MindGuide provides online therapy, anytime, anywhere. Once you start to dis-identify from you superego you are already forming a healthier ego and more authentic self. Explore your own voice and pay attention to your own impulses and feelings. The inner critic will still try to stop you but it is you who is making the decisions now. Whenever a new impulse arises, try to stay with it and observe it. Once you try to recognise your inner critic and see it as separated from yourself, you might even start recognising the tone, words and messages it is using to attack you. It makes you feel worthless, small, guilty and ashamed. How do you know it is the critical voice and not your inner voice that motivates you to become a stronger, better person? A critical inner voice attacks you as a person and devalues you as a whole, not just your behaviour or a mistake. Our inner voice and inner critic are fused together and the critical voice is being mistaken for - our own voice. What happens to many of us an for the most of the time is that the superego becomes our inner voice. It is judging and always comparing to the ideal image, therefor it keeps devaluating you if the ideal self is too high a standard. Developing a superego is a necessary thing to learn as a child and it gives you an inner compass to regulate you behaviour. It is perceived as a safe space where your parents will accept you and love you if you’re acting according to their rules and norms. Inner voice, just like superego, develops in early childhood and tries to keep you in the Good Girl or Good Boy square.

The Freudian perspective and definition of superego gives us an insight into the nature of inner critic, the critical voice that whispers doubts and fears. Today, the idea of unconscious mind is widely accepted and scientifically proven. Yet, it was Freud who developed idea of irrational forces outside of conscious mind that determine human thoughts and experience. Freud’s theories and techniques have been widely criticised, especially for very little empirical evidence to back the theories up. It has been almost 80 years since the death of Sigmund Freud, neurologist and the founder of Psychoanalysis. If we are behaving according to superego’s image of ideal-self, then the superego can also reward us by making us feel proud. If the ego surrenders under demands of id, the superego then punishes the ego with the feelings of guilt. The superego has a superpower to cause feelings of guilt or pride. According to Freud, superego consists at first of integrated parental morals about what is right and wrong and later takes on the influence of other significant people like teachers, educators. The ego is under constant watch of superego. The ego tries to meet the desires of id in such a way that it is acceptable for external real world. As Freud put it, the ego “attempts to mediate between the id and reality”. When we grow older, we still try to satisfy the needs while act accordingly to social norms and circumstances- with the help of ego. Baby’s are completely “id-driven” in order to survive. It is present from birth and responds directly to needs in order to receive immediate gratification. Id works to satisfy the basic needs, desires and urges. These are active agents that form so called psychic apparatus (human personality). The concepts themselves arose at a late stage in the development of Freud's thought: the structural model was first discussed in his 1920 essay 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' and was formalised and elaborated upon three years later in his 'The Ego and the Id.' Freud's proposal was influenced by the ambiguity of the term 'unconscious' and its many conflicting uses.According to Freud, a complex human behaviour is the reflection of three distinct yet interacting systems, id, ego and superego.

According to this model, the uncoordinated instinctual trends are the 'id' the organised realistic part of the psyche is the 'ego,' and the critical and moralising function the 'super-ego.' Even though the model is 'structural' and makes reference to an 'apparatus,' the id, ego, and super-ego are functions of the mind rather than parts of the brain and do not necessarily correspond one-to-one with actual somatic structures of the kind dealt with by neuroscience. Id, ego, and super-ego are the three parts of the psychic apparatus defined in Sigmund Freud's structural model of the psyche they are the three theoretical constructs in terms of whose activity and interaction mental life is described.

Id superego and ego