The Superego

Crudely speaking, the superego is the con­science, the still, small voice within us that warns us against temptation and wrongdoing. But the voice we hear is only the conscious part of the superego. A larger part of it is buried in the unconscious, where it frequently bullies the ego and makes itself felt in vague but distressing feelings of guilt and shame. The superego embraces not only our conscious moral standards but also our "ego ideal" the picture of ourselves as we would secretly like to be and appear to the world.

While the reality principle restricts the ego to what is possible, the superego tells it what is permissible, or, to put it another way, what is socially acceptable. The superego is an es­sential check on asocial or antisocial conduct.

A peculiarity of the superego is that it is often behind the times. Its sternest admoni­tions frequently are those that were formed in early childhood. The nature of the superego is the heart of the doctrine: "Give me the child until he is seven and you can have him for the rest of his life."

This brings us to the ori­gin of the superego.

The superego is formed in childhood, principally between the ages of three and six. At this time, as already noted, the child is strongly identified with his parents (or their substitutes). Their least prohibitions and com­mands, their values, and their attitudes are etched deeply on the young and weak ego of the child, and these feelings become the es­sence of his superego.

The unfortunate catch in this is that the parents, impelled by their own superegos, too often urge the child to be better than he can be ("a perfect little lady or gentleman") and better than they (the parents) are or were themselves.

UNCONSCIOUS MIND

Now that we have described the unconscious mind, we are in a position to understand the conflicts that occur in it. The conflicts can be understood as battles between the ego and the id, the superego and the id, the ego and the superego, and struggles within the id. The focus of these conflicts is on the ego. It must mediate between the id and superego; it must obey the dictates of the su­perego; it must control the whimsical de­mands of the id; it must satisfy the needs of external reality; it must guide the entire per­sonality through the shoals and competitions of the real world. Some egos are stronger than others, but no ego can always meet all the demands upon it. It must sometimes adopt compromises, subtle means of self-protection variously called "ego defenses," mental mech­anisms, and mental dynamisms.

When the ego is under stress from the id or being "punished" by the superego, the indi­vidual whose ego is being hurt suffers from anxiety-a vague but often powerful feeling for which he has no obvious or immediate explanation. He cannot put his finger on the source of the anxiety because it is concealed and disguised in the unconscious mind. The anxiety may express itself in feelings of ten­sion, guilt, inferiority, or even physical symp­toms (e.g. a headache). There are always some physical reactions to the stress of anx­iety. In one sense anxiety may be considered an admission on the part of the ego that it is temporarily unable to cope with its taxing job.

Later in this chapter we shall deal with constructive ways of handling anxiety. At this point we shall set forth some of the men­tal mechanisms by which the ego seeks to defend itself against otherwise intolerable anxieties generated by conflicts in the uncon­scious mind.