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PARTISAN REVIEW
therefore to revise and narrow the question and ask instead, Does
the psyche have a modern history?
One of the ways we can resume the discussion is to consult
Freud's final and fullest representations of his theory of the mind.
Significantly, he began to publish works containing this revisionary
scheme after the end of World War
1.
These writings contain new
descriptions of the structural workings of the mind, a newly revised
theory of the instincts, and new dispositions of mental forces as these
were ascribed to their organization in newly classified unconscious
psychic formations. In one of these agencies, the superego, the nexus
of unconscious psychic processes and cultural phenomena , is
explicitly put forward.
Freud had made some preliminary observations about the
superego - which he initially called the ego ideal- in his 1914 essay,
"On Narcissism: An Introduction"; he discussed this agency briefly
again in "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917) and at some further
length in
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
(1921).
It
was,
however, in his account of certain of the "higher functions" of the
mind in
The Ego and the Id
(1923) that he first developed this
conception of length; thereafter it was a permanent occupant of one
of the centers of his attention. The ego ideal, Freud had first
speculated, is the later substitute, constructed by each individual to
take the place of the "lost narcissism" of infancy and early childhood ,
when each of us "was his own ideal." In order to assure that "the
narcissistic satisfaction from the ego ideal" is sustained, Freud
postulated a "special psychical agency" whose task was to watch the
ego and measure it in comparison with the ideal. These functions or
characteristics, Freud reflects, are associated with what is commonly
known as "conscience," and this internal watchman or monitor is in
turn connected with the mind's self-critical faculty and its sense of
guilt. Hence from the very outset, Freud's discussion of this agency
was placed in a context in which some of the most primordial and
some of the most advanced mental functions were brought together,
juxtaposed in such a way as to elicit their latent contradictoriness .
For Freud the superego brings into being the higher and "supra–
personal" side of human nature . In it he discerns the origins of
religion, morality and the social sense. At the same time, the
superego is "the heir of the Oedipus complex," and by virtue of this
patrimony is "also the expression of the most powerful impulses and
most important libidinal vicissitudes of the id." In establishing the
superego, "the ego has mastered the Oedipus complex and at the
