{"id":795,"date":"2015-04-19T16:17:48","date_gmt":"2015-04-19T20:17:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/basicproblems002\/?p=795"},"modified":"2015-04-19T16:17:48","modified_gmt":"2015-04-19T20:17:48","slug":"why-cant-the-apple-fall-far-from-the-tree","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/basicproblems002\/2015\/04\/19\/why-cant-the-apple-fall-far-from-the-tree\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Can\u2019t the Apple Fall Far from the Tree?"},"content":{"rendered":"

For Freud, our parental figures are extremely important to the development and interactions of our consciousness. His model of consciousness is a little different from the others we have encountered so far in that it takes into deeper account the internalization of our external experiences and influences. Unlike the slave consciousness in the Hegelian Dialectic which eventually transcends external objects, Freud describes a process of token keeping in which external influences like our parents, culture, and \u201cwhat is taken over from\u00a0other\u00a0people\u201d are internalized and ever present in the \u201cpsychical province\u201d which he calls our superego (An Outline of Psycho-Analysis <\/i>147).<\/span><\/p>\n

In An Outline of Psycho-Analysis <\/i>Freud describes the our conscience\/superego as the part of our consciousness which sort of takes the place of our parents when our external world is internalized after our early development (An Outline of Psycho-Analysis <\/i>205).<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThis new psychical\u00a0agency\u00a0continues to carry on the functions which have hitherto been performed by the people [the abandoned objects] in the\u00a0external world: it observes the ego, gives it orders, judges it and threatens it with punishments, exactly like the parents whose place it has taken. We call this\u00a0agency\u00a0the\u00a0super-ego<\/i>\u00a0and are aware of it in its judicial functions as our\u00a0conscience<\/i>.\u201d (An Outline of Psycho-Analysis <\/i>205).<\/span><\/p>\n

I hope I wasn’t the only one who read that and realized how awful <\/i> that sounds. I can barely handle my mom\u2019s judgement outside my head much less inside my head. More than that, I do not like the idea that my morality and sense of right\/wrong are all things I have \u201ctaken over from other people\u201d; that at the end of the day I am doomed to become like these \u201cother people\u201d. It takes away any sense of autonomy and originality I thought I had been living under. <\/span><\/p>\n

However, after thinking of my own experience I realized that things don\u2019t always end up that way. There are many cases where the ego overcomes the superego, where the superego is the very facilitator of this deviation. In a study<\/a> published in The British Journal of Political Science <\/i>researchers found that although children of very politically engaged parents are likely to initially acquire the same political views, they are also most likely to later abandon these initial political views as a result of their own political engagement which their parents values facilitated. So maybe in the process of internalizing external influences we personalize more than is initially thought. In which case the superego is more of a dynamic facilitator than a replacement for a chastising parent. What do you guys think this internalizing process and the function of the superego?<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For Freud, our parental figures are extremely important to the development and interactions of our consciousness. His model of consciousness is a little different from the others we have encountered so far in that it takes into deeper account the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2703,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[202,5],"tags":[285,280,284,49],"class_list":["post-795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contemporary-philosophy","category-identity","tag-an-outline-of-psycho-analysis","tag-freud","tag-superego","tag-trieste"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/basicproblems002\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/basicproblems002\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/basicproblems002\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/basicproblems002\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2703"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/basicproblems002\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=795"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/basicproblems002\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":796,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/basicproblems002\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795\/revisions\/796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/basicproblems002\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/basicproblems002\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/basicproblems002\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}