“The commandment, 'Love thy neighbour as thyself', is the strongest defence against human aggressiveness and an excellent example of the unpsychological [expectations] of the cultural super-ego. The commandment is impossible to fulfil; such an enormous inflation of love can only lower its value, not get rid of the difficulty. Civilization pays no attention to all this; it merely admonishes us that the harder it is to obey the precept the more meritorious it is to do so. But anyone who follows such a precept in present-day civilization only puts himself at a disadvantage vis-a-vis the person who disregards it. What a potent obstacle to civilization aggressiveness must be, if the defence against it can cause as much unhappiness as aggressiveness itself! 'Natural' ethics, as it is called, has nothing to offer here except the narcissistic satisfaction of being able to think oneself better than others. At this point the ethics based on religion introduces its promises of a better after-life. But so long as virtue is not rewarded here on earth, ethics will, I fancy, preach in vain. I too think it quite certain that a real change in the relations of human beings to possessions would be of more help in this direction than any ethical commands; but the recognition of this fact among socialists has been obscured and made useless for practical purposes by a fresh idealistic misconception of human nature.”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
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“The most effective weapon a parent has to control a child is the withdrawal of love or its threat. A young child between the ages of three and six is too dependent on parental love and approval to resist this pressure. Robert's mother, as we saw earlier, controlled him by "cutting him out." Margaret's mother beat her into submission, but it was the loss of her father's love that devastated her. Whatever the means parents use, the result is that the child is forced to give up his instinctual longing, to suppress his sexual desires for one parent and his hostility toward the other. In their place he will develop feelings of guilt about his sexuality and fear of authority figures. This surrender constitutes an acceptance of parental power and authority and a submission to the parents' values and demands. The child becomes "good", which means that he gives up his sexual orientation in favor of one directed toward achievement. Parental authority is introjected in the form of a superego, ensuring that the child will follow his parents' wishes in the acculturation process. In effect, the child now identifies with the threatening parent. Freud says, "The whole process, on the one hand, preserves the genital organ wards off the danger of losing it; on the other hand, it paralyzes it, takes its function away from it.”
― Alexander Lowen, Fear Of Life
tags: bioenergetics, fear, freud, guilt, life, psychotherapy, sexuality, suppression
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“Recent brain scans have shed light on how the brain simulates the future. These simulation are done mainly in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the CEO of the brain, using memories of the past. On one hand, simulations of the future may produce outcomes that are desirable and pleasurable, in which case the pleasure centers of the brain light up (in the nucleus accumbens and the hypothalamus). On the other hand, these outcomes may also have a downside to them, so the orbitofrontal cortex kicks in to warn us of possible dancers. There is a struggle, then, between different parts of the brain concerning the future, which may have desirable and undesirable outcomes. Ultimately it is the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex that mediates between these and makes the final decisions. (Some neurologists have pointed out that this struggle resembles, in a crude way, the dynamics between Freud's ego, id, and superego.)”
― Michio Kaku, The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind
tags: 2014, brain, freud, mind, neuroscience, prediction, simulation
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“A transference neurosis corresponds to a conflict between ego and id, a narcissistic neurosis corresponds to that between between ego and super-ego, and a psychosis to that between ego and outer world.”
― Sigmund Freud, General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology
tags: 1924, conflict, definition, neurosis, psychosis
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“We have learned, for example, that the more virtuous a man is the more severe is his super-ego, and that he blames himself for misfortunes for which he is clearly not responsible.”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
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“One thus gets an impression that civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to power and coercion. It is, of course, natural to assume that these difficulties are not inherent in the nature or civilization itself but are determined by the imperfections of the cultural forms which have so far been developed. And in fact it is not difficult to indicate those defects. While mankind has made continual advances in its control over nature and may expect to make still greater ones, it is not possible to establish with certainty that a similar advance has been made in the management of human affairs; and probably at all periods, just as now once again, many people have asked themselves whether what little civilization has thus acquired is indeed worth defending at all. One would think that a re-ordering of human relations should be possible, which would remove the sources of dissatisfaction with civilization by renouncing coercion and the suppression of the instincts, so that, undisturbed by internal discord, men might devote themselves to the acquisition of wealth and its enjoyment. That would be a golden age, but it is questionable if such a state of affairs can be realized. It seems rather that every civilization must be built upon coercion and renunciation of instinct; it does not even seem certain that if coercion were to cease the majority of human beings would be prepared to undertake to perform the work necessary for acquiring new wealth. One has, I think, to reckon with the fact that there are present in all men destructive, and therefore anti-social and anti-cultural, trends and that in a great number of people these are strong enough to determine their behavior in human society.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion
tags: 1928, civilization, id, instinct, psychoanalysis, superego, will-to-power
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“We can postulate that there must be diseases founded on a conflict between ego and super-ego. Analysis gives us the right to infer that melancholia is the model of this group, and then we should put in a claim for the name of "narcissistic psychoneuroses" for these disorders.”
― Sigmund Freud, General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology
tags: 1924, definition, melancholia, neurosis, psychosis
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“The two psycho-analytic theories were in a different class. They were simply non testable, irrefutable. There was no conceivable human behaviour which could contradict them. This does not mean that Freud and Adler were not seeing certain things correctly: I personally do not doubt that much of what they say is of considerable importance, and may well play its part one day in a psychological science which is testable. But it does mean that those ‘clinical observations’ which analysts naively believe confirm their theory cannot do this any more than the daily confirmations which astrologers find in their practice. And as for Freud’s epic of the Ego, the Super-ego, and the Id, no substantially stronger claim to scientific status can be made for it than for Homer’s collected stories from Olympus. These theories describe some facts, but in the manner of myths. They contain most interesting psychological suggestions, but not in a testable form.”
― Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge
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“The metaphor I use when I lecture on Freud is to think of the mind as a horse and buggy (a Victorian chariot) in which the driver (the ego) struggles frantically to control a hungry, lustful, and disobedient horse (the id) while the driver’s father (the superego) sits in the back seat lecturing the driver on what he is doing wrong.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science
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“Na construção da personalidade, o instinto de destruição manifesta-se com a maior nitidez na formação do superego . Certo, por seu papel defensivo contra os impulsos irrealistas do id, por sua função na conquista duradoura do complexo de Édipo, o superego consolida e protege a unidade do ego, garante o seu desenvolvimento sob o princípio de realidade e, assim, atua a serviço de Eros. Contudo, o superego atinge esses objetivos dirigindo o ego contra o seu id, desviando parte dos instintos de destruição contra uma parte da personalidade destruindo, fragmentando a unidade da personalidade como um todo; assim, atua a serviço do antagonista do instinto de vida. Além disso, essa destrutividade dirigida para dentro constitui o âmago moral da personalidade adulta. A consciência, a mais querida agência moral do indivíduo civilizado, surge-nos impregnada do instinto de morte; o imperativo categórico que o superego impõe continua sendo um imperativo de autodestruição, enquanto constrói a existência social da personalidade. A obra de repressão pertence tanto ao instinto de morte quanto ao instinto de vida. Normalmente, a fusão de ambos é salutar, mas a obstinada severidade do superego ameaça constantemente esse equilíbrio salutar. Quanto mais um homem controla suas tendências agressivas em relação a outros, mais tirânico, isto é, mais agressivo se torna em seu ego-ideal ... mais intensas se tornam as tendências agressivas do seu ego-ideal contra o seu ego. Levada ao extremo, na melancolia, uma pura cultura do instinto de morte pode influir no superego, convertendo este numa espécie de local de reunião para os instintos de morte. Mas esse perigo extremo tem suas raízes na situação normal do ego. Como a ação do ego resulta em uma
'... libertação dos instintos agressivos no superego, a sua luta contra a libido expõe-no ao perigo de maus tratos e morte. Ao sofrer os ataques do superego ou talvez ao sucumbir a eles o ego está enfrentando um destino semelhante ao dos protozoários que são destruídos pelos produtos de desintegração que eles próprios criaram.'
E Freud acrescenta que do ponto de vista econômico [mental], a moralidade que funciona no superego parece ser um produto similar de desintegração.
É nesse contexto que a metapsicologia de Freud se defronta com a dialética fatal da civilização: o próprio progresso da civilização conduz à liberação de forças cada vez mais destrutivas.”
― Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud
tags: psicanálise
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“The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it, is called by us the sense of guilt; it expresses itself as a need for punishment. Civilization, therefore, obtains mastery over the individual's dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.”
― Sigmund Freud
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“Here, indeed, we encounter a curious phenomenon: the relevant mental processes, when seen in the mass, are more familiar, more accessible to our consciousness than they can ever be in the individual. In the individual only the aggression of the super-ego makes itself clearly heard, when tension arises, in the form of reproaches, while the demands themselves often remain unconscious in the background. When brought fully into consciousness, they are seen to coincide with the precepts of the current cultural super-ego. At this point there seems to be a regular cohesion, as it were, between the cultural development of the mass and the personal development of the individual. Some manifestations and properties of the super-ego can thus be recognized more easily by its behaviour in the cultural community than by its behaviour in the individual.”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
tags: collective, cultural, super-ego
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“Since our philosophy has given us no better way to express that intemporal, that indestructible element in us which, says Freud, is the unconscious itself, perhaps we
should continue calling it the unconscious—so long as we do not forget that the word is the index of an enigma—because the term retains, like the algae or the stone that one drags up, something of the sea from which it was taken.
The accord of phenomenology and of psychoanalysis should not be understood to consist in phenomenology’s saying clearly what psychoanalysis had said obscurely. On the contrary, it is by what phenomenology
implies or unveils as its limits—by its latent content or its unconscious—that it is in consonance with psychoanalysis. Thus the cross validation between the two doctrines is not exactly on the subject man; their agreements, rather, precisely in describing man as a timber yard, in order to discover, beyond the truth of immanence, that of the Ego and its acts, that of consciousness and its objects, of relations which a consciousness cannot sustain: man’s relations to his origins and his relations to his models. Freud points his finger at the Id and the Superego. Husserl, in his last writings, speaks of historical life as of a Tiefenleben. Phenomenology and psychoanalysis are not parallel; much better, they are both aiming toward the same latency.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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“The superego is, however, not simply a residue of the earliest object-choices of the id; it also represents an energetic reaction-formation against those choices.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id
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“a materialization of our conscience, of the severe super-ego within us, in which the punitive agency of our childhood finds residual expression.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Penguin Freud Reader
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“Getting ready is that point in the day when the rivalry between the two needs is likely to peak, because we are making transition from being at home and pleasing ourselves (ego) to going out and having to conform to a series of norms an conventions (superego). We become less ego and more superego with each button we fasten”
― Robert Rowland Smith, Breakfast with Socrates: An Extraordinary (Philosophical) Journey Through Your Ordinary Day
tags: clothes, freud
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“Freud's psychology and the philosophy underlying it are essentially pessimistic. This is patent in his outlook on the future of mankind as well as in his attitude toward therapy. And on the basis of his theoretical premises, he cannot be anything but pessimistic. Man is driven by instincts which at best are only to be modified by "sublimation." His instinctual drives for satisfaction are inevitably frustrated by society. His "ego" is helplessly tossed about between instinctual drives and the "superego," which itself can only be modified. The superego is primarily forbidding and destructive. True ideals do not exist. The wish for personal fulfillment is "narcissistic." Man is by nature destructive and a "deadi instinct" compels him either to destroy others or to suffer. All these theories leave little room for a positive attitude toward change and limit the value of the potentially splendid therapy Freud originated. In contrast, I believe that compulsive trends in neuroses are not instinctual but spring from disturbed human relationships; that they can be changed when these improve and that conflicts of such origin can really be resolved.”
― Karen Horney, Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis
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“The superego, Freud wrote, is the “mischief maker which prevents the ego’s coming to a friendly understanding with the instincts.” It”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Psychology Classics: Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do: Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books
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“Castration anxiety develops into moral anxiety — social anxiety — and it is not so easy now to know what the anxiety is about. The formula, ‘separation and expulsion from the horde’, only applies to that later portion of the super-ego which has been formed on the basis of social prototypes, not to the nucleus of the super-ego, which corresponds to the introjected parental agency.”
― Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety
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“In describing the evolution of the various danger-situations from their prototype, the act of birth, I have had no intention of asserting that every later determinant of anxiety completely invalidates the preceding one. It is true that, as the development of the ego goes on, the earlier danger-situations tend to lose their force and to be set aside, so that we might say that each period of the individual's life has its appropriate determinant of anxiety. Thus the danger of psychical helplessness is appropriate to the period of life when his ego is immature; the danger of loss of object, to early childhood when he is still dependent on others; the danger of castration, to the phallic phase; and the fear of his super-ego, to the latency period. Nevertheless, all these danger-situations and determinants of anxiety can persist side by side and cause the ego to react to them with anxiety at a period later than the appropriate one; or, again, several of them can come into operation at the same time. It is possible, moreover, that there is a fairly close relationship between the danger-situation that is operative and the form taken by the ensuing neurosis.”
― Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety
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