Id has become super-ego

  

The id

“The id is the instinctual component of personality that is present at birth, and is the source of bodily needs and wants, emotional impulses and desires, especially aggression and the libido (sex drive). The id acts according to the pleasure principle – the psychic force oriented to immediate gratification of impulse and desire – defined by the avoidance of pain.” (Wikipedia)

Freud: “It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle.”

“. . . contrary impulses exist side by side, without cancelling each other. . . . There is nothing in the id that could be compared with negation . . . nothing in the id which corresponds to the idea of time.”

The id “knows no judgments of value: no good and evil, no morality. . . . Instinctual cathexes seeking discharge – that, in our view, is all there is in the id.”

The super-ego

“The super-ego . . . reflects the internalization of cultural rules, mainly taught by parents applying their guidance and influence.” . . . For Freud, ‘the installation of the super-ego can be described as a successful instance of identification with the parental agency,’ while as development proceeds ‘the super-ego also takes on the influence of those who have stepped into the place of parents – educators, teachers, people chosen as ideal models.’

“The super-ego works in contradiction to the id. The super-ego strives to act in a socially appropriate manner, whereas the id just wants instant self-gratification. The super-ego controls our sense of right and wrong and guilt. It helps us fit into society by getting us to act in socially acceptable ways.” (Wikipedia)

Here is a way to describe the psycho-evolution that has taken place in our country suddenly and has overcome much of it since Trump was elected president: Id has become superego. The primitive, guttural, aggressive, amoral and immoral spasms and cries of the Right have been so diligently, so pandemically reframed as the good by a massive concatenation of individuals and institutions that they can no longer be stared down by the actual good, by time-proven conscience. Intentions of care and decency seem to have withered, have weak knees, have been derided, defeated, rendered impotent. I am sure many of us can feel this defeat, this impotence. Trump, a true sociopath, warms millions of people’s hearts with love and with fire. Women’s rights to their bodies – their lives – are torn from them. Simple and practical social aims are hated with the intensity of insanity and insane pain.

The moral magnetic poles of our world have nearly reversed.

One doesn’t reason with the id. In its non-instinctual conceptualization, it is based in the deepest childhood loss traumas and later solidifying losses. To unmask the id would be to return the person to his infant on fire in the crib, to the lost, unparented child. But then – to assign this poisoned force the imprimatur of morality: This is to give it ultimate power. The corrupt person now sees himself as right as God, not a pariah or aberration. Clasping hands with his fellow millions, he feels good, like a Narcissist. “As he basks in the comfortable habitat that he has constructed, an air-tight cocoon of narcissistic enjoyment, life can seem pretty good. In fact, he does feel good; he feels secure, and as long as nothing punctures the closed circle, he will not be aware of any serious personality problems. He thinks he has it all, and those who know him would agree, since he has carefully selected and enlisted them to be part of his world and therefore buttresses his view of himself.” (James F. Masterson, M.D., The Search for the Real Self, “Portrait of the Narcissist,” page 93.)

None of us knows what to do to reverse this regression. Critical thinking among the Right has become impossible. Challenge Marjorie Taylor Greene or Josh Hawley or Donald Trump on their puerility and sociopathic craziness and they will smile and pontificate more righteously than the Pope, who has some humility. The fascinating irony, of course, is that these people are children frozen in their development, in their psyche. So we ask: How can children win? How can the weakest, the inchoate, prevail? This may seem impossible, yet it makes ultimate sense: It is only children who deserve revenge.