Wwhen I first became her patient, I heard everything my therapist said as criticism. Almost every word that came out of her mouth I received as a put-down, a character assassination or a low point. I thought to myself, “I pay this woman to help me and all she does is criticize me! How rude!”
Here’s a made-up example that has a lot of truth in it: if I lose my cell phone and describe my feelings of panic, she might respond with something like: “You crazy woman, can’t you be more robust? How can you be overwhelmed by something like losing your phone? Can’t you be more chill? More resilient? Thank God my other patients are not so basic.”
Except… she didn’t say that. Over time – and it felt like a very, very long time – therapy allowed me to see that what she was saying was not what I had heard her say. What she said was something like, “I think you felt overwhelmed.”
What I now feel she offered was a true understanding of my internal reality. She was right: I felt overwhelmed. But I was turning her mind into a punishment; I didn’t hear her voice – I heard my own. My superego.
In 1923, Freud drew a map of the human mind and its functions, and located this voice, which he called the über-ich, which is commonly translated as superego. We can think of the superego as an internalized parental authority. Often, however, the internal parental voice bears little resemblance to the parents’ actual voices: the superego can, as he wrote, appear to have made a unilateral choice and singled out only the parents’ strictness and severity, their forbidding and punitive function, while their loving care seems not to have been taken over and maintained”.
If you are interested in building a better life, one with more loving care, it is worth trying to get to know your superego, because if you cannot identify and recognize your own internal voice, you will inevitably hear its echoes hear in the voices of those around you. It might change your relationship with your father, or your friend, or your colleague, or your partner if you were to discover that the criticism you hear coming from their mouths is not actually coming from them, but from yourself. You may then be better able to receive any loving care that is offered.
Once you become familiar with your superego, once you can recognize its tone, its tendencies and intensities, you can work out what is coming from you and what is coming from others. You can reflect on whether the standards you feel obligated to meet are imposed by others, as you assume they are – or whether they are in fact imposed by you. Either way, you can then make a conscious choice to continue living up to those standards, or, if you find that those standards are making you miserable, you might want to try to put them to rest.
But getting to know your own superego will not only give you a better life If you are so critical of yourself, you may unconsciously treat those around you in the same way. If you can catch your judgmental thoughts—especially if they’re directed at any children in your life—you can reflect on them before acting on them, and try to interrupt the generations of inherited criticism that can unleash an unrestrained superego.
It’s important to recognize that several things can be true at the same time: your judgmental friend—who may also have an extremely harsh superego—may especially enjoy laying into you because you so readily agree with their harsh criticism. When you see it for the first time, it feels like a revelation. You may instinctively want to cut those people out to free yourself from their cruelty. But it’s worth asking whose cruelty you’re really trying to free yourself from – theirs or your own? Sometimes I meet critical people who are very comfortable taking on the punishing superego role in which I have already cast them. These are the people I find the most annoying and want to run away from immediately. Natural. Because they remind me of myself.
But I know that you cannot build a better life by running away from yourself. It is by getting to know myself better, in the atmosphere of containment and freedom of emotion and thought created by my psychoanalyst, that I could begin to get the measure of my superego and understand more the relentless pressure and relentless demands I had. lived under. I think it was a big factor in easing my anxiety, after decades of suffering.
If you have never about you über-ich before it’s worth thinking about now – it makes a better life more possible. Sure, it probably won’t feel good to discover that you have a manic monster inside your mind. But as they say – and as I’ve learned from experience – the better the superego you know.
