![]() ![]() This activity seems to commence in early infancy, concomitant to and in parallel with the limbic storage of feeling experience, but increases as the months after birth allow for more development of neuronal pathways and connections in the later part of the first year after birth. The second phase is the primitive reworking of these experiences at a cortical level, in effect trying to make sense of these “memories of experience as feelings” and giving them meaning. The earliest phase, spanning intra-uterine life to about the first three to four months after birth, I would like to describe as having a disproportionate degree of storage of “experience stored as unthinkable feelings” at a “mid-brain” level, substantially in the “limbic system”. To ground this discussion of the origin of these elements in the psyche, we need a brief discussion of brain development.įor this discussion I would like to arbitrarily divide brain development into three phases. I rather like these definitions but they tell us little about the prototypic origin of these attitudes and motives that are manifestations of a sense of morality and guilt. Super-ego: “The one of the three divisions of the psyche in psychoanalytic theory that functions to reward and punish through a system of moral attitudes, conscience, and a sense of guilt.” For contrast sake, the following are the definitions of each from one of my dictionaries.Ĭonscience: “Consciousness of the moral right and wrong of one’s own acts or motives.” This focus on the unconscious inner world and its creation and composition allows for a detailed specificity that is utterly lacking in the words super-ego and conscience. In other words, parts of self and internal parental figures may imagined to be doing things to each other that bear little resemblance to what the parents actually did with and to the child. The degree to which these paired relationships are a product of projective processes is the degree to which these relationships need not correspond to things actually done to the individual in external reality. ![]() These phantasies represent what the part of self and the version of mom or dad are imagined to be doing to each other including why they are doing it to each other. “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”).Īxiom #3: These paired internal relationships, which make up the unconscious inner world, are linked together by “unconscious phantasies”. These primitive internal relationships are by definition, concrete in nature and dominated by the Law of Talion (i.e. ![]() This recreation makes it possible to visualize what they are like in that persons unconscious inner world of psychic reality.Īxiom #2: When someone is said to “lack a super-ego” or have a “harsh super-ego”, those descriptions are referring to internal object relations that are dominated by views of life that originated in very early infancy, and may have been reinforced by ongoing later experiences. These object relationships, being the only game in town, are externalized into the outside world where they are recreated. I will follow with a few definitions and then try to succinctly explain the logic in my thinking.Īxiom #1: What is referred to as the super-ego is actually a depiction of a handful of object relationships, between parts of self and internal versions of mom and dad that exist in the unconscious inner world of every individual. So to launch this discussion I would like to make a few orienting observations in the form of axioms. It tells nothing about what it really is, how to think about it, or what to do with it. These are only useful in the most rudimentary sense analogous to saying “look there is a bird”. The result of this failure of specificity is that it leads to crude descriptive comments like someone has a “harsh super-ego” or “lacks a conscience”. ![]() It also lacks a connection to the development of the brain in the first year of life. It does not flow logically from infancy and childhood and their relationship to external experience, combined with unconscious phantasy. it is a meta-psychological concept, and is not sufficiently “experience near”, to be useful except in the most general or crude descriptions. In turn, their understanding was not grounded in an understanding of the composition of the unconscious inner world and its functioning.įor me the concept of the “super-ego” is too much of an “abstraction”, i.e. What was most concerning to me was that they did not seem to be based on an understanding of emotional development in infancy. I thought that all of these ideas were correct in a certain sense, but they had no coherent, organizing logic to them. I had occasion recently to give a talk during which I asked of the assembled group, “What is the super-ego?” To my surprise, I got a number of thoughtful but rather vague answers like “the conscience” or “that part of you that makes you behave yourself” or “that part of your mind that punishes you”. ![]()
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