From the Ambivalent Superego to the Impersonal Superego*

It [the supreme Cause] transcends all negation by the pre-eminence

of Its Simple and absolute nature – free from

every limitation and beyond them all.

(Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite)

There is the capacity of the ego to “see” itself − which is not to be confused with the cogito defined by the intransitive sense of one’s own existence (Pasche 1991) − a capacity for standing back from itself, for becoming detached from itself, in order to apprehend both that of which it is the agent and the effect on it of what it receives and sometimes suffers (from the inside or the outside); in a word everything that envelops the cogito: sensations, perceptions, volitions, affects and judgements.

There is also, in a form that is difficult to imagine, and likewise innate, a sort of prefiguration of the external world but also the means of a pre-adaptation to this world and, particularly in Man, a pre-adaptation to his relations with his genitors or their substitutes: an archaic schema of mothers and fathers, of primal scenes, of the Oedipus complex, of castration, etc. It is primal phantasies that give parental images their supernatural dimensions. Freud (1923) rightly drew attention in The Ego and the Id (in the section on “The dependent relations of the ego”) to the phylogenetic roots of the superego.

Thirdly, fuelling the superego with energy that is always qualified (aggressive and libidinal), there is the id. An id with which the superego is in easier, more immediate, and more continuous communication than is the case between the id and the ego, which suppresses and represses the former to the extent of its strength. The superego will also be fuelled by the ego, and I will try to explain how.

Finally, there is parental reality; the parents strive by means of their instructions, refusals and prohibitions to infuse the child with educational elements of their own superego, but also love the child with tutelary love.