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same time placed itself in subjection to the id ." We are involved in
what appears to be irreducible contradiction. Higher and lower
converge, for the act of mastery is at once an act of subjection. And
in this sense the superego, whose origins are ultimately the external
world, comes to represent, vis-a.-vis the ego, the realities of the
internal world, of the id, of the psyche itself. One of the things that
Freud was trying to do, I believe, in this disquieting derivation was
to explain how it is that the inner forces opposing instinctual and
libidinal impulses seem to have the very character of what it is they
are opposing; how it is that our consciences and our senses of guilt
can be as wild, peremptory, savage, and ferocious as the actions and
thoughts for which they upbraid and punish us. They are so, Freud
suggests, because they are, in fact, derivatives of the identical forces
to which they are antagonistic.
Throughout the latter part of his career, Freud returned at
crucial moments to reconsider the central importance of the
superego in the psychic economy of our unconscious minds and to
rework its place within his evolving theoretical system.
In
"The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex" (1924), Freud
focuses on bringing into further systematic coherence the disparate
elements that cluster about the central, or Oedipal, phase of the
formation of the superego. The Oedipal crisis is brought toward
resolution by the fear of castration - that outcome being in the case
of the male child either the punishment for or the precondition of the
fulfillment of the fantasies of genital satisfaction entailed in the
permutations of the Oedipal situation.
All the same , Freud reserves a certain measure of skepticism
about the value of these extended proceedings. And he permits
himself to write that , "It is true that we cannot tell at once whether
we have really gained any new knowledge by this, or have only
enriched our store of formulas." This minatory observation has a
characteristic edge to it; and it refers I believe to the entire
undertaking of ego psychology. Freud seems, among other things, to
be wondering whether this new terminology may be the beginning of
psychoanalysis as a formal system and is giving voice to intuitive
doubts about the larger value of such a development.
In
the important and difficult book,
Inhibitions, Symptoms and
Anxiery
(1926), Freud refers on a number of separate occasions to the
role of the superego in symptom formation - a role which it shares
with the ego itself. Freud's major dealings with the superego in this
work, however, have to do with his new theory of anxiety and his
