The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout PhD Read Free Book Online

according to Freud, that they must be thoroughly “repressed” or kept from awareness, and this “repression” is made possible by a drastic strengthening of the young superego. From this point on, should any sexual feelings arise toward the parent of the opposite sex, or any rivalrous feelings toward the parent of the same sex, these feelings will be vanquished by the dreaded, ruthless weapon of the newly fortified superego—immediate, unbearable guilt. In this way, the superego gains its autonomy and its crowning advantage inside the mind of the child. It is a severe taskmaster installed to serve our need to remain a part of the group.
    Whatever else one may think of such theorizing, credit must be given to Freud for understanding that our moral sense was not a one-size-fits-all hermetic code, but was instead dynamic, and intricately tied up with essential family and societal bonds. With his writings on the superego, Freud imparted to an awakening scientific world that our usual respect for law and order was not simply imposed on us from the outside. We obey the rules, we honor the virtues, primarily from an internal need that begins in infancy and early childhood to preserve and remain embraced by our families and the larger human society in which we live.

    Conscience Versus Superego

    Whether or not one believes that superego is an intrapsychic schemer, or that it is, to use Freud's words, “the heir to the Oedipus complex,” superego itself must be acknowledged as a rich and useful concept. As an inner voice acquired through our significant childhood relationships, commenting on our shortcomings and railing against our transgressions, superego is a feature of subjective experience that most people recognize easily. “Don't do that.” “You shouldn't feel that way.” “Be careful; you'll hurt yourself.” “Be nice to your sister.” “Clean up that mess you made.” “You can't afford to buy that.” “Well, that wasn't very smart, was it?” “You've just got to deal with it.” “Stop wasting time.” Superego yammers at us inside our minds every day of our lives. And some people's superegos are rather more insulting than others.
    Still, superego is not the same thing as conscience. It may feel like conscience subjectively, and may be one small part of what conscience is, but superego by itself is not conscience. This is because Freud, as he conceptualized the superego, threw out the baby with the bathwater, in a manner of speaking. In ejecting moral absolutism from psychological thought, he counted out something else too. Quite simply, Freud counted out love, and all of the emotions related to love. Though he often stated that children love their parents in addition to fearing them, the superego he wrote about was entirely fear-based. In his view, just as we fear our parents' stern criticisms when we are children, so do we fear the excoriating voice of superego later on. And fear is all. There is no place in the Freudian superego for the conscience-building effects of love, compassion, tenderness, or any of the more positive feelings.
    And conscience, as we have seen in Joe and Reebok, is an intervening sense of obligation based in our emotional attachments to others—all aspects of our emotional attachments—including most especially love, compassion, and tenderness. In fact, the seventh sense, in those individuals who possess it, is primarily love- and compassion-based. We have progressed, over the centuries, from faith in a God-directed synderesis, to a belief in a punitive parental superego, to an understanding that conscience is deeply and affectingly anchored in our ability to care about one another. This second progression—from a judge in the head to a mandate of the heart—involves less cynicism about human nature, more hope for us as a group, and also more personal responsibility and, at times, more personal pain.
    As an illustration, imagine that under some impossibly bizarre set of