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Sigmund Freud Superego Essay

Decent Essays

In the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud the idea of the “super ego” was developed. The superego as defined by Britannica is “the ethical component of the personality and provides the moral standards by which the ego operates. The superego’s criticisms, prohibitions, and inhibitions form a person’s conscience, and its positive aspirations and ideals represent one’s idealized self-image, or “ego ideal.” Freud himself described the super ego as “the long period of childhood, during which the growing human being lives in dependence on his parents, leaves behind it as a precipitate the formation in his ego of a special agency in which this parental influence is prolonged. It has received the name the super-ego.”
The superego develops during …show more content…

We convince ourselves that the inner voice we hear is good but it is actually a false voice we have fabricated for ourselves. The superego instils barriers in our lives, makes us less open to the world around us and more paranoid of the idea of what we should be or should become and stops new, unplanned experience reaching us. These barriers come from previous experience. The negative emotions we evoked from our parents and care givers when we were younger were internalized and became part of our inner voices, our false god. Situations which may have caused negative feedback are when we would; “Speak what was true for us, Take care of ourselves by making a choice that was threatening to the mindset of a caregiver, Assert ourselves, even when we did it in healthy ways, Reach for something we wanted that was beyond the status quo of those around us, Express a strong (or in some cases ANY) opinion, Do ANYTHING that our caregivers didn’t want us to do because it rocked their boat and triggered THEIR superego voice: “No, don’t do that! That’s bad” This is a reprimanding side to us which wants us to be normal and fit in. This element of our psyche challenges the development of the autonomous moral

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