IDEAS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS The Superego PRISCILLA ROTH IDEAS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS The Superego Priscilla Roth Series editor: Ivan Ward ICON BOOKS UK TOTEM BOOKS USA Published in the UK in 2001 by Icon Books Ltd., Grange Road, Duxford, Cambridge CB2 4QF E-mail:
[email protected] www.iconbooks.co.uk Sold in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asia by Faber and Faber Ltd., 3 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AU or their agents Distributed in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asia by Macmillan Distribution Ltd., Houndmills, Basingstoke RG21 6XS Published in Australia in 2001 by Allen & Unwin Pty. Ltd., PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander Street, Crows Nest, NSW 2065 Published in the USA in 2001 by Totem Books Inquiries to: Icon Books Ltd., Grange Road, Duxford Cambridge CB2 4QF, UK Distributed to the trade in the USA by National Book Network Inc., 4720 Boston Way, Lanham, Maryland 20706 Distributed in Canada by Penguin Books Canada, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Suite 300, Toronto, Ontario M4V 3B2 ISBN 1 84046 246 9 Text copyright © 2001 Priscilla Roth The author has asserted her moral rights. Series editor: Ivan Ward No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Typesetting by Hands Fotoset Printed and bound in the UK by Cox & Wyman Ltd., Reading Introduction Everyone has a superego. Not everyone calls it a superego. Some people call it a conscience, or even a guilty conscience; some people call it morality. But whatever it’s called, everyone has one. Your superego is most recognisable as (but, as we will see, is not limited to) that voice inside your head which won’t let you do something wrong (illegal, immoral, unkind) even when nobody else would know. And which punishes you from inside when you succumb to temptation and do something that you know you shouldn’t have done . . . and sometimes even when you haven’t. You could think about it as being your ‘conscience’, but the Freudian idea of a superego is not exactly the same as a conscience, although they share many similar qualities and characteristics. One of the biggest differences between the very ancient idea of ‘conscience’ and the psychoanalytic extension of it called 3 THE SUPEREGO ‘the superego’, is that the concept of the superego recognises that there is often very little relation between what a person consciously thinks is permissible, and what the superego actually allows him or her to do. Or, to put it the other way round: we can sometimes feel very guilty, or experience a vague feeling of badness, without having much awareness of what we’ve done to make us feel guilty and bad. People often, for instance, find themselves feeling anxious when questioned at customs at the airport, or pulled over by a policeman for a routine check, even when they can’t think of anything they’ve done that is actually illegal. To further complicate matters, sometimes our superego speaks quite directly and straightforwardly inside us: ‘Get down to work NOW; you’ve been procrastinating long enough!’, or ‘DO NOT eat another chocolate!’, or ‘If you 4 INTRODUCTION leave the dirty dishes on the table, you’ll just have to do them when you come home, so do them before you go out!’ Sometimes it is more punitive: ‘You are a nasty, unkind person to treat your sister like that; you REALLY are a nasty