UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT SANTA CRUZ; 2009; © V.Tonay

First, a little review of the Id-Ego-Superego:

One way of looking at the psyche is to divide it, as Plato did, into three parts which interact with one another in a dynamic way. Dynamic means that the parts of the psyche are always in conflict. Freud used the id (translated from German as "the it") to describe that part of the psyche containing the pure aggressive and sexual drives with which we humans are born, constantly seeking expression through fantasy and behavior. The id is unconscious, meaning we are not aware of how strongly these drives exist within us.

The superego (translation: "above I") contains introjected values from one's culture, most often communicated through one's parents, but also through extended family, school, and religion. It contains the "shoulds" we all carry around about the way in which we'd best behave (another word for the superego's effects is the conscience). The superego is partly conscious and partly unconscious. The collective superego of a culture is its list of "good" or "appropriate" or "expected" behavior from its members or citizens.

The ego (translated as "the I") is the "I" we refer to when speaking of ourselves. It is mostly conscious. The ego is the rational part of the psyche which we use to learn, evaluate, analyze, and perform other higher order cognitive processes. The ego mediates between the desires of the id and the demands of the superego in order to get as many id desires expressed as possible without suffering the pain (and potential threat of loss of love) inflicted by the superego. Example: Your id wants to wring your mother's neck after she calls you 8 times in a day. You consciously experience this as feeling ferociously angry. The superego explains that you really mustn't do such a naughty thing; if you do, your mother will no longer love you, and neither may anyone else, you horrible son, you. You consciously experience this as feeling guilty. The ego says, okay, maybe the thing to do is imagine you're screaming at her while calmly telling her that when she calls you several times a day you get annoyed. That way you can express great rage in fantasy without harming your relationship with your mother, and you can also change the situation by informing her how you feel.

You can probably imagine how people without a very well-developed ego may have very difficult lives. Dominated by the superego, they may be so constrained by what they "should" and "shouldn't" do, that they cannot do anything! They will likely suffer a great deal of guilt, shame, and low self-esteem. People who are dominated by the id, however, have lots of fun, but tend to wind up in jail or in a profession or other situation that rewards exploiting/harming others without any, or much, conscience.

In the classic Freudian model, when we experience a trauma (emotional pain too great for our conscious mind to handle in full), the ego represses (pushes out of consciousness) the pain into the unconscious in order to protect us. It will remain there until the conscious mind is strong enough to be able to process the emotions without being damaged by them. Over time, repression drains one's psychic energy--it is difficult to keep a feeling under repression. The feeling pushes against consciousness, sometimes being partially released in dreams, slips of the tongue, and through defenses. One sign that something is being repressed is the feeling of free-floating anxiety (feeling restless, nervous, worried but not knowing why).

The ego controls the release of the repressed feeling into consciousness; it is a sort of gatekeeper. It also uses defenses to partially discharge the repressed feeling. There are a lot of different defenses, but the most important ones for our purposes are: denial, projection, displacement, reaction formation, and sublimation. George Vaillant, a psychologist who extensively researched the development of defenses in a classic longitudinal study, found that they develop in a specific, unvarying sequence throughout childhood.

Denial is the first defense to be used developmentally (children begin to observably use it once they can talk). Denial is simply denying the reality of the feeling. "I don't feel that." "I didn't do that" (enabling the fear of lost love of the parent to be partially discharged) is an example. Denial is NOT the same as lying. People using denial truly believe what they are saying. Using denial is a sign that the person's other defenses are inoperable, due to extreme stress being put upon the ego, or a developmental deficit in which they did not develop other, more mature and effective defenses. In CMH, it's best to shore up a person's defenses when they are using denial: that is, support, support, support (provide emotional and practical assistance, advice, a network of contacts, education, rather than interpret, confront, or analyze).

Projection is developed next. Instead of admitting the threatening feeling or motive as belonging to oneself, we believe it exists in someone else. "People are sooo sensitive," we say (when we, in fact, are sensitive). Or, "How come everybody acts without thinking?" (when we are impulsive). "My friend Enu never studies..." These sentences could all be projections: we see in others what is too threatening to admit exists in ourselves. Or, in Jung's words, "one needs others in order to know oneself." An extreme example of projection occurs in paranoia, where one projects one's violent impulses onto another person or people: in reality, it is not them who are enraged with me, it is me who is enraged with them.

Displacement is the next defense mechanism to develop in children. In it, we transfer our feelings for one person, x (often a parent or parental figure) to another person, y, and treat y as if they were x. It is different from projection in that in the latter, you are seeing in someone else a feeling you, yourself really feel. In displacement, you are feeling FOR someone else the way you actually feel for ANOTHER person. For example, Sean accuses his girlfriend, Molia of having an affair. In fact, Sean has been having an affair for some time. That is projection. But what if Sean, after visiting his mother, comes home to Molia and begins to yell at her for being boring and lazy? If he were actually upset with himself for being boring and lazy, this would be projection again. If he were actually angry at his mother for being boring and lazy, that would be displacement. A slang term for displacement is the 'kick the dog' syndrome, where a person has a bad day at work with the boss, and comes home and yells at the spouse.

Further up the developmental ladder (there are over 20 defense mechanisms!) reaction formation is a defense where we behave as if we feel the opposite of our true, repressed feeling. Usually that behavior is exaggerated. "Overcompensation" is a word sometimes used to describe reaction formation. Evangelical figures and priests in recent years, who were discovered to have committed fraud or lewd and lascivious acts with their parishioners are examples of people using reaction formation. It is as if they dedicate their lives to try to say to the world, "I am not a child molester! I am a priest! I could never do such a thing!" while all the time, repressing the deviant desire. Another instance of reaction formation you may come across in CMH is that of people questioning their sexual orientation and on their way to coming out (see handout on Freud evaluation on the home page).

Sublimation is the most positive of all defense mechanisms, in that it involves transforming a repressed feeling into a socially useful product, through art, writing, social activism or some other constructive means. It is also the last defense mechanism to develop. Some people get "stuck" and don't develop the higher level defense mechanisms. These can be taught, however, and CMH is a good place to do that.

The Oedipal conflict is not about wanting to have sex with one's parent..

I'll write the female version here, since most of us have heard about the male version. The resolution of the Oedipal conflict results in the formation of the initial, yet still immature, superego:

The girl at age 5 has passed the symbiotic stage where she feels joined with her mother. She now realizes she is separate from her mother and, modeling herself after her mother, begins to look to her father for affection. She realizes, though, that he is not always there for her when she wants him to be. She looks around, sees he's often there for mom, that dad actually chooses mom over her increasingly more often.

This hurts (fears abandonment), threatens her natural egocentrism at this age ("I am the center of the universe, and Very Important to Everyone"), and her self-esteem ("He wants to be with mom more because there's something wrong with me," she feels damaged).

The daughter realizes she is in competition with mother for father's affection, which means pleasure and self-worth to her. Because she is a child, she is unable to either win her father's affection by competing with and beating out her mother, or to express her hurt feelings. Because she is powerless to express it directly, the daughter's hurt transforms to anger (as it does when unexpressed), and child develops an unconscious wish to remove her mother forever and thus secure dad's attention permanently ("If only mom wasn't here, I'd have him all to myself!"). This wish is repressed because it is so threatening to her developing ego. However, the daughter also wants to protect her mother, whom she loves and on whom her survival depends, from her wish (ambivalence). Essentially, the daughter wants both to have and not have her mother and her father. She is not cognitively developed enough to realize that she can have both, that situations and people are not black-and-white, either/or, all-or-nothing. She still believes if she has dad, she has to get rid of mom; if she has mom, she can't have dad.

Mother, meanwhile, might be unconsciously resentful of father's attention for daughter (especially if mother has unresolved Oedipal issues of her own). The child has realized for some time she is physically different from her father and more like her mother. Unlike the boy child, the girl child has no fear of the mother "castrating" her (destroying power), because she has never had power (symbolically represented by the penis as suggested in anthropological studies, like that of Sharon Nathan, who went around the world studying "castration" images in dreams cross-culturally and correlated them with the amount of power women hold in those cultures). The daughter is afraid mother can sense daughter's wish (magical thinking) and will destroy the child because of it (origin of "mother/woman = wicked witch"). Daughter represses the desire for father, anger towards mother and the resultant anxiety; she has no choice (since they can't be expressed, are so extreme, and threatening) and also LOVES both parents and wants to protect them from her "powerful" (child's normal feelings of grandiosity) wishes.

To resolve this seemingly unresolvable conflict, the daughter identifies with (adopts values of) mother, for that is the only way she can get her father--that is, if she's like mom, dad should like her, too! Also, her mother would never destroy someone so like herself! She, therefore introjects her mother's values exactly. The superego (moral voice) thus develops to prevent future annihilations by the mother. At this point, the emerging superego is identical with the mother's values. However, because castration anxiety (= fear of loss of power) is not present in the girl (because she has already "lost" her power/penis), Freud believed the superego does not develop in girls as strongly as in boys, which has not been supported by subsequent research: in fact, females tend to express a slightly higher level of moral (superego) development than do males. The superego in females seems to govern behavior in relationships (being "nice"), versus the superego in males, which governs the need for power (being "first").

All depends on the response of the mother to the daughter's emerging individuality at this point. If mother is threatening, daughter will remain "stuck" (fixated) here. She will retain this original superego--her mother's values exactly--getting involved with men who represent her father, and competing with female authority figures and romantic rivals who represent her mother. This pattern will be re-enacted (through the repitition compulsion) in every important relationship, including those with friends, lovers, and co-workers. She will remain in the original psychological situation, becoming involved in/unconsciously seeking out triangular relationships as an adult, where the partner/authority figure is confused with her father, and "the other" man (or woman, depending on sexual orientation), confused with her mother (through displacement). A woman in this situation is said to have an Oedipal complex.

If the mother is not threatening, but encourages the daughter's individuality and own developing sense of conscience and identity, the girl is able to re-evaluate her superego. She incorporates some of her mother's values and rejects others, to develop her own moral code (a mature superego). That is the "healthy" or "normal" path of female development. We all go through the Oedipal conflict, but only some of us end up with the Oedipal complex.

A person with an Oedipal complex has difficulty with people in authority. Remember that, during the Oedipal conflict, the child is overwhelmed by dual, incompatible feelings: love and the wish to protect the parent and self, and fear and the wish to destroy the parent. As an adult, then, s/he may alternately project and displace this love/fear on authority figures and will relate to authority figures as if they were parents, fearing their disapproval, abandonment, or rage. The adult will then behave as a child would to avoid provoking those feelings in the authority figure, by becoming overly submissive or complaint, becoming defiant, and so on. Of course, the real life authority figure is quite unlikely to respond with rage or abandonment (adults cannot really be abandoned), and disapproval in the adult world is rarely linked to one's worth as a person, but rather, to one's behavior, which is never perfect. Therefore, the Oedipal complex, like all complexes, distorts the perceptions of the person who suffers with it. Such a person is in danger of misinterpreting the motives of others (especially authority figures and romantic partners--who are also viewed as authority figures), and is unable to relate to them as whole, other, real people with their own needs and desires. Rather, people with Oedipal complexes believe they know what the other is thinking and feeling (that he/she wants to exclude, destroy, humiliate the sufferer) and base their behavior on that knowledge. Being sure one knows what someone else feels or thinks is always a sign to examine oneself for projection.

In Community Mental Health we work with others, typically in an agency setting which can duplicate the sense and roles of family members. CMH workers' own Oedipal dynamics may play out there, as may the Oedipal dynamics of those whom we try to help, because we are the authority figures the Oedipal drama will play itself out upon. Agencies oriented toward helping people with relationship issues (parental loss, child abuse, divorce/separation, domestic violence) are likely to come into contact with those with unresolved Oedipal complexes, and understanding the part one is playing in a client's Oedipal drama can help resolve negative transference and acting out, including potential violence.

THINGS TO CONSIDER...

Since nearly everyone goes through the Oedipal conflict, how might these dynamics affect society? Freud was very interested in applying his concepts to the world stage. Parenting and politics were, he felt, two of the most important areas to which his ideas were relevant. He wrote about the latter in, among other works, Civilization and its Discontents (which you are reading for this class).

Collective Oedipal issues are reflected in the ways in which one group views another. This is easiest to see, at first, when looking at a nation's views of another country's leader(s) during times of political tension or war. How? Can you think of ways current political or societal issues in the U.S. might be being influenced by the Oedipal conflict or complex? From this viewpoint, what would the President Bush's famous statement about Iraq's former leader once trying to "kill my daddy" (when explaining why the U.S. was invading Iraq) really signify? Consider violence in general. From a psychoanalytic point of view, violence results from the failure of the ego to mediate the impulses of the id. Egos are weakened by stress. They sometimes also fail to develop (which we'll discuss when we discuss ego development). Violence is more of a risk when an individual (or culture) is under stress and the ego (or collective ego) is unable to cope.

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