concerned you have a free hand. You’re of age, I’ve no advice to give you . . .” The series of the father’s “rhetorical methods” as enumerated by Kafka—“abuse, threats, irony, spiteful laughter, and—oddly enough—self-pity”—are the most concise rendering of the superego’s ambiguity. Kafka’s father was definitely a luder, if ever there was one, a figure out of which an “orgy of malice and spiteful delight” emanated. (The link here is between Kafka and David Lynch: namely, the excessive clownish figures of terrorist authority in Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Dune, Lost Highway. . .)
The superego’s basic trick consists in reproaching the subject for not living up to its high expectations, while simultaneously sabotaging the subject’s efforts (or mockingly expressing disbelief in the subject’s capacities, and then laughing at the subject’s failure). Kafka clearly noticed this paradox apropos of his father’s demands that he should become an autonomous person who succeeds on his own:
But that wasn’t what you wanted at all; the situation had, after all, become quite different as a result of all your efforts, and there was no opportunity to distinguish oneself as you had done. Such an opportunity would first of all have had to be created by violence and revolutions, it would have meant breaking away from home (assuming one had had the resolution and strength to do so and that Mother wouldn’t have worked against it, for her part, with other means). But that was not what you wanted at all, that you termed ingratitude, extravagance, disobedience, treachery, madness. And so, while on the one hand you tempted me to it by means of example, story, and humiliation, on the other hand you forbade it with the utmost severity.
This is the obscene superego in its contrast to the Name-of-the-Father: the very injunction “be autonomous,” in its mode of operation, sabotages its goal; the very injunction “Be free!” ties the subject up forever in the vicious circle of dependence.
One can retell in these superego terms even the remark allegedly made by Brecht apropos the accused at the Moscow show trials in the 1930s: “If they are innocent, they deserve all the more to be shot.” This statement is thoroughly ambiguous—it can be read as the standard assertion of radical Stalinism (your very insistence on your individual innocence, your refusal to sacrifice yourself for the Cause, bears witness to your guilt which resides in privileging your individuality over the larger interests of the party), or it can be read as its opposite, in a radically anti-Stalinist way: if they were in a position to plot and execute the execution of Stalin and his entourage, and were “innocent” (that is, they did not grasp the opportunity), they effectively deserved to die for failing to rid us of Stalin. The true guilt of the accused is thus that, instead of rejecting the very ideological framework of Stalinism and ruthlessly acting against Stalin, they narcissistically fell in love with their victimization and either protested their innocence or became fascinated by the ultimate sacrifice they were making to the party by confessing their nonexistent crimes. So the properly dialectical way of grasping the imbrication of these two meanings would have been to start with the first reading, followed by the common-sense moralistic reaction to Brecht: “But how can you claim something so ruthless? Can such a logic which demands blind self-sacrifice for the accusatory whims of the Leader not function only within a terrifying criminal totalitarian universe? Far from accepting these rules, it is the duty of every ethical subject to fight such a universe with all means possible, including the physical removal (killing) of the totalitarian leadership?” “So you see how, if the accused are innocent, they deserve all the more to be shot—they effectively were in a position to organize a plot to rid us of Stalin and his henchmen, and missed this unique opportunity to spare humanity from terrible crimes!” This, again, is the twisted superego logic at its purest: the more you are innocent, the more you are guilty, because your innocence itself (innocence in the eyes of whom? With regard to what? With regard to the obscene criminal power) is the proof of your guilt (of your complicity with this power) . . .
Although Freud uses three distinct terms for the agency that pushes the subject to act ethically—he speaks of the ideal ego (Idealich), ego ideal (Ich-Ideal), and superego [Überich]—as a rule he conflated the three (he often uses the expression Ichideal oder Idealich (ego ideal or ideal ego), and the title of chapter III of The Ego and the Id) is “The Ego and Superego (Ego Ideal).” Lacan, however, introduces a precise distinction between these three terms: the “ideal ego” stands for the idealized self-image of the subject (the way I would like to be, I would like others to see me); the ego ideal is the agency whose gaze I try to impress with my ego image, the big Other who watches over me and pushes me to give my best, the ideal I try to follow and actualize; and the superego is this same agency in its vengeful, sadistic, punishing aspect. The underlying structuring principle of these tree terms is clearly Lacan’s triad Imaginary—Symbolic—Real: the ideal ego is imaginary, what Lacan calls the “small other,” the idealized double image of my ego; the ego ideal is symbolic, the point of my symbolic identification, the point in the big Other from which I observe (and judge) myself; the superego is real, the cruel and insatiable agency which bombards me with impossible demands and which mocks my failed attempts to meet them, the agency in the eyes of which I am all the more guilty, the more I try to suppress my “sinful” strivings and live up to its exigencies.
What follows from these precise distinctions is that, for Lacan, the superego “has nothing to do with moral conscience as far as its most obligatory demands are concerned.”18 The superego is, on the contrary, the anti-ethical agency, the stigmatization of our ethical betrayal. So which one of the other two is the proper ethical agency? Should we—as some American psychoanalysts propose—set up the “good” (rational-moderate, caring) ego ideal against the “bad” (irrational-excessive, cruel, anxiety-provoking) superego, trying to lead the patient to get rid of the “bad” superego and follow the “good” ego ideal? Lacan opposes this easy way out—for him, the only proper agency is the fourth one, missing from Freud’s tripartite list, the one sometimes referred to by Lacan as “the law of desire,” the agency which tells you to act in conformity with your desire. The gap between this “law of desire” and the ego ideal (the network of social-symbolic norms and ideals that the subject internalizes in the course of her education) is crucial here. For Lacan, the ego ideal, this seemingly benevolent agency which leads us to moral growth and maturity, forces us to betray the “law of desire” by adopting the “reasonable” demands of the existing socio-symbolic order. The superego, with its excessive feeling of guilt, is merely the necessary obverse of the ego ideal: it exerts its unbearable pressure upon us on behalf of our betrayal of the “law of desire.” In short, for Lacan, the guilt we experience under the superego’s pressure is not illusory but actual—“the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one’s desire,” and the superego’s pressure demonstrates that we effectively are guilty of betraying our desire.
Back to Kafka: he formulates this same insight apropos the father’s reactions to his attempts to get married:
The fundamental thought behind both attempts at marriage was quite sound: to set up house, to become independent. An idea that does appeal to you, only in reality it always turns out like the children’s game in which one holds and even grips the other’s hand, calling out: “Oh, go away, go away, why don’t you go away?”
What the father was thus preventing is Kafka’s marriage: in his case, the father did not act as the guarantor of marriage, as the agent of symbolic authority (see Lacan’s thesis that a harmonious sexual relationship can only take place under the cover of the Name-of-the-Father), but as its superego obstacle, as what Freud, in his analysis of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Sandman, calls LiebesstoÈrer, the obstacle which disturbs/prevents the love relationship. We encounter here the superego paradox at its purest: the father who prevents the love relationship is precisely the obscene father who enjoins us to “do it,” to engage in sexual promiscuity without constraints; and, inversely, the father who opens up the space for a love relationship is the father who is the agency of prohibition, of the symbolic Law.
