The Philosophers and the Super-Ego: On Kant, Freud, and Moral Psychology

DIALECTICAL THINKING IN THE HUMANITIES

SPEAKER: Francey Russell, Barnard College

In recent decades, several philosophers—Samuel Scheffler, David Velleman, and Béatrice Longuenesse—have turned to Freud’s last metapsychology of id, ego, and super-ego in order to reconstruct a naturalistic, causal-developmental account of Kantian moral psychology.  In this paper I show that the picture of the super-ego that they extract from Freud omits a crucial and highly unusual detail: according to Freud, the super-ego generates contradictory commands, both demanding that the egostrive to realize the ego-ideal and prohibiting that very striving.  This, I argue, makes Freud’s moral psychology quite different from Kant’s, and much less philosophically familiar.  After defending this reading of Freud, I then begin the task of arguing for the merits of adopting Freud’s picture.  I close by suggesting that adopting this picture requires greater transformations in our moral psychological ideals than has recently been acknowledged.