Word: superego
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Ancient man had a psyche, by which he meant a soul. Modern man has a psyche, by which he is apt to mean a cumbersome machine full of id and superego, conscious and unconscious, with optional accessories such as Oedipal feedbacks. In place of the soul he has put psychology. In The Death and Rebirth of Psychology, published last week (Julian Press; $4), Dr. Ira Progoff suggests that with recent modifications psychology can now give man back his soul...
...fact that he saw man almost entirely as a material being controlled by biological urges. Thus man's spiritual search for the "core of his being"-which is essential in every religion and almost every philosophy of life-was reduced by Freud to a matter of the "superego accepting the ego." This, to Progoff, means that Freud was guilty of intellectualizing and mechanizing "a basic cosmic experience...
...admit those tendencies in himself which demand belief at this price. Under the influence of the academic he maintains that dishonesty is too much to pay for a credo and before abandoning his scruples about such self-deception he allows separation in time and space to remove his institutional superego...
...symbol of hypocrisy, but this does not mean that they are the root of all prestige-consciousness. When one reads assertions as reck-less as these, it convinces him that id est, the Cambridge Review, is a good example of how un-repressive the University as Superego actually is. In spite of its pervading irrationality, however, i.e. has stimulated some thought, as well as disgust. It might be called a Good Thing, badly done...
...minor complaint-your failure to point out that the mystic-sounding terms Id, Ego and Superego are just so much Anglo-American psychiatric jabberwocky for simple concepts. In his native German, Freud used understandable terms: es, ich and überich-literally translatable as the it, the I and the beyond-I. This kind of linguistic lily-gilding by Freudian exponents is the stuff that cultism is made...