Freud’s super-ego is more than just conscience, although it includes this traditional form. It also has other functions, one of which is – in a limited sense – benign. The super-ego is not only the censor or judge but also the provider and guardian of what Freud calls our ‘ego-ideals’. The ego-ideal, Laplanche and Pontalis write in The Language of Psychoanalysis, ‘constitutes a model to which the subject attempts to conform’. Once again, Freud prefers the multiple view: ‘Each individual,’ he writes, ‘is a component part of numerous groups, he is bound by ties of identification in many directions, and he has built up his ego-ideal on the most vari0us models.’ The ego-ideal is both composite – made up from many cultural models and influences – and divisive. It keeps alternative models at bay, but it can also be surprisingly inclusive. In this ambiguity, which Freud can never quite resolve, he is wondering just how constricted the modern individual really is, or has to be. In making the ego-ideal, at its best, the ego has over-interpreted his culture, beginning with the family; he has taken whatever he can use from his culture to make up his own ideals for himself.
But that other aspect of the super-ego, the censor or judge, Freud believes, is just an internalised version of the prohibiting father, the father who says to the Oedipal child: ‘Do as I say, not as I do.’ The super-ego, by definition, despite Freud’s telling qualifications, under-interprets the individual’s experience. It is, in this sense, moralistic rather than moral. Like a malign parent it harms in the guise of protecting; it exploits in the guise of providing good guidance. In the name of health and safety it creates a life of terror and self-estrangement. There is a great difference between not doing something out of fear of punishment, and not doing something because one believes it is wrong. Guilt isn’t necessarily a good clue as to what one values; it is only a good clue about what (or whom) one fears. Not doing something because one will feel guilty if one does it is not necessarily a good reason not to do it. Morality born of intimidation is immoral. Psychoanalysis was Freud’s attempt to say something new about the police.
We can see the ways in which Freud is getting the super-ego to do too much work for him: it is a censor, a judge, a dominating and frustrating father, and it carries a blueprint of the kind of person the child should be. And this reveals the difficulty of what Freud is trying to come to terms with: the difficulty of going on with the cultural conversation about how we describe so-called inner authority, or individual morality. But in each of these multiple functions the ego seems paltry, merely the slave, the doll, the ventriloquist’s dummy, the object of the super-ego’s prescriptions – its thing. And the id, the biological forces that drive the individual, are also supposed to be, as far as possible, the victims, the objects of the super-ego’s censorship and judgment. The sheer scale of the forbidden in this system is obscene. And yet, in this vision of things, all this punitive forbidding becomes, paradoxically, one of our primary unforbidden pleasures. We are, by definition, forbidden to find all this forbidding forbidden. Indeed we find ways of getting pleasure from our restrictedness.
But how has it come about that we so enjoy this picture of ourselves as objects, and as objects of judgment and censorship? What is this appetite for confinement, for diminishment, for unrelenting, unforgiving self-criticism? Freud’s answer is beguilingly simple: we fear loss of love. Fear of loss of love means forbidding certain forms of love (incestuous love, or interracial love, or same sex love, or so-called perverse sexuality, or loving what the parents don’t love, and so on). We need, in the first instance, the protection and co-operation of our parents in order to survive; so a deal is made (a contract is drawn up). The child says to the parents: ‘I will be as far as possible what you need me to be, in exchange for your love and protection.’ As with Hobbes’s story about sovereignty, the protection required for survival is paramount: everything must be sacrificed for this, except one’s life. Safety is preferred to desire; desire is sacrificed for security. But this supposed safety, in Freud’s version, comes at considerable cost: the cost of being turned into, by being treated as, an object. We are made to feel that we need constant critical scrutiny. We must be cram-packed with forbidden desires, if so much censorship and judgment are required. We are encouraged by all this censorship and judgment to believe that forbidden, transgressive pleasures are what we really crave; that really, essentially, deep down, we are criminals; that we need to be protected primarily from ourselves, from our wayward desires.