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 an insult, a character assassination, or a low grade. 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 along the lines of: “You crazy woman, can’t you be more robust? How can you be overwhelmed by something like losing your phone? Can’t you be cooler? More resilient? Thank God my other patients are not so basic.”
Only… she hadn’t said that. Over time – and it felt like a very, very long time – therapy allowed me to see that what she had said was not what I had heard her say. What she had said was something like, “I think you felt overwhelmed.”
What I now feel she offered me was a true understanding of my internal reality. She was right: I felt overwhelmed. But I turned her understanding into a punishment; I didn’t hear her voice – I heard mine. My super ego.
In 1923, Freud drew a map of the human mind and its functions, and placed in it this voice, which he called the über-ich, usually translated as superego. We can think of the superego as an internalized parental authority. Often, however, the inner voice of the parents bears little resemblance to the real voices of the parents: the superego may, as he wrote, “seem to have made a one-sided choice and to have chosen only the strictness and severity of the parents. their prohibitive and punitive function, while their loving care does not seem to have been adopted and maintained.”
If you are interested in building a better life, a life with more loving care, it is worth getting to know your superego, because if you cannot identify and recognize your own inner voice, you will inevitably hear its echoes hear in the voices. of the people around you. It could change your relationship with your father, or your friend, or your colleague, or your partner, if you discovered that the criticism you hear coming from their mouths is not actually coming from them, but from you. You may then be better able to receive the loving care offered.
Once you become familiar with your superego, once you can recognize its tone, its tendencies, and its intensity, you can figure out what comes from you and what comes from others. You may want to consider whether the standards you feel obligated to are imposed by others, as you believe them to be, or whether they are actually imposed by you. Either way, you can then make a conscious choice to continue living up to those standards, or, if you come to the realization that those standards are making you miserable, you can try to let them go.
But getting to know your own superego doesn’t just deliver you a better life. If you are so critical of yourself, you may unconsciously treat the people around you the same way. If you can identify your punitive thoughts—especially if they are directed at children in your life—you can think about them before you act on them, and try to interrupt the generations of inherited criticism that a full-blown superego can unleash.
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 attacking you because you so easily agree with their harsh criticism. When you see this for the first time, it feels like a revelation. You may instinctively want to exclude those people to free yourself from their cruelty. But it’s worth asking yourself whose cruelty you’re actually trying to free yourself from: theirs or your own? Sometimes I meet critical people who are quite comfortable taking on the punitive superego role in which I have already cast them. These are the people I find most annoying and immediately want to run away from. Naturally. Because they remind me of myself.
But I know you can’t build a better life by running away from yourself. It is by getting to know myself better, in the atmosphere of control and freedom of emotions and thoughts created by my psychoanalyst, that I have come to understand the size of my superego and better understand the unrelenting pressure and relentless demands I have. lived under. I think that has been a big factor in easing my anxiety after decades of suffering.
If you’ve never thought about you über-ich before, it’s worth thinking about it now – it makes a better life more possible. Sure, it probably won’t be a good feeling to discover that a maniacal monster lives in your head. But as they say – and as I have learned from experience – better is the superego, you know.