CONSCIENCE AND SUPEREGO 419 



With these deep desires as their roots, all the prohibitions, 

 exhortations, expressed or implied wishes, ideals, goals, opinions, 

 and attitudes, etc. of his parents take on added force and 

 meaning — they begin to constitute for the child the code by 

 which he regulates his life; the code which, if he obeys it, 

 produces a sense of contentment like the contentment he felt 

 when his parents approved of him; the code which, when broken, 

 gives him a sense of guilt or wrongdoing like the guilt he felt 

 when he experienced a threat in his relationships with his 

 parents. 



The force of the superego depends on many factors. The 

 stronger the original Oedipus complex, the stronger the identi- 

 fications necessary to resolve it, and therefore the stronger the 

 ego-ideal which results from it. The more rigid and harsh the 

 parents were, the more rigid and harsh is the image developed 

 from them, and the more urgent the need of resolving the 

 complex — both factors producing a more exacting superego.^® 



Other factors may also account for the strength of a superego. 

 In every person there is a certain narcissistic element — self- 

 love — which varies inversely with the strength of his object 

 loves. (It is a matter of common experience that love of self 

 impedes love of others, love of others leads to a certain self- 

 forgetfulness.) Now a child has an enormous narcissistic love, 

 almost a megalomania. He can be pictured as thinking that the 

 whole world revolves around him, that he should have every 

 satisfaction, and he becomes enraged when thwarted. Freud 

 asks: Where does this narcissistic love go in the adult, for 

 obviously it is much diminished in normal adults. His con- 

 clusion is that, since this love must be directed somewhere, it 

 must have been absorbed in the love of the ego-ideal. This 

 accounts for much of the force the ideal exerts on the ego, (e. g. 

 it has the force of the displaced narcissistic impulse) and mani- 

 festly the greater the degree of narsissistic love, the stronger 

 is the resulting superego. ^^ 



^^ Freud, "The Economic Problem in Masochism," Coll. Papers , Vol. 2, pp. 

 263-66. 



17 



Freud. " On Narcissism: An Introduction," Coll. Papers, vol. 4, p. 50. 



