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What do I most need to know to thrive at college?
As a professor, I’m asked this question often. And there are, I understand, many answers one might offer. Some have to do with selecting a major, some with roommate relations, some with the consumption of alcohol and drugs. These are all important issues, no doubt. But for most students there’s a more central one.
My students are often hurting. Their favorite word to describe their common state of mind is “stressed.” To hear them tell it, they are stressed almost all the time, except on Friday and Saturday nights, when many of them find ways to medicate their woes.
I believe there’s something that my students can do about this state of ongoing stress, and it begins with self-knowledge. It begins in the old Socratic fashion of knowing oneself as well as possible and then using that knowledge to make life better. All the king’s horses and men can now put someone back together again passably well after a major breakdown: there have been gains in therapy; there have been gains in medication. But the process of falling apart and putting together, which I’ve been close to a number of times, is no joy. I can’t say it can always be prevented with self-knowledge, but self-knowledge surely helps.
I believe that students need to know a simple fact: there is something inside all of us that does not like us much. It does not want us to be calm or happy, or content. At its worst, it’s a source of endless unreasonable criticism—demanding perfection, when perfection, as any sane person knows, is not available. The force that I am talking about can be punitive: it can punish the self for not obeying its dictates—which sometimes means that it punishes the self for not attaining flawlessness. This agency often operates below the level of consciousness: it’s hard to tune in, hard to hear it.
What I’m talking about, you may have guessed, is the agency that Sigmund Freud calls the superego. It is difficult now to attach Freud’s name to any idea you hope will be persuasive. But the originality, and to my mind the accuracy, of Freud’s theory of the superego makes it necessary to bring him forward and give credit where it’s more than due. Freud’s thinking is flawed in certain ways, no doubt about it. (Penis envy!) But those flaws have resulted in his thought being all but banished from the culture. In the case of Freud’s reflections on the superego, which I develop fully in my new book, The Age of Guilt: The Super-Ego in the Online World (Yale University Press), this exile is a great loss.
The superego seems to become most potent when the demands of civilization are high. The over-I, which is actually the best translation of Freud’s German term Über-Ich, thrives and expands when social expectations rise for individuals to succeed and to prosper. It is strongest when competition is intense and when there are few perceived alternatives to the war of each against all.
The superego grows more potent when people cannot see a way to build lives that are based on anything but money, success, fame and competition. (The psychotherapist Adam Phillips observes that we do not know what the good life is, so we often settle for trying to lead the enviable life.) The superego is strong at times when we are inclined to believe that our lives are individually defined and that we cannot find happiness in community. The superego is isolating: it makes us think that no one truly loves or cares for us and that the only significant task in life is pleasing it, even though the superego often turns out to be implacable.
Students are at a time of life when the superego can be especially potent. Mine feel that they absolutely must succeed and prosper; they must never make anything close to a serious mistake; they must mind their manners and their morals, or at least mind the public dissemination of anything—a photo, a note, a word or gesture—that might smack of impropriety. When the culture and the values of the over-I blend almost seamlessly, a world of psychological peril opens up.
How does the superego manifest itself? Freud tells us that though it operates through the medium of an inner voice, that voice often goes unheard. What we gather about the superego comes indirectly. The empowered superego is manifest in anxiety and depression, and also in headaches and backaches and stomach disorders and bowel complaints. The superego can be an artist of indirect self-expression: our body is the medium for its arts. More often than not, the superego prohibits too much, rewards too little and offers almost no satisfactions—since it generally refuses to love the individual for what she is, rather than what she might become. And if the individual by chance meets the standards of the over-I, then often the over-I responds by raising them. Does this sound familiar? Does it resonate with our own lives and with what we see of the lives of the purportedly empowered young?
My students are bright, talented and kind. But they are also oppressed by standards that have been instilled deep within them. They are often overwhelmed with anxiety. They’re frequently depressed. And both conditions, I believe, can arise from having an internal agency that makes demands that are virtually impossible for them to meet. They take six courses, they’re in five clubs, they cultivate numberless friends and, at a certain point, usually close to the end of the academic term, it often becomes too much. At a time when they should be alive with possibility and excited by all they’ve learned and all that’s left to learn, they’re riven with anxiety or pressed down by depression. They often tell me that their lives seem to shuttle between anxiety on the one hand and deep boredom on the other. Another word for that deep boredom is depression.
Almost none of my students have ever heard of the superego (at least until I say a word to them about it). None of them believe that coming to terms with one’s inner agency of authority, and maybe transforming it, are crucial to attaining a measure of happiness. They simply suffer on, unarmed with the basic resources that Freud and a few others offer.
The superego is not moral; it is bitterly moralistic. The ego, the thinking self, may approve of a certain action: the indulgence in some sexual pleasure, perhaps. But the over-I does not concur. The self, the ego, may give its approval to a homosexual connection, let us say. But the superego may still become enraged. There follows punishment. The punishment can be of a conscious, perceptible nature: a voice that both is and is not the subject’s upbraids him as a degenerate and even an evildoer. But the ego has no problem with homosexuality. The ego condones and even encourages the act! It does not matter: the superego will have its say and take its revenge.
People are implanted young with superegos, be they weak or strong or somewhere in between. Then the cultural context sometimes intensifies, sometimes reduces the punitive superego. How could it be otherwise? Culture is variable, inconsistent. At times a loose and tolerant ethos reigns. That was the case in the America of the late 1960s, and perhaps even more so in the ’70s. At other times, and for reasons that are not easy to determine, a more stringent morality takes hold. I think it is safe to say that among people who think of themselves as educated and liberal, a potent streak of morality, we might even say self-righteous moralism, has emerged. They are ever vigilant, always on the alert for infractions against right-thinking and correct action. Sexist! Racist! Homophobe! Transphobe! The judgments go on and on. And often it takes all too little to trigger them. An era of oppressive, superego morality? Living amid the ostensibly enlightened, it is easy to imagine so.
Too many of our contemporaries bear the signs of possession by the superego. They are, as the superego itself is, immune to irony, void of humor, unforgiving, prone to demanding harsh punishments. They align themselves with superego-affiliated institutions. They see deans’ offices and human resource departments as mediums for visiting punishment on transgressors. All too many situations devolve to black and white, with no hint of an intervening shade. There is no forgiveness and no redemption.
I speculate that people with fierce superegos often get relief by aiming them outward, at others. They sometimes get relief from the ongoing self-condemnation by directing superego judgment outside. It’s a relief to fuse with it and move harsh attention away from yourself and into the world. But a problem arises. The more you let the superego play freely at large, the stronger it gets, so when it re-aims its venom at you, it does so with enhanced force. The solution? Turn it outward again. Drunks tell you that the only remedy for a hangover is a morning shot, hair of the dog that bit you. As a long-term solution, this does not work well.
The displacement strategy, from the self to others, also has some worrisome political effects. It sometimes seems that the judgment the bien-pensant sector of the culture visits on the less refined has the effect of inflaming them. They are tired of being judged by their supposed betters, and they respond not by reforming but by becoming more committed to their ways. “Evil be thou my Good,” they effectively say, and commit themselves to a theatrical backwardness to shock the superego-inflamed. They too are in their way victims of superego culture, letting its force deform their inner and outer lives. As one side grows tighter, more judgmental, more self-righteous, the other grows callous, mean and aggressive in its ignorance.
Skeptical about adopting the concept of the superego? I don’t blame you. But perhaps the more you look around, the more sense it will make. Relations between men and women, between the races, between liberals and conservatives are rammed with harsh and uncompromising judgment. The internet, a potential site for productive culture building, is too often a zone of ranting judgment. No forgiveness is possible, no prisoners taken. Many seem to take obscene delight in every exposure of transgression, at least until their supposed sins are exposed in turn.
What’s to be done about this unwelcome guest, this superego? What relief can my students and all the rest of us who find ourselves under the reign of the superego secure? I think the initial answer would be rather simple: start by experimenting with accepting the idea that the over-I exists. Begin by trying out the hypothesis that within you dwells a figure and force that both is and is not yourself. The figure lives to criticize and even condemn you.
What is to be done, after you have been willing to admit that Freud could be right? You might start by asking yourself questions from time to time. As in, “Hey, what’s going on here? Why am I ranting about this or about that? Why do I need a daily political tantrum? Why am I walking back and forth in the Senate chamber of my own mind delivering slightly deranged speeches about the turpitude I see around me? How come the thought of someone voting for a candidate other than my own makes me boil up then boil over? But more generally, how come I’m so damned critical of everybody and of myself to boot?”
Or you might say, it’s possible that this superego thing is beginning to act up. It does that. It’s a little like a tantrum-prone baby. When it starts screaming for what it wants—Revenge! Retribution!—one might tell it to calm down and get some sleep. God can take care of righteous judgment. Until I can simmer down and make my judgments sane and thoughtful, I’ll try to stay quiet. (And I’ll stay off Twitter, too.) In the meantime, I’ll see if I can’t substitute some cool understanding for rancorous judgment.
Or you might even dare to crack a little wise about the authoritarian stooge who lives within, call him out the way the little boy did when the bogus emperor marched down the street in his new clothes. Every insubordinate joke, George Orwell suggested, is a small revolution.
Where id was, there ego shall be. That was one of Freud’s therapeutic slogans. He meant that allowing the repressed desires of the id into consciousness could produce enhanced sanity. Freud believed that when we turn mute inner experience into words, we begin to make progress. There’s something about expression that liberates. We can calm down and move with circumspection, rather than simply relying on reflex. So, it might be possible to stop in the midst of a self-righteous rant against oneself or others and say to oneself: I know there’s a part of me that tends to irrational raving. It’s not so good for the objects of my rant, and it’s not good for me.
How many loud patrons of righteousness do you know who have serious problems with depression and anxiety? These conditions are not easy to explain, but one strong possibility is that they arise from the superego’s rage against the self, the ego. When you slow the over-I down and question its motives and its tactics, you may make real progress toward relative sanity and spare yourself needless pain. Where superego was, Phillips’s work suggests, there ego shall be.
Freud speaks not only of a superego, but also of an ego ideal. Unluckily for us, he never got around to drawing a firm line between the two. But I persist in thinking that given time, Freud might have propounded a full theory of the ego ideal, a benign form of inner authority. We (and our students in particular) can all go to work arriving at a system of values and aspirations that is both modest—not asking too much of ourselves or others—and still admirable. Maybe a clear, self-constructed ego ideal could siphon off some of the insane drive for self-perfection that the superego visits upon us and let us aim our energies at a standard that’s realistic.
But these are all individual responses: what would a collective response look like? One might speculate that the rogue superego thrives when there is an authority vacuum in the culture. When societies present reasonable, high-functioning, flexible authority through government, church, school and family, there is less room for irrational internal powers to insert themselves. In a culture like ours, where there is so much doubt about virtually every form of authority—government authority in particular—it is almost inevitable that the superego will step in. Developing plausible versions of social authority is a long-term response to the difficulties before us, but ultimately it may be the best and most needful.
But the question at hand is our students and their mental health. What is to be done there? Surely, we must let them know about the superego hypothesis. And we must tell them it is possible, through inner dialogue and skillful conduct of life, to calm that frequently angry agency down. And we can help our students, and ourselves, to create standards of achievement that are sane and plausible. We need them to understand that wayward desire can be ruinous, but a rampant, unchecked hunger to be better than good—to be, in short, perfect—can be just as destructive.
