Superego? More like super awesome!

When Freud talks of the relationship between an individual’s public and private sphere of life, he clearly states that one’s id, his personal passions and desires, and ego, his individual sense of reason, needs to be mediated by the superego, his public conscience. Freud believes that if one were to live a life solely to follow the drive of the id, society would not function. Although individual indulgence creates pleasure, people need to have some sort of outside discipline in order to keep society under control. Freud’s superego constructs this mediation as inherently punitive—solely a means of punishment and restriction. His notion disregards the advantages to be gained from an individual’s interaction with society (the means by which one obtains a public conscience). In Civilization and its Discontents he talks about the relationship between love and society as oppositional: “On the one hand, love opposes the interests of culture; on the other, culture menaces love with grievous restrictions” (122). Freud views the public realm as a necessary way in which to keep individuals from existing as egotistical beings. Although his idea of the public realm (superego) as an essential to the private realm (id and ego) correctly positions the self as responsive to outside social pressures, he never recognizes the benefits that the superego offers (its positive and dialogic relationship to and with the private).
Individual and social interaction is much more advantageous than Freud assumes. The relationship between public and private not only joins society together as a whole, but it also allows individuals to become a better, more intelligent version of themselves. In contrast to Freud’s vision of the public realm, Hegel views the relationship between the “superego” (what he terms as the “other”) and the “id/ego” (what he calls “the individual”) as both innate and beneficial. His notion of mediation allows for a much greater possibility of gain. In Phenomenology of the Mind Hegel talks about how the individual can only discover his/her own self-consciousness through contact with the other. This double process of self-consciousness afford an equivalency that is non-restrictive: “Each sees the other do the same as itself: each itself does what it demands on the part of the other, and for that reason does what it does, only so far as the other does the same” (Phenomenology of the Mind 67). As opposed to Freud’s restricting vision of the mediation, Hegel’s notion allows one much more possibility for growth. If individuals only viewed the superego as a constraint to keep everyone’s id and ego under control, as Freud believes, then people would never truly care for the wellbeing of anyone but themselves. The mediation of the superego to the id and the ego should not simply be perceived as a way to manage things but as an intrinsic part of what it means to be human.