lost souls and superegos

Reading more psychoanalytic texts, yesterday, I didn't really understand before the relationship that some people have to their superegos. I have found, in my own life, that it is possible to tame the superego, just as it is possible to tame a circus tiger and get it to do your bidding. It was Nietzsche who first gave me this idea, in Genealogy of Morals, wherein he suggests that conscience can be trained to enforce the opposite values to those of conventional Christianity.

So, from experience I have learned to know the proclivities of my own superego -- and thus to tame it. I understand that when I am tired from applying genuine and intense amounts of energy towards completing a particularly well defined goal, it is in the aftermath of this effort that superego tends to pounce: "Maybe you could have done this or that better? You know, you are not perfect! What's up with that? You've achieved something, but is it really as much as you would have wanted to achieve?"

As Nietzsche and Freud (if I recollect rightly) both manage to point out, the more you give in to superego ( or the "ascetic ideal", in Nietzsche's terms) the more hairsplitting becomes its demands. The moment of fatigue also has a cultural origin, in terms of its meaning, for me, since I was never permitted, by my father, to express fatigue. It was considered by him to be a sign of complete mental and physical deterioration, something unconscionable, to express oneself in relation to this normal physiological sensation.

To keep superego at bay, I generally try to avoid becoming fatigued -- or if I do become so, I grit my teeth and close my eyes and ride the wave of feeling slightly off-kilter, until normal energy levels are restored. What I don't do is to make the mistake of believing everything my superego tells me when I am in a delapidated condition. In this way, and in others, I assert my power over my own life and tame the superego.

Yet, recently, I have found that there are those who see their superego not as an abritrary and officious sparring partner, but as an ally. It seems that they use the certainty of the ideas generated from the superego in order to calm down their profound levels of anxiety. For them, superego performs a role of filling in the emptiness they feel inside, by giving them some prescriptions to follow that make them feel less alone. Many people, it would seem, feel that they cannot do without the feeling of being dominated by their superegos. To even try to do things differently would make them feel extremely terrified and even more alone. So they submit to all sorts of rules that may be extemely arbitrary, in order to avoid this feeling.

Perhaps this attitude of fear is indeed the anchor of much dogmatic religiosity. The ability to abide by rules is a palliative, in the case of some people, to make tolerable an overwhelming sinking feeling. No wonder those whose character structures are like this start to panic when another value system (than that of right wing fundamentalism) seems to be in the making. They are afraid of losing their 'souls'.