The particular qualities of any individual child’s relationship with his superego will depend on how he has managed the intense and complex emotional connections with his parents throughout his infancy and childhood, and particularly how he manages the critical events of the Oedipal period.

Roth, P. (2001) The Superego. p74. Icon Books

 

One perennial area of potential conflict in human affairs is that between experience and authority. Judgement based on experience is the business of the ego: through its belief system and its function of reality testing, it speaks with the authority of the individual’s own experience. The superego, in contrast, claims authority by virtue of its position and its origins: it is claimed on the basis of the principle of parental authority, bolstered by ancestral authority.

Britton, R. (2003) ibid, p71.

 

The normal superego can be distinguished from the pathological superego in the following ways: it is concerned with nuanced moral judgment which takes reality and humane consideration into account, rather than delivering absolute moralistic condemnation.

Sedlak, V. (2019) The psychoanalyst’s superegos, ego ideals, and blind spots: the emotional development of the clinician. p41. Routledge.

 

The normal superego is not a soft touch, it can be appropriately critical and this can lead to enormous pain and suffering which can at times be experienced as unbearable.

Sedlak, V. (2019) ibid, p43.