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Leaders
Published in S. Alexander Haslam, Psychological Insights for Understanding COVID-19 and Society, 2020
These are not only questions about which people we respect and which codes we try to adhere to. They are also about a more subterranean area of human life, in which forms of pre-verbal relating to the world hold sway. These are laid down early in our psychological development, when we learn who or what to trust, and what we have to do to keep safe and to fit in with the world. In the technical language of psychoanalysis, it is the area of early superego development. The superego is that part of the mind in which the restraints and rules of the culture are embedded, transferred from one generation of superegos to the next (though with modifications along the way), and which is therefore core to our development as civilised beings. Out of the ‘parental matrix’, which was described in Chapter 1, there emerges a constellation of feelings and capacities in the developing person which we can call their ‘superego’, and which define that person’s relationships with authority. This includes their own sense of personal authority, the capacity to make judgments and to act independently. So the superego is deeply linked to the individual’s experience of both safety and dignity.
‘Out, damned spot!’
Published in Alan Bleakley, Educating Doctors’ Senses Through the Medical Humanities, 2020
In the circumstance of necessary adaptation to the abject, the superego is strengthened to overcome both ego and id (impulses, emotions) dynamics. This develops a paradox – a degree of impulse control and emotional detachment is necessary to do the job, but this can lead to excessive emotional insulation and inflation of the ego as over-defensive postures (Bleakley 2019). Indeed, this faulty psychological dynamic has come to, historically, represent the norm and even ideal for a medical education. In short, this (over-determined) dynamic can produce insensibility. The extreme example of this inflation is the kind of heart surgery culture Stephen Bolsin faced in Bristol during the 1990s – an ingrained culture of insensibility and insensitivity, a group of surgeons numbed by overconfidence, inflation and arrogance. The subsequent inquiry noted an ‘old boy’s’ culture at work among doctors. This was the 1990s and much has changed in medicine and surgery for the better.
Major Schools of Psychology
Published in Mohamed Ahmed Abd El-Hay, Understanding Psychology for Medicine and Nursing, 2019
The last component of Freud’s structural model of the mind to develop is the superego. The superego operates on the morality principle and motivates the person to behave in a socially responsible and acceptable manner. It is the aspect of personality that holds all of our internalized moral standards and ideals approved by parental and other authority figures as well as societal, and cultural traditions (ego ideal). Obeying these rules leads to feelings of pride, value, and accomplishment. It also includes prohibitions of things that are viewed as bad by parents and society (the conscience). These behaviors are often forbidden and lead to bad consequences, punishment, or feelings of guilt and remorse. The superego acts to perfect and civilize our behavior. It works to suppress all the unacceptable urges of the id and struggles to make the ego act upon idealistic standards rather than upon realistic principles. The superego develops during early childhood around age 5, when the child identifies with members of the family and the culture in which the child was raised. The superego is present in the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious.
Ernst Brücke and Sigmund Freud: Physiological roots of psychoanalysis
Published in Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 2022
Moreover, what is hysteria? Hysteria is, in a nutshell, just a wrong way of discharging energy (S. Freud 1991c, 57). When a person cannot discharge the energy due to the repression of “unthinkable thought,” the same energy finds its way in some other way. That other way is a somatic manifestation of the perfectly natural first stimulus. This fundamental principle of keeping the body’s energy level low—or as, he later directly attributed to Fechner and named it the principle of constancy (S. Freud 1986f, 9)—is just a psychological equivalent of physiological principle. It is easy to identify in Freud’s later writings. When he discovered his second topographical model, he assured that the duty of psychoanalysis was strengthening the ego over the id and the superego (Smith 1999, 90–91). This process proved itself fruitful for Freud because, obviously, what the superego does is block the ways of discharge by enforcing a sense of guilt in subjects (S. Freud 1986g, 135–37). When the superego gets stronger, as he realized in Totem and Taboo, it can pave the way for fatal consequences through the omnipotence of thought and become a self-destruction machine simply by inhibiting the discharge of the energy from the body or discharging the energy through displacement (S. Freud 1986e, 30). In the tribes he studied, Freud saw that members of some tribes could have died simply because they had misconduct with the taboo, and they believed that they were going to die (S. Freud 1986e, 42–43).
The Uncanny Swipe Drive: The Return of a Racist Mode of Algorithmic Thought on Dating Apps
Published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2021
Foucault’s understanding of biopower resonates with the dualistic battle between life and death Freud proposes in Civilization and Its Discontents (2019). In this book, Freud contends there is an interlinked dynamic between “eros” and “death” that drives the development of individuals, societies, and the human species. Eros is fairly straightforward: It looks to foster the life of individuals and the human species through the libido, causes individuals to come together to propagate, and leads to large groups of people in civilizations. The death drive is harder to detect: It overrides the pleasure principle, compels people to repeat past traumatic experiences, and fosters excessive acts of aggression. Civilization subdues this aggression through the superego, which creates an overbearing conscience in subjects, forcing them to bottle up aggression in an unsustainable way. According to Freud (2019), this death drive tends to erupt in mass destruction when it is not adequately addressed. So just as Foucault details the atrocities perpetuated by societies ostensibly bent on optimizing life, the death drive points to repetitive trauma undergirding the more easily discernible forces of “eros.” Both the “death” drive and biopower can thus be seen as exposing the sordid underbelly of life.
Outline for a future psychiatry: the transcendent meaning model (TMM)
Published in International Review of Psychiatry, 2020
The third, ultimate level of TMM is that of the transc-person, or transcendence as it relates to the interperson. What is transcendence? It is the collection of all of the non-immanent aspects of the superego. For a religious person, transcendence is the divinity that calls her forth to perfection and sanctity. For an agnostic person, the transc-personal may be the inexpressible element experienced in the psyche as a voice that commands obedience without recourse to mere earthly wisdom or reasoning. Accordingly, the typical transc-personal disorder is paraphrenia, in which the sufferer can hear voices coming from powerful sentient presences that many religious traditions identify with demonic possession (Casanova, 2010). In the case of paraphrenia by association, the personalities of these intermediary beings seem to be conducted from one psyche to another (Nishihara & Nakamura, 1993).