This reading of the Superego reminds me of the figure of the Father. When I teach my son that enjoyment requires sacrifice, I'm inviting him to trespass the threshold of law. I show him my love through the command to enjoy, at the same time I display authority giving him permission to break the law in certain circumstances. That's just awesome! Cheers from Colombia ;)
Had a debate about a tragic act of violence in my country that happened in the last couple days, where a group of citizens took an innocent person from the police hands, they beat him unconscious and burned him alive. after slightly suspecting him of being behind the recent forest fires in that region. who eventually turned out to be a volunteer who was only there to help.. the people's consensus and surprisingly even that of my classmates in the faculty of psychology, is that these brutal acts are merely the barbaric manifestation of impulse, aka pure id in action. even though their reaction before the person was proven innocent was mostly in favour of this collective *crime.* which implies, as you clarified in this video, that societal demand and approval which utterly breaks both the legal and moral law but obeys the super-ego's function. anyway thanks for the video Todd, that was enlightening.
Thanks for your commitment to free public education 👍 Without you and Gregory Sadler, I never would have made it past the first page of The Phenomenology haha
Thanks, this really helps me. I'd already figured from your book Capitalism and Desire that the unconscious enjoyment of dieting must be in the failure rather than any success. But I really like your point about the super-egoic injunction to diet as a form of getting the subject to renounce its enjoyment - I think perhaps it would be key here to add the observation that the body of the overweight person is viewed as "anti-social"? Personally, I do occasionally follow the keto diet to lose weight, but always find that I cannot avoid the desire to drink milk. Eventually, the desire becomes too strong and I fall off the wagon. I know many heroin addicts who are thin, so maybe the answer is to become a milk-slurping junkie who reads Todd McGowan books :p
I think that's right--to be overweight is to be antisocial, and yet overeating is also following a different social imperative. So one loses either way.
Terrific video. I’m not sure if it’s worth your time or important enough to your thinking, but I’d love to see a vid on neuroses, perversion, and psychosis. It’s been a point of confusion for me and your videos are so helpful.
Very clear and erudite without being boring or turgid. I love the subject of the superego. Have you listened to Don Carveth’s lectures on RUclips? He’s also in favour by this much maligned aspect of psychoanalysis
Fantastic video, thank you so much! Could you tell me where I can find the quotes by Zizek and Lacan in their respective books (in terms of chapters)? Do you have written yourself about this somewhere?
The Zizek quotation comes from chapter 3, "Superego By Default," and Lacan's claim about the superego injunction to enjoy is on page 3 of the English translation of Seminar XX.
I wonder if the diet example is more complicated. It seems to me, rather, that the food industry has used the superegoic command to enjoy to sort of kidnap our desire so that we eat sugar and saturated fats whilst they get out money making all the population sicker (tobacco could be another example of this). In this sense, all the fad diets are part of this same procedure, but the attempt (that you describe) to eat healthier (in short, eat more veggies and less saturated fats), I see it as a way to reclaim our subjectivity. In any case, thank you so much for all your work!
This is compelling, and theres certainly something to it and what you have elaborated about enjoyment, but one area where this is defeated by observation is that all of this only ever seems to go in one direction. The working class never get a superegoic drive to attack the capitalists when they have the numbers and certainly the conditions to do so, nor do they ever derive surplus enjoyment from stamping out their uncastrated enjoyment. It only ever seems to flow from the rulers downwards. I would be interested to know if theres any reason for this "inequality".
As I see it, the whole point of superego is that it mobilizes enjoyment in the direction of the social demand, never for the sake of emancipation. Emancipation cannot be superegoic. That seems like a basic contradiction with the structure of the superego--its very function--to me.
@toddmcgowan8233 So maybe even though the super-ego does only flow one direction and appears all-consuming, its a mistake to think this is sustainable forever and won't lead to consequences the ruling class cant or wont account for? I kind of get the point of all this is that there isnt anything that can be done to shortcircuit the superego (which is a depressing thought) and this goes hand in hand with the thought of Paul Mattick (though from sociology not psychoanalysis) who thought that the workers subjectivity alone isnt enough to revolt. Maybe Im pathologically grasping at straws, but something tells me that if there is any potential to escape the mire of super-ego, it could be in the Gaze. Though not directly, it would have to be the long and circuitous route.
Hey Todd, great video, thanks so much! There's just one thing I keep struggling with on superego: how do we reconcile this notion of superegoic repression of desire with Lacan's claim (often cited by Zizek) that the ultimate law of the superego is "Enjoy"? Is this simply a matter of the superego's enjoyment of repression, or are we dealing with a totally different conception of superego by Lacan?
I see the difficulty. But the point is that the command to enjoy doesn't facilitate enjoyment. It acts as the ultimate barrier to enjoyment. Thus the link between superego and repression, I would say.
@@toddmcgowan8233 So the superego represses enjoyment by circumventing the commandments of the law and instead commanding us to enjoy, which prevents us from doing so?
Can you say that the difference between law and superego that law is not blatantly contradicts itself? For example if you bash yourself for being plump or any other way not adhering to beauty standarts and then bash yourself for bashing youself about being plump, because you're not fallowing 'love yourself' injunction. Can the same malignancy be present in law? I guess law can be malignant, but not as self-inconsistent and contradictory as superego? It is devoid of logic, operating solely on slogans.
Great video. It makes me wonder if John Kay's obliquity isn't a kind of ethical principle, where the companies whose mission statements based on interpreting customers' desires inadvertently end up successful, and those whose mission statements are commandments of enjoyment, such as make more money or a better return to shareholders, end up with failure.
@@toddmcgowan8233 haha, yeah, especially Sam Walton given Walmart. Hard to say that by not following the superego they're benefiting society. Stupid capitalism ruins everything
@@davesmith4400 I would say that in general capitalism works with the logic of the superego. It's destructive in the same sense that capitalist society is, so yes, its destructiveness is relative to the society in which its activated.
Superego is a command that comes from the big Other, whereas our desire is an interpretation of the Other's desire. Where desire is concerned, it's not possible to obey because the uncertainty of the interpretation is integral to the desire. But one can obey the superegoic imperative. It gives a clear direction, in contrast to the fundamental ambiguity of desire.
@@toddmcgowan8233 Ok, so the superegoic imperative is like a command which acts as a path of less resistance compared with following the ambiguity of desire? Sorry I’m just trying to tease out the concepts tor my own learning. I’m not an academic but very interested.
@@toddmcgowan8233 Thank you for that clarification. That helps a lot. Would it, therefore, be correct to say that the Lacanian ethics of desire is an ethics of stubborn ambiguity? Is desire ethical precisely because it lacks an official guarantee (the stamp of the big Other) and, therefore, is ambiguous (uncertain)?
@@TheDangerousMaybe Yes, I think that's right. The superegoic imperative is backed by the semblance of a guarantee, whereas the desire of the Other is not
@@jigglypufflove Yes, superegoic imperative is a path of less resistance, to be sure, and it is also supported by the Other in a way that desire is not
I wonder how we can make sense of the relation between Other and superego. In some texts, there is a pretty clear implication that the Lacanian Other is really (m)Other, at least early on in childhood. If we take the superego in its Kleinian sense, the superego and the Other seem to coincide in the sense that the figure of the mother both defines the unattainable standard and is the one with the access to unbounded enjoyment. This seems like a much different configuration from reactionary politics, where the superegotic leader commands us to get back the enjoyment that was 'stolen' by the Other, incarnated this time by those of a different ethnicity, religion etc... In a sense though, doesn't that leader/superegotic figure have unbounded access to enjoyment while somehow redirecting his/her followers to get back their enjoyment somewhere else? (e.g. in the US, Republicans tell their followers not to support taxing businesses and CEOs because _their_ enjoyment was actually taken away by illegal immigrants).
Very good points. I would say that there is a distinction in reactionary politics between the big Other issuing the superegoic imperative and the other responsible for the theft of enjoyment. It is precisely because this second other is not a social authority--doesn't really belong to the social order--that it represents a threat. The illegal immigrant, in this vision, does not belong to the reactionary big Other.
@@toddmcgowan8233 Could we say then that the basic move of emancipatory politics is to sacrifice the traumatic enjoyment we receive from the superegoic incarnation of the Other at the altar of our desire? This seems to be a difficult exchange in that we lose the 'excitation' that comes with the guilt-ridden imperatives and are forced to be free through our awareness of the Other's lack. It's even more difficult to turn this into political action in that while the structure is universal, the enjoyment is always particular. I wonder what Lacanian politics would look like if it were allowed to take shape.
@@MegaReza94 Yes, but I do think that there is an emancipatory form of enjoyment that is not necessarily lesser than the rightist alternative. This enjoyment of contradiction is akin to what occurs in love, which is very powerful.
@@toddmcgowan8233 Yes, I was referring to the part of the video where you cite Zizek. I wonder if the hijacking of death drive by the superego isn't deeper than what's suggested here. The superego seems to be a 'smart' extortioner in that it avoids making the contradiction too salient while keeping enjoyment at hand. If it were too heavy handed then the contradiction would very quickly become unbearable for the subject who would soon be thrown back into its freedom. I can see how analysis can help the subject not "give itself too much trouble" by going through the extortioner to derive enjoyment, but I wonder what this looks like politically given that it requires quite a topological change in the subject. Great discussion by the way, thank you!
I wonder what happens, then, when the injunction to enjoy (or to pursue happiness...) is inscribed into the law itself. To resist this law would be just another exercise in conformity to the superego. I assume this is the Freudian critique of Pragmatism. Furhtermore, it's funny how someone 'going their own way' was met with such ridicule in the previous decade. I'm not convinced that the incels-MGTOW camp were obedient to the moral law, but it was a claim of theirs. It seems as though the appearance of another super-egoic enjoyment, is an unbearable concept. A battle of the super-egos! Might as well be Aphrodite and Ares in the Iliad.
I really don't think so. The super egoic enjoyment I believe is on the unconscious level. So just the fact that we put ourself into trouble, no nut november or going to gym or running, isn't necessarily super egoic because we also know the enjoyment we get out of it, which is the sense of accomplishment at the end of the activity. I think the super egoic enjoyment is jouissance, where we really cause trouble to ourself and on a conscious or common sense level, it is pure misery but we still get some enjoyment out of it on an unconscious level.
@@sarathgopinath3096 well I think in one of the other comments Prof. McGowan said that superego enjoyment comes from following social demand, and desire comes from as a response to what we perceive what the big Other wants. In this case the point of no nut November, it is a social movement and it is a clear social demand by a group of men to "exercise self control" It's like the example in the video about being on a diet. You're on a diet of not jerking off. You enjoy not masturbating
@@vidividivicious yeah as much as I agree to what you just said, I think it's not that simple either. Because then as I said, everything is about superego and it's clearly on a conscious level. I still think the enjoyment he refers to is jouissance and it's not really the no nut November or any of that self Helpy stuff because we're aware about the enjoyment we get in all these cases and none of them even remotely comes close to (death)drive or the self destructive nature of the psyche. Maybe someone more knowledgeable could correct me here :)
@@vidividivicious Hey I think I was wrong. In that, this is super egoic. But now I am confused as well. Because my understanding of superego and jouissance now I feel is wrong
I think what's ironic about this movement is that it commands enjoyment in the guise of prohibiting it or producing a self-prohibition. But I would say that it is nonetheless superegoic because it is associated with a clear social demand. Locating the enjoyment here is the tricky part. I would say that it is in the capitulation rather than in the refusal of sex, simply because that is the explicit demand.
This reading of the Superego reminds me of the figure of the Father. When I teach my son that enjoyment requires sacrifice, I'm inviting him to trespass the threshold of law. I show him my love through the command to enjoy, at the same time I display authority giving him permission to break the law in certain circumstances. That's just awesome! Cheers from Colombia ;)
Thank you for the example ❤
I am trying to read Sublime Object of Ideology for the first time and these videos are super helpful. Thank you so mich!
Had a debate about a tragic act of violence in my country that happened in the last couple days, where a group of citizens took an innocent person from the police hands, they beat him unconscious and burned him alive. after slightly suspecting him of being behind the recent forest fires in that region. who eventually turned out to be a volunteer who was only there to help..
the people's consensus and surprisingly even that of my classmates in the faculty of psychology, is that these brutal acts are merely the barbaric manifestation of impulse, aka pure id in action. even though their reaction before the person was proven innocent was mostly in favour of this collective *crime.* which implies, as you clarified in this video, that societal demand and approval which utterly breaks both the legal and moral law but obeys the super-ego's function.
anyway thanks for the video Todd, that was enlightening.
I see this psychologization and trumpeting of the problems of the id all the time. I see this misdiagnosis of superego as a serious problem of our era
Thanks for your commitment to free public education 👍
Without you and Gregory Sadler, I never would have made it past the first page of The Phenomenology haha
Oh, hell yeah!! I've been waiting for this one! This video is a wonderful supplement to Chapter Two of 'The End of Dissatisfaction?'
Thanks, this really helps me. I'd already figured from your book Capitalism and Desire that the unconscious enjoyment of dieting must be in the failure rather than any success. But I really like your point about the super-egoic injunction to diet as a form of getting the subject to renounce its enjoyment - I think perhaps it would be key here to add the observation that the body of the overweight person is viewed as "anti-social"? Personally, I do occasionally follow the keto diet to lose weight, but always find that I cannot avoid the desire to drink milk. Eventually, the desire becomes too strong and I fall off the wagon. I know many heroin addicts who are thin, so maybe the answer is to become a milk-slurping junkie who reads Todd McGowan books :p
I think that's right--to be overweight is to be antisocial, and yet overeating is also following a different social imperative. So one loses either way.
Terrific video. I’m not sure if it’s worth your time or important enough to your thinking, but I’d love to see a vid on neuroses, perversion, and psychosis. It’s been a point of confusion for me and your videos are so helpful.
OK, I'll try to do it.
@@toddmcgowan8233 nice Thanks!
Very clear and erudite without being boring or turgid. I love the subject of the superego. Have you listened to Don Carveth’s lectures on RUclips? He’s also in favour by this much maligned aspect of psychoanalysis
Hi Dave, I didn't know of them, thanks.
Fantastic video, thank you so much! Could you tell me where I can find the quotes by Zizek and Lacan in their respective books (in terms of chapters)? Do you have written yourself about this somewhere?
The Zizek quotation comes from chapter 3, "Superego By Default," and Lacan's claim about the superego injunction to enjoy is on page 3 of the English translation of Seminar XX.
I wonder if the diet example is more complicated. It seems to me, rather, that the food industry has used the superegoic command to enjoy to sort of kidnap our desire so that we eat sugar and saturated fats whilst they get out money making all the population sicker (tobacco could be another example of this). In this sense, all the fad diets are part of this same procedure, but the attempt (that you describe) to eat healthier (in short, eat more veggies and less saturated fats), I see it as a way to reclaim our subjectivity. In any case, thank you so much for all your work!
Amazing , very clearly and succinctly explained such difficult psychoanalytic concept
This is compelling, and theres certainly something to it and what you have elaborated about enjoyment, but one area where this is defeated by observation is that all of this only ever seems to go in one direction. The working class never get a superegoic drive to attack the capitalists when they have the numbers and certainly the conditions to do so, nor do they ever derive surplus enjoyment from stamping out their uncastrated enjoyment. It only ever seems to flow from the rulers downwards.
I would be interested to know if theres any reason for this "inequality".
As I see it, the whole point of superego is that it mobilizes enjoyment in the direction of the social demand, never for the sake of emancipation. Emancipation cannot be superegoic. That seems like a basic contradiction with the structure of the superego--its very function--to me.
@toddmcgowan8233 So maybe even though the super-ego does only flow one direction and appears all-consuming, its a mistake to think this is sustainable forever and won't lead to consequences the ruling class cant or wont account for?
I kind of get the point of all this is that there isnt anything that can be done to shortcircuit the superego (which is a depressing thought) and this goes hand in hand with the thought of Paul Mattick (though from sociology not psychoanalysis) who thought that the workers subjectivity alone isnt enough to revolt. Maybe Im pathologically grasping at straws, but something tells me that if there is any potential to escape the mire of super-ego, it could be in the Gaze. Though not directly, it would have to be the long and circuitous route.
Hey Todd, great video, thanks so much! There's just one thing I keep struggling with on superego: how do we reconcile this notion of superegoic repression of desire with Lacan's claim (often cited by Zizek) that the ultimate law of the superego is "Enjoy"? Is this simply a matter of the superego's enjoyment of repression, or are we dealing with a totally different conception of superego by Lacan?
I see the difficulty. But the point is that the command to enjoy doesn't facilitate enjoyment. It acts as the ultimate barrier to enjoyment. Thus the link between superego and repression, I would say.
@@toddmcgowan8233 So the superego represses enjoyment by circumventing the commandments of the law and instead commanding us to enjoy, which prevents us from doing so?
@@jessicaanderson750 Yes, that's what I would say.
What an excellent piece, thank you.
I like how you always look like you've just finished working out when recording your vids. Runner?
Various lung and hip problems have caused me to resort to lesser substitutes, but still in spirit.
I know you already did a podcast with Ryan about the Freudian It (or id), but I'd love to see you do a video about id here.
I'll try to do it, thanks
The superego-Zeno’s paradox in the psyche
Nah
Can you say that the difference between law and superego that law is not blatantly contradicts itself? For example if you bash yourself for being plump or any other way not adhering to beauty standarts and then bash yourself for bashing youself about being plump, because you're not fallowing 'love yourself' injunction. Can the same malignancy be present in law? I guess law can be malignant, but not as self-inconsistent and contradictory as superego? It is devoid of logic, operating solely on slogans.
Brilliant.
Good post. Thank you 😊
Lovedthe outro thanks for that
Great video. It makes me wonder if John Kay's obliquity isn't a kind of ethical principle, where the companies whose mission statements based on interpreting customers' desires inadvertently end up successful, and those whose mission statements are commandments of enjoyment, such as make more money or a better return to shareholders, end up with failure.
Great point, but I dislike the idea that the capitalist can profit off defying the logic of the superego.
@@toddmcgowan8233 haha, yeah, especially Sam Walton given Walmart. Hard to say that by not following the superego they're benefiting society. Stupid capitalism ruins everything
@@davesmith4400 I would say that in general capitalism works with the logic of the superego. It's destructive in the same sense that capitalist society is, so yes, its destructiveness is relative to the society in which its activated.
Heh. I watched the Maggie Mae Fish video that has clips of Lost Highway and this uses the clip from Lost Highway.
Girard's scapegoat theory works here also: Without scapegoat there is no culture.
How does a command from the superego free us from our own desire?
Superego is a command that comes from the big Other, whereas our desire is an interpretation of the Other's desire. Where desire is concerned, it's not possible to obey because the uncertainty of the interpretation is integral to the desire. But one can obey the superegoic imperative. It gives a clear direction, in contrast to the fundamental ambiguity of desire.
@@toddmcgowan8233 Ok, so the superegoic imperative is like a command which acts as a path of less resistance compared with following the ambiguity of desire? Sorry I’m just trying to tease out the concepts tor my own learning. I’m not an academic but very interested.
@@toddmcgowan8233 Thank you for that clarification. That helps a lot. Would it, therefore, be correct to say that the Lacanian ethics of desire is an ethics of stubborn ambiguity? Is desire ethical precisely because it lacks an official guarantee (the stamp of the big Other) and, therefore, is ambiguous (uncertain)?
@@TheDangerousMaybe Yes, I think that's right. The superegoic imperative is backed by the semblance of a guarantee, whereas the desire of the Other is not
@@jigglypufflove Yes, superegoic imperative is a path of less resistance, to be sure, and it is also supported by the Other in a way that desire is not
I wonder how we can make sense of the relation between Other and superego. In some texts, there is a pretty clear implication that the Lacanian Other is really (m)Other, at least early on in childhood. If we take the superego in its Kleinian sense, the superego and the Other seem to coincide in the sense that the figure of the mother both defines the unattainable standard and is the one with the access to unbounded enjoyment. This seems like a much different configuration from reactionary politics, where the superegotic leader commands us to get back the enjoyment that was 'stolen' by the Other, incarnated this time by those of a different ethnicity, religion etc... In a sense though, doesn't that leader/superegotic figure have unbounded access to enjoyment while somehow redirecting his/her followers to get back their enjoyment somewhere else? (e.g. in the US, Republicans tell their followers not to support taxing businesses and CEOs because _their_ enjoyment was actually taken away by illegal immigrants).
Very good points. I would say that there is a distinction in reactionary politics between the big Other issuing the superegoic imperative and the other responsible for the theft of enjoyment. It is precisely because this second other is not a social authority--doesn't really belong to the social order--that it represents a threat. The illegal immigrant, in this vision, does not belong to the reactionary big Other.
@@toddmcgowan8233 Could we say then that the basic move of emancipatory politics is to sacrifice the traumatic enjoyment we receive from the superegoic incarnation of the Other at the altar of our desire? This seems to be a difficult exchange in that we lose the 'excitation' that comes with the guilt-ridden imperatives and are forced to be free through our awareness of the Other's lack. It's even more difficult to turn this into political action in that while the structure is universal, the enjoyment is always particular. I wonder what Lacanian politics would look like if it were allowed to take shape.
@@MegaReza94 Yes, but I do think that there is an emancipatory form of enjoyment that is not necessarily lesser than the rightist alternative. This enjoyment of contradiction is akin to what occurs in love, which is very powerful.
@@toddmcgowan8233 Yes, I was referring to the part of the video where you cite Zizek. I wonder if the hijacking of death drive by the superego isn't deeper than what's suggested here. The superego seems to be a 'smart' extortioner in that it avoids making the contradiction too salient while keeping enjoyment at hand. If it were too heavy handed then the contradiction would very quickly become unbearable for the subject who would soon be thrown back into its freedom. I can see how analysis can help the subject not "give itself too much trouble" by going through the extortioner to derive enjoyment, but I wonder what this looks like politically given that it requires quite a topological change in the subject. Great discussion by the way, thank you!
what is the tune at the start?
Mussorgsky - Pictures at an Exhibition. I think it's the piano solo version of the opening 'Promenade'
It's from Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition"
@@toddmcgowan8233 thank you very much! sorry I didn't thank you sooner
Hi Todd My request a video on this plz - "woman as a symptom of man"
Thanks. I'll try to do that.
PLEASE take the cap off. It's too distracting! Must be my Superego speaking.
I wonder what happens, then, when the injunction to enjoy (or to pursue happiness...) is inscribed into the law itself. To resist this law would be just another exercise in conformity to the superego. I assume this is the Freudian critique of Pragmatism.
Furhtermore, it's funny how someone 'going their own way' was met with such ridicule in the previous decade. I'm not convinced that the incels-MGTOW camp were obedient to the moral law, but it was a claim of theirs. It seems as though the appearance of another super-egoic enjoyment, is an unbearable concept.
A battle of the super-egos!
Might as well be Aphrodite and Ares in the Iliad.
No nut November is super egoic enjoyment
I really don't think so. The super egoic enjoyment I believe is on the unconscious level. So just the fact that we put ourself into trouble, no nut november or going to gym or running, isn't necessarily super egoic because we also know the enjoyment we get out of it, which is the sense of accomplishment at the end of the activity.
I think the super egoic enjoyment is jouissance, where we really cause trouble to ourself and on a conscious or common sense level, it is pure misery but we still get some enjoyment out of it on an unconscious level.
@@sarathgopinath3096 well I think in one of the other comments Prof. McGowan said that superego enjoyment comes from following social demand, and desire comes from as a response to what we perceive what the big Other wants. In this case the point of no nut November, it is a social movement and it is a clear social demand by a group of men to "exercise self control"
It's like the example in the video about being on a diet. You're on a diet of not jerking off. You enjoy not masturbating
@@vidividivicious yeah as much as I agree to what you just said, I think it's not that simple either. Because then as I said, everything is about superego and it's clearly on a conscious level. I still think the enjoyment he refers to is jouissance and it's not really the no nut November or any of that self Helpy stuff because we're aware about the enjoyment we get in all these cases and none of them even remotely comes close to (death)drive or the self destructive nature of the psyche. Maybe someone more knowledgeable could correct me here :)
@@vidividivicious Hey I think I was wrong. In that, this is super egoic. But now I am confused as well. Because my understanding of superego and jouissance now I feel is wrong
I think what's ironic about this movement is that it commands enjoyment in the guise of prohibiting it or producing a self-prohibition. But I would say that it is nonetheless superegoic because it is associated with a clear social demand. Locating the enjoyment here is the tricky part. I would say that it is in the capitulation rather than in the refusal of sex, simply because that is the explicit demand.
whats the point with the cap backwards? dont wanna grow up? ;)
Alas, it seems to be happening no matter how I wear my cap