Liam MacLean

Super-Ego
Freud's concept of the super-ego starts in his analysis of the libido, which he divides into
the eros (love instinct) and the thanatos (death instinct). The love instinct is our subconscious
desire to bind and relate to our fellow. It binds us together. Thanatos is our desire to destroy and
kill. Freud believes it is the driving force behind the phenomena of narcism and other destructive
human tendencies. The two are both repressed by society, but while eros is utilized, thanatos
must be entirely repressed for a society to avoid destroying itself.
Freuds super-ego is what more commonly is referred to as a conscious, an internal
watchdog of each person's actions. It is a part of the mind that reflects and punishes the ego for
something that the ego considers a digression. Freud claims that the super-ego is created when
society denies a person's ability to express his/her thanatos. Once this happens, the excess death
instinct is driven inwards toward the ego, forming the super-ego.
The super-ego is responsible for feelings such as guilt and remorse. The super-ego
primarily exists to criticize the ego, and creates these emotions as a result. Remorse is produced
when the super-ego punishes the ego for something it has already done. Guilt, on the other hand,
comes from the ego thinking about doing something that the ego deems bad. Whether the action
is morally bad is irrelevant, it only matters that the ego thinks that the action is negative for the
feeling of guilt to arise. Freud extrapolates this into a bigger point: that mankind has no inherent
moral compass, and that good and evil derive from the super-egos interactions with the ego.
Freud continues that there are two types of guilt: fear of authority and that created by the
super-ego. While the guilt based on fear of authority can be removed by the removal of the
authority or by obtaining the authorities approval, guilt by the super-ego is much harder to

escape. In some ways, Freud suggests that the two are tied together, as in the example of the
super-ego by identification with the father, gave it the fathers power to punish as he would
have done the aggression they had performed (Freud Section VII). In this example, the authority
is incorporated into the super-ego as the ego feels a need to punish itself for killing the father that
it loved.
Freud concludes in Section VIII by discussing the implications this has on society. Freud
suggest that the super-ego is necessary for a functioning society and that culture itself has a
super-ego. The cultural super-ego takes the form of ethics. That super ego, Freud argues, is
created by the memories of great leaders and figures in history who shape the cultural
subconscious and that ethics are based on the impression left behind them by great leading
personalities (Freud Section VIII), one of the most striking such figures is Jesus Christ. Freud
ends by warning against extending the analogy about super-ego in culture too far, as it is hard to
find empirical evidence in such cases.