On Relations Between the Ego and the Super-Ego*

It seems unnecessary to point out the extreme importance of Freud's postulation of the Super-Ego. We have been empowered with a new conceptual instrument suitable for describing and aiding in understanding the most complicated psychical processes.

Images of persons who had guided the child and were its source of norms are known to be the cornerstone of the Super-Ego.

According to the basic law of eternal duration of things lived, relations which had linked the infantile ego and those divine persons are preserved although masked by advancing time. They can be found not only in the endopsychic terrain itself but also in relations arising between the Ego and the external world. The primitive images are constantly retroprojected on persons surrounding the individual during his adult life; the latter acquire qualities borrowed from the original models. Accordingly, conflicts and struggles which had evolved during childhood repeat themselves albeit between other players and in a new shape.

I hope to show by means of a few clinical examples the main mechanisms observed, in use as arms by both of the belligerent parties. In my opinion the knowledge of those mechanisms is of definite importance as far as therapeutic technique is concerned, since it allows the material brought by the patient to be utilized more efficiently.

Let us follow these clinical illustrations.

Observation 1. A woman of forty, suffering- from an extremely grave agoraphobia. Although greatly ameliorated after a few months of treatment, she was again subjected to violent attacks of fear upon resuming her solitary walks around the city.

It happened, however, that at the same time she finally succeeded, after many failures, in separating from her husband. To her the latter was a tyrannical and brutal person and he had played an essential rôle in the