Freud describes the super-ego now as one core element of the tripartite psychic structure in its relation to the Ego and the Id. The concept was fully developed three years later in ‘ The Ego and the Id’ (Freud 1923b). It is remarkable however, that he used the term only after the revision of his drive theory and the introduction of the death instinct (Freud 1920g). Thus, Freud clearly regarded the super-ego as the heir of the Oedipus complex (Freud 1933a, p. The resulting unconscious feelings of guilt are part of a highly organized internal agency, linking the ego ideal with complex identifications arising from the individual’s ambivalent feelings towards both parents including elements of remorse and regret. Freud further elaborated the idea of a “separation of the ego from the ego ideal” in Chapter XI of ‘ Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’ (Freud 1921c).Ĭlinically, the experiences with obsessional neurosis (Freud 1909d 1918b) and melancholia (Freud 1916-1917g) convinced him of the existence of an internal structure that directs and subjugates the ego to its own demands. The origins of conscience, which had already been hypothesised two years earlier in ‘ Totem and Taboo’, lay in the incest taboo, castration anxiety and the identification with a powerful paternal authority as the source of social norms and ethical values (Freud 1912-1913a, p. He assumed that the conscience works in this way as a “watchman” (p. 93), and the existence of a “special psychical agency”, the ego ideal, “which (…) constantly watches the actual ego and measures it by that ideal “(p. Here he postulates the formation of a narcissistic structure, the ideal ego (p. 539-540) and, in particular, to the function of the ego ideal in his paper on narcissism (Freud 1914c). Their traces date back to the function of ‘judgement’ in his ‘ Project of a Scientific Psychology’ (Freud 1950a ) 1, to the ‘critical instance’ of the preconscious in Freud’s first topography (Freud 1900a, p. Although the term ‘super-ego’ does not appear in Freud’s writings until 1923, the precursors of the concept are clearly already detectable much earlier.
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