Ego Ideal - Freud, Ego Ideal, and Superego

Freud, Ego Ideal, and Superego

In Freud's "On Narcissism: an Introduction", among other innovations - 'most important of all perhaps - it introduces the concepts of the "ego ideal" and of the self-observing agency related to it, which were the basis of what was ultimately to be described as the "super-ego" in The Ego and the Id (1923b)'. Freud considered that the ego ideal was the heir to the narcissism of childhood: the 'ideal ego is now the target of the self-love which was enjoyed in childhood by the actual ego...is the substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood'.

The decade that followed would see the concept playing an ever more important and fruitful part in his thinking. In "Mourning and Melancholia", Freud stressed how 'one part of the ego sets itself over against the other, judges it critically, and, as it were, takes it as its object'. A few years later, in "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego", he examined further how 'some such agency develops in our ego which may cut itself off from the rest of the ego and come into conflict with it. We have called it the "ego ideal"...heir to the original narcissism in which the childish ego enjoyed self-sufficiency'. Freud reiterated how 'in many forms of love-choice...the object serves as a substitute for some unattained ego ideal of our own', and further suggested that in group formation 'the group ideal...governs the ego in the place of the ego ideal'.

With "The Ego and the Id", however, Freud's nomenclature began to change. He still emphasised the importance of 'the existence of a grade in the ego, a differentiation in the ego, which may be called the "ego ideal" or "super-ego"', but it was the latter term which now came to the forefront of his thinking. 'Indeed, after The Ego and the Id and the two or three shorter works immediately following it, the "ego ideal" disappears almost completely as a technical term' for Freud. When it briefly reappears in the "New Introductory Lectures", it was as part of 'this super-ego...the vehicle of the ego ideal by which the ego measures itself...precipitate of the old picture of the parents, the expression of admiration for the perfection which the child then attributed to them'.