The Superego

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Notes

I believe Freud meant that the ego ideal was the recipient of early infantile “perfection” rather than infantile “narcissism.” In this paper (p. 94) he does say that “the subject’s narcissism makes its appearance displaced onto this new ideal ego which finds itself possessed of every perfection that is of value.” He goes on to say that in the face of criticism from within and without the child has to give up the early sense of perfection and “seeks to recover it in the new form of an ego ideal.” Then, on p. 95, Freud suggests a special agency akin to the conscience, adding that it “performs the task of seeing that narcissistic satisfaction from the ego ideal is ensured.” The implication is that the ego (today we would say the self-representation) is the recipient of narcissistic satisfaction from living up to the ego ideal. In addition, if we define narcissism as the libidinal cathexis of the self representation (Hartmann, 1950), it follows that the ego ideal, a substructure in the superego, cannot be the repository of narcissism, even though it is deeply involved in dynamic operations that result in increases and decreases of narcissism.

Just as the auditory sphere is important in superego formation and function, the visual sphere is primary in the formation and function of the wished-for self image. The admired qualities in one’s idols which the preoedipal individual wants to emulate are taken in largely visually. In addition, the shame reaction resulting from falling short of the wished-for self image is strongly linked to a fear of being discovered or seen as inadequate in some way. In shame the individual feels that his shortcomings have been exposed, and an external observer is implicit in the process. By contrast, guilt and superego influence depend not on exposure or an implied external observer but on the observing superego within.

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Notes on contributors

David Milrod

Training and supervising psychoanalyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.