Super-ego

The Surmoi is a psychoanalytical concept worked out by Freud. It is with That and it Me one of the three authorities of the personality. It is the moral structure (design of the good and the evil) and legal (capacity of reward or punishment) of our Psychisme. He is the heir to the Oedipus complex . He reflects all our culture under the category of “what it is advisable to do”. It is an authority severe and cruel, especially made of prohibited which makes feel guilty the individual.

Super-ego in the second topics of Freud

It is used to indicate the result of a process which proceeds in the child and who remains printed in his unconscious when it is adulte.
The process describes by Freud is the following:
According to him, the starting point is a Pulsion born in the That. At the time when she is born, this impulse is sometimes forced by a higher force. It is necessary thus to give up satisfaction that would generate the realization of the instinctual act. But this frustration generates one second impulse, aggressive, against the agent exerting the constraint. Such a reaction (which one often observes in the young children) is not a socially adapted answer. To leave itself the dead end, the child has recourse to a specific psychic mechanism: identification with the authority. This authority is thus seen interiorized in part of the Me: the Super-ego . The Surmoi is thus the seat of the mechanisms of renouncement of the impulses, containing the images of the various constraining forces to which Ego can be identified.

Oedipus complex super-ego and

The Super-ego rises from the resolution of the Oedipus complex: the child assumes the Interdits Parricide and Inceste and is identified with the relative of the same sex. By thus interiorizing the authority of this relative, the child symbolically kills it while seizing his sphere of influence and while returning this relative superflu.
to some extent The appearance of the Super-ego is moreover related to the awakening of the existence of an external reality. The integration of prohibited and recommendations of the parents make it possible the child to better manage his relationship with the world which surrounds it while making him make the saving in unpleasant experiments that it would owe if not repeat (or to live again by the memory).

Function of the Super-ego

The Super-ego is thus a critical agent, most of the time unconscious, filtering the impulses through interiorized standards. These standards (interdicts, requirements) can be of an ethical , social or cultural nature and are more or less constraining according to the personality of the individual, of sound education. The role of the parents in this structuring during childhood is determining, in particular that of the father who represents the Autorité traditionally. The Super-ego is the authority which generates the Refoulement impulses considered to be unacceptable. He guides the child become independent, and thereafter the adult, in his choices.

Jean-Paul Sartre, whose father died young person and whose mother truly did not exert normative authority, even said of him as it did not have Super-ego.

Surmoïques injunctions

The super-ego is a complex authority, too often considered as the " gendarme intérieur". This is not false but a little reducing. The injunctions of the super-ego are of four types, and in contradiction:

“Enjoyed not! ”

This injunction comes from the introjection of the father interdictor. It is that one the true gendarme, which does not want to say that this injunction is most important.

“Go ahead enjoyed! ”

This injunction is in perfect contradiction with the preceding one, and comes from the introjection of the mother (wished and wishing).

This contradiction makes emerge the symptom in order to approach the pleasure, without to reach it.

“Would be perfect! ”

This injunction originates in the model to reach. It is this injunction which brings sometimes to conduits of avoidance (“I would never arrive there… ”).

“Subject yourself! ”

Exit of the wished paternal figure, it can bring to conduits masochists.

These various injunctions emphasize four types of super-ego:

the super-ego interdictor;
super-ego of the pleasure;
super-ego of the narcissistic ideal;
sadistic super-ego.

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