Superego The superego reflects the internalization of cultural rules, mainly as absorbed from parents, but also other authority figures, and the general cultural ethos. Freud developed his concept of the superego from an earlier combination of the ego ideal and the “special psychical agency which performs the task of seeing that narcissistic satisfaction from the ego ideal is ensured…what we call our 'conscience'.” For him the superego can be described as “a successful instance of identification with the parental agency”, and as development proceeds it also absorbs the influence of those who have “stepped into the place of parents — educators, teachers, people chosen as ideal models”.

Thus a child's super-ego is constructed on the model not of its parents but of its parents' super-ego; the contents that fill it are the same and it becomes the vehicle of tradition and of all the time-resisting judgments of value that have propagated themselves in this manner from generation to generation.

The superego aims for perfection. It is part of the personality structure, mainly but not entirely unconscious, that includes the individual's ego ideals, spiritual goals, and the psychic agency, commonly called “conscience”, that criticizes and prohibits the expression of drives, fantasies, feelings, and actions. Thus the superego works in contradiction to the id. It is an internalized mechanism that operates to confine the ego to socially acceptable behavior, whereas the id merely seeks instant self-gratification.

The superego and the ego are the product of two key factors: the state of helplessness of the child. In the case of the little boy, it forms during the dissolution of the Oedipus complex, through a process of identification with the father figure, following the failure to retain possession of the mother as a love object out of fear of castration. Freud described the superego and its relationship to the father figure and Oedipus complex thus:

The super-ego retains the character of the father, while the more powerful the Oedipus complex was and the more rapidly it succumbed to repression (under the influence of authority, religious teaching, schooling, and reading), the stricter

• SUPEREGO