Concept
Super-ego
In Freud's structural model, the agency that judges and censors the ego: conscience, self-observation and the holding up of ideals. Freud introduced it in Das Ich und das Es (1923) as heir of the Oedipus complex, formed when the child gives up its parents as objects and identifies with their authority. Much of it is unconscious, and its severity draws on aggression turned back against the self, which the ego feels as a sense of guilt. Melanie Klein traced its origins to the first year of life.
Development
1923
introduced by Sigmund Freud
Das Ich und das Es introduces the super-ego (Über-Ich), at first as another name for the ego ideal, and derives it from the identifications with the parents that bring the Oedipus complex to an end, which makes it the heir of that complex.
In The Ego and the Id (1923);The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex (1924)
1928
reworked by Melanie Klein
Against Freud's view that the super-ego is the heir of the Oedipus complex, Klein finds an early and harsh super-ego in the first years of life. It is built from the introjected objects that the child's own sadism makes frightening. The Psycho-Analysis of Children (1932) sets out this view at length.
In The Psycho-Analysis of Children (1932);Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict (1928)
Relations
- 1923 introduced by Sigmund Freud
Das Ich und das Es introduces the super-ego (Über-Ich), at first as another name for the ego ideal, and derives it from the identifications with the parents that bring the Oedipus complex to an end, which makes it the heir of that complex.
- 1923 derives from Oedipus complex
Freud calls the super-ego the heir of the Oedipus complex: when the complex is given up, the parental authority is introjected into the ego and forms its nucleus, taking over the father's severity and perpetuating his prohibition of incest.
- 1923 derives from Ego ideal
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.
- 1928 reworked by Melanie Klein
Against Freud's view that the super-ego is the heir of the Oedipus complex, Klein finds an early and harsh super-ego in the first years of life. It is built from the introjected objects that the child's own sadism makes frightening. The Psycho-Analysis of Children (1932) sets out this view at length.
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.
- 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.
- 1924
The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex
Freud's short paper of 1924, published in the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, asks what brings the Oedipus complex, the central phenomenon of the sexual period of early childhood, to its end. He weighs two accounts: that the complex founders on the painful disappointments its impossible wishes meet, and that it passes away when its developmentally appointed time is over, as milk teeth fall out when the permanent ones come. He treats the two as compatible, the individual events realising an inherited programme. In the boy he locates the decisive factor in the phallic phase, in which only the male genital is known. A threat of castration, provoked by masturbation and at first disbelieved, takes effect retroactively once the boy has seen the female genitals. Since both the active and the passive Oedipal satisfactions would cost him his penis, his narcissistic interest in the organ wins out over the libidinal cathexis of his parents. The object cathexes are given up and replaced by identification. The parental authority taken into the ego forms the nucleus of the super-ego, which borrows the father's severity and perpetuates the prohibition of incest, while the libidinal trends are partly desexualised and sublimated and partly inhibited in their aim and turned into tenderness. The latency period begins. Ideally the process is more than a repression: it amounts to the destruction and abolition of the complex, whereas a complex that is merely repressed persists unconsciously in the id and may later have pathogenic effects. Freud then turns to the girl, whose development he finds obscure and incomplete. She takes her lack of a penis as a castration already carried out, not as a threat. Lacking castration anxiety, she has a weaker motive for setting up the super-ego and breaking off her infantile genital organisation, which owe more to upbringing and to the fear of losing love. Her Oedipus complex culminates in the wish to receive a child from her father, a substitute for the penis, and fades gradually because that wish is never fulfilled. Freud closes by allowing that the sequence he describes is typical but perhaps not the only possible one, and notes that Otto Rank's theory of the trauma of birth raises a question about castration anxiety that he leaves for another occasion.
- 1928
Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict
Paper read by Melanie Klein at the Innsbruck Congress of 1927 and published in 1928, in English and in German as "Frühstadien des Ödipuskonfliktes". Drawing on her analyses of young children, Klein moves the beginnings of the Oedipus conflict and of the super-ego back to the frustrations of weaning towards the end of the first year, a period she sees as dominated by oral and anal sadism. She describes a "femininity phase" through which children of both sexes pass, and an epistemophilic impulse directed at the inside of the mother's body. On her account anxiety and guilt already arise at this early stage, well before the period Freud had assigned to the Oedipus complex.
- 1932
The Psycho-Analysis of Children
Melanie Klein's first book was published in 1932, in German in Vienna by the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag and in English by the Hogarth Press as The Psycho-Analysis of Children, translated by Alix Strachey. It sets out the play technique she had devised for analysing children, which carried psychoanalytic theory and practice into early childhood and made the analysis of very young children possible. Part one, on the technique of child analysis, presents its psychological foundations and the technique of early analysis. It goes on to analysis in the latency period and at puberty, and includes the case of an obsessional neurosis in a six-year-old girl and chapters on neurosis in children and on children's sexual activities. Part two, on early anxiety-situations and their effect on the child's development, draws theory from this clinical work. It covers the early stages of the Oedipus conflict, which Klein places in the first year of life; an early and harsh super-ego and its relation to obsessional neurosis; the part played by sadism and anxiety; and the effect of early anxiety-situations on the development of the ego and on the sexual development of the girl and of the boy. The book thus sought the roots of neuroses and psychoses in children and adults alike. Later editions add a preface to the third edition in which Klein traces how her views on some of its central hypotheses developed. The book has been translated into many languages, Hebrew among them.
See also
Linked from
People
References
- The Ego and the Id1923Evidence for a relation
- The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex1924Evidence for a relation
- On Narcissism: An Introduction1914Evidence for a relation
- The Psycho-Analysis of Children1932Evidence for a relation
- Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict1928Evidence for a relation