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2637 Durant Avenue, Berkeley, 5.9.30
… During the past few days I have again re-read-perhaps for the tenth time-your The Ego and the Id, and I felt glad that after writing it you turned to the garden of humanity, having previously, so to speak, examined the foundations and drains of its houses. One thing surprises me
greatly, but perhaps I have not fully understood you. You believe human beings to be so conservative, and talk of identification and formation of the ego-ideal through the parents. Am I wrong in rather seeing the drive to outdo the parents everywhere at work? I do not deny that the boy occasionally really identifies himself with his father, i.e., wishes to be his father. He can also be said to introject his idealised father. But that gives a different look to mental life. I have the impression that conservatives all have a kink in the form of inferiority feelings, and that anyone who wants to be like his father feels himself inferior to him. Does the chief difference between man and the animals perhaps not reside in the fact that we aspire to climb higher, over the dead and the images of our parents, while the ape, in so far as he is not urged forward by the not completely conservative nature of his phylogenesis, is content to go on hanging to his father's tail? Many use the term ‘identification’ recklessly, and confuse it with assimilation or partial introjection.
It seems to me from your new ideas that the ego-ideal ought to be more thoroughly dealt with than it is by many. I do not attain the objective with my patients by devaluing it as a mere apeing of the parents. Just as real love does not disappear when it is made clear that the first love-object was the mother, so does the ego-ideal not collapse when it is revealed that it originated in the parents' house. The parents may be right, and their moral demands may be the correct expression of a valid order of things analogous to the hygienic order. By dethroning the ego-ideal nothing is achieved. Im