CONSCIENCE AND SUPEREGO 



Q*J> 



THEOLOGIANS and philosophers have rightly stigma- 

 tized Freud's concept of moral conscience as a carica- 

 ture of the real thing. The psychological phenomenon 

 which Freud called the superego, and which he equivalated 

 with the traditional notion of conscience, in fact lacks the 

 essential note of conscience. Nevertheless, since Freud was a 

 gifted investigator, the presumption is that the superego is a 

 reality and, since Freud credited it with a significant note in 

 human activity, it would seem to be something important. 

 The following paper attempts to analyze Freud's conception 

 of the superego in terms of Thomistic thought, comparing it 

 with more valid notions of conscience, and defining the area 

 in human activity, especially in moral activity, into which the 

 functioning of the superego enters as something significant. 



I. The Notion of the Superego 



(1) The Fundaments of Human Nature According to Freud. 



Speaking broadly, the superego is the part in a man which 

 tells him that he ought to do something or ought not to do it. 

 In Freud's conception, a mature human personality comprises 

 three basic structures: the id, the ego and the superego. If a 

 rough description is permissible at the beginning, the id may 

 be called the pool of instinctual drives, repressed complexes 

 images and thoughts — a wholly unconscious area of the mind. 

 The ego is the agency of all sense perceptions and conscious 

 thought, and the initiator of deliberate activities. The super- 

 ego is the source of moral incitement and constraint, and is 

 largely unconscious. 



Of these three, the primitive part and only native part is 

 the id. In the id, instinctual impulses arise, and indeed arise 

 by a natural and uncontrollable necessity, welling up con- 



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