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First published in French in 1975, The Ego Ideal preceded the same author's Creativity and Perversion by eight years, although both arrive together in English publication. There is overlap, but no great conflict, between the two books.
The British reader will notice at once the lack of many familiar landmarks: no references to Winnicott, passing references only to Anna Freud, Bion and so on while Melanie Klein is treated respectfully but at arm's length. Apart from Freud,
the analyst who scores by far the largest number of mentions is Béla Grunberger, followed by Francis Pasche, Catherine Parat, and the pioneers Ferenczi and Abraham.
We are, in short, in somewhat foreign territory. Nevertheless, the base of Chasseguet-Smirgel's argument is easy to understand. It runs more or less as follows.
When Freud introduced the term ‘ego-ideal’ (in his paper ‘On narcissism’, 1914), he made it ‘the heir to primary narcissism’ (Chasseguet-Smirgel's phrase). As man can never relinquish a satisfaction he has once enjoyed, his loss of the perfect fulfilment of primary narcissism leaves him, as it were, with an experience of perfection that no longer belongs anywhere. He deals with it by ‘projecting it before’ him, into objects which then seem to him supremely admirable, and from which he is separated by a gulf which he ardently wishes to cross. Thus a motive arises which causes him to pursue goals other than the goals of instinct—including, in the long run, education, high achievement, morality and his own personal development.
At the same time, a ‘critical agency’ comes into being, which assesses the extent to which the ego falls short of the ideal. It was this critical agency which, nine years later, in The Ego and the Id, received detailed description and became the superego, and which, confusingly enough, Freud then also called the ego-ideal. But the superego is, of course, the ‘heir to the Oedipus complex’, and thus Freud had elided a valuable distinction and smothered the conce