Concept
Ego ideal
The standard of perfection against which the ego measures itself. Freud introduced it in Zur Einführung des Narzißmus (1914) as the heir of infantile narcissism: the child, unable to keep its own sense of perfection, projects it ahead as an ideal and seeks to regain it by living up to that ideal. In Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (1921) a group forms when its members put one and the same leader in place of their ego ideal. In 1923 Freud treated it as another name for the super-ego; later writers often distinguish the ideal aspect from the punishing one.
Development
1914
introduced by Sigmund Freud
In 'On Narcissism' Freud introduces the ego ideal as the heir of infantile narcissism: what the subject projects before him as his ideal is the substitute for the lost perfection of childhood, watched over by an agency of self-observation. In 1921 he explains the bond of a group by its members putting the leader in place of their ego ideal.
In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921);On Narcissism: An Introduction (1914)
Relations
- 1914 introduced by Sigmund Freud
In 'On Narcissism' Freud introduces the ego ideal as the heir of infantile narcissism: what the subject projects before him as his ideal is the substitute for the lost perfection of childhood, watched over by an agency of self-observation. In 1921 he explains the bond of a group by its members putting the leader in place of their ego ideal.
- 1923 gave rise to Super-ego
The super-ego grows out of the ego ideal and the agency of self-observation Freud had described in 1914; in 1923 he uses the two names interchangeably, and only later, in the New Introductory Lectures, treats the ego ideal as one function of the super-ego.
Works
- 1914
On Narcissism: An Introduction
Freud's 1914 essay, published in the Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse, treats narcissism as a normal state of the libido. It sets the libido invested in the ego against the libido invested in objects, and primary narcissism against secondary narcissism. It contrasts two types of object-choice, the anaclitic and the narcissistic, introduces the concept of the ego ideal, and separates sublimation, which concerns the drive, from idealization, which concerns the object.
- 1921
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
Freud’s study of group psychology. Starting from the accounts of crowds given by Le Bon and McDougall, he argues that what binds the members of a group together, and binds them to their leader, is libido diverted from its sexual aims. He takes the church and the army as examples of artificial groups held together by love for a leader. He develops the concept of identification as the earliest emotional tie to another person, and compares being in love and hypnosis to group formation: in each, an object is put in place of the ego ideal. A group is then a number of individuals who have put one and the same object in place of their ego ideal and so have identified with one another. Freud links the leader to the father of the primal horde, and separates the ego ideal from the ego as a differentiating grade within it.
- 1923
The book in which Freud sets out his structural model of the mind. Since much of the ego is itself unconscious, the division conscious/unconscious is not enough. Freud distinguishes the id, a term he takes from Georg Groddeck, as the reservoir of the drives; the ego, the part of the id modified by the influence of the external world, first and foremost a bodily ego; and the super-ego or ego ideal, formed by identification with the parents as the heir of the Oedipus complex. He restates the dualism of life drives and death drives, discusses fusion and defusion of the drives, the unconscious sense of guilt and the negative therapeutic reaction, and ends with the ego as a poor creature serving three masters: the external world, the libido of the id and the severity of the super-ego.
See also
Linked from
People
References
- Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego1921Evidence for a relation
- On Narcissism: An Introduction1914Evidence for a relation
- The Ego and the Id1923Evidence for a relation