a discrepancy between the two. The super-ego seems to
have made a one-sided choice and to have picked out only the
parents’ strictness and severity, their prohibiting and
punitive function, whereas their loving care seems not to have been
taken over and maintained. If the parents have really enforced
their authority with severity we can easily understand the
child’s in turn developing a severe super-ego. But, contrary
to our expectation, experience shows that the super-ego can acquire
the same characteristic of relentless severity even if the
upbringing had been mild and kindly and had so far as possible
avoided threats and punishments. We shall come back later to this
contradiction when we deal with the transformations of instinct
during the formation of the super-ego.

   I cannot tell you as much as I
should like about the metamorphosis of the parental relationship
into the super-ego, partly because that process is so complicated
that an account of it will not fit into the framework of an
introductory course of lectures such as I am trying to give you,
but partly also because we our selves do not feel sure that we
understand it completely. So you must be content with the sketch
that follows.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

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   The basis of the process is what
is called an ‘identification’ - that is to say, the
assimilation of one ego to another one, as a result of which the
first ego behaves like the second in certain respects, imitates it
and in a sense takes it up into itself. Identification has been not
unsuitably compared with the oral, cannibalistic incorporation of
the other person. It is a very important form of attachment to
someone else, probably the very first, and not the same thing as
the choice of an object. The difference between the two can be
expressed in some such way as this. If a boy identifies himself
with his father, he wants to
be like
his father; if he makes
him the object of his choice, he wants to
have
him, to
possess him. In the first case his ego is altered on the model of
his father; in the second case that is not necessary.
Identification and object-choice are to a large extent independent
of each other; it is however possible to identify oneself with
someone whom, for instance, one has taken as a sexual object, and
to alter one’s ego on his model. It is said that the
influencing of the ego by the sexual object occurs particularly
often with women and is characteristic of femininity. I must
already have spoken to you in my earlier lectures of what is by far
the most instructive relation between identification and
object-choice. It can be observed equally easily in children and
adults, in normal as in sick people. If one has lost an object or
has been obliged to give it up, one often compensates oneself by
identifying oneself with it and by setting it up once more in
one’s ego, so that here object-choice regresses, as it were,
to identification.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

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   I myself am far from satisfied
with these remarks on identification; but it will be enough if you
can grant me that the installation of the super-ego can be
described as a successful instance of identification with the
parental agency. The fact that speaks decisively for this view is
that this new creation of a superior agency within the ego is most
intimately linked with the destiny of the Oedipus complex, so that
the super-ego appears as the heir of that emotional attachment
which is of such importance for childhood. With his abandonment of
the Oedipus complex a child must, as we can see, renounce the
intense object-cathexes which he has deposited with his parents,
and it is as a compensation for this loss of objects that there is
such a strong intensification of the identifications with his
parents which have probably long been present in his ego.
Identifications of this kind as precipitates of object-cathexes
that have been given up will be repeated often enough later in the
child’s life; but it is entirely in accordance with the
emotional importance of this first instance of such a
transformation that a special place in the ego should be found for
its outcome. Close investigation has shown us, too, that the
super-ego is stunted in its strength and growth if the surmounting
of the Oedipus complex is only incompletely successful. In the
course of development the super-ego also takes on the influences of
those who have stepped into the place of parents - educators,
teachers, people chosen as ideal models. Normally it departs more
and more from the original parental figures; it becomes, so to say,
more impersonal. Nor must it be forgotten that a child has a
different estimate of its parents at different periods of its life.
At the time at which the Oedipus complex gives place to the
super-ego they are something quite magnificent; but later they lose
much of this. Identifications then come about with these later
parents as well, and indeed they regularly make important
contributions to the formation of character; but in that case they
only affect the ego, they no longer influence the super-ego, which
has been determined by the earliest parental imagos.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4674

   I hope you have already formed an
impression that the hypothesis of the super-ego really describes a
structural relation and is not merely a personification of some
such abstraction as that of conscience. One more important function
remains to be mentioned which we attribute to this super-ego. It is
also the vehicle of the ego ideal by which the ego measures itself,
which it emulates, and whose demand for ever greater perfection it
strives to fulfil. There is no doubt that this ego ideal is the
precipitate of the old picture of the parents, the expression of
admiration for the perfection which the child then attributed to
them.

   I am sure you have heard a great
deal of the sense of inferiority which is supposed particularly to
characterize neurotics. It especially haunts the pages of what are
known as
belles lettres
. An author who uses the term
‘inferiority complex’ thinks that by so doing he has
fulfilled all the demands of psycho-analysis and has raised his
composition to a higher psychological plane. In fact
‘inferiority complex’ is a technical term that is
scarcely used in psycho-analysis. For us it does not bear the
meaning of anything simple, let alone elementary. To trace it back
to the self-perception of possible organic defects, as the school
of what are known as ‘Individual Psychologists’ likes
to do, seems to us a short-sighted error. The sense of inferiority
has strong erotic roots. A child feels inferior if he notices that
he is not loved, and so does an adult. The only bodily organ which
is really regarded as inferior is the atrophied penis, a
girl’s clitoris. But the major part of the sense of
inferiority derives from the ego’s relation to its super-ego;
like the sense of guilt it is an expression of the tension between
them. Altogether, it is hard to separate the sense of inferiority
and the sense of guilt. It would perhaps be right to regard the
former as the erotic complement to the moral sense of inferiority.
Little attention has been given in psycho-analysis to the question
of the delimitation of the two concepts.

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   If only because the inferiority
complex has become so popular, I will venture to entertain you here
with a short digression. A historical personality of our own days,
who is still alive though at the moment he has retired into the
background, suffers from a defect in one of his limbs owing to an
injury at the time of his birth. A very well-known contemporary
writer who is particularly fond of compiling the biographies of
celebrities has dealt, among others, with the life of the man I am
speaking of. Now in writing a biography it may well be difficult to
suppress a need to plumb the psychological depths. For this reason
our author has ventured on an attempt to erect the whole of the
development of his hero’s character on the sense of
inferiority which must have been called up by his physical defect.
In doing so, he has overlooked one small but not insignificant
fact. It is usual for mothers whom Fate has presented with a child
who is sickly or otherwise at a disadvantage to try to compensate
him for his unfair handicap by a superabundance of love. In the
instance before us, the proud mother behaved otherwise; she
withdrew her love from the child on account of his infirmity. When
he had grown up into a man of great power, he proved unambiguously
by his actions that he had never forgiven his mother. When you
consider the importance of a mother’s love for the mental
life of a child, you will no doubt make a tacit correction of the
biographer’s inferiority theory.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

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   But let us return to the
super-ego. We have allotted it the functions of self-observation,
of conscience and of the ideal. It follows from what we have said
about its origin that it presupposes an immensely important
biological fact and a fateful psychological one: namely, the human
child’s long dependence on its parents and the Oedipus
complex, both of which, again, are intimately interconnected. The
super-ego is the representative for us of every moral restriction,
the advocate of a striving towards perfection - it is, in short, as
much as we have been able to grasp psychologically of what is
described as the higher side of human life. Since it itself goes
back to the influence of parents, educators and so on, we learn
still more of its significance if we turn to those who are its
sources. As a rule parents and authorities analogous to them follow
the precepts of their own super-egos in educating children.
Whatever understanding their ego may have come to with their
super-ego, they are severe and exacting in educating children. They
have forgotten the difficulties of their own childhood and they are
glad to be able now to identify themselves fully with their own
parents who in the past laid such severe restrictions upon them.
Thus a child’s super-ego is in fact constructed on the model
not of its parents but of its parents’ super-ego; the
contents which fill it are the same and it becomes the vehicle of
tradition and of all the time-resisting judgements of value which
have propagated themselves in this manner from generation to
generation. You may easily guess what important assistance taking
the super-ego into account will give us in our understanding of the
social behaviour of mankind - in the problem of delinquency, for
instance - and perhaps even what practical hints on education. It
seems likely that what are known as materialistic views of history
sin in under-estimating this factor. They brush it aside with the
remark that human ‘ideologies’ are nothing other than
the product and superstructure of their contemporary economic
conditions. That is true, but very probably not the whole truth.
Mankind never lives entirely in the present. The past, the
tradition of the race and of the people, lives on in the ideologies
of the super-ego, and yields only slowly to the influences of the
present and to new changes; and so long as it operates through the
super-ego it plays a powerful part in human life, independently of
economic conditions.