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

 



####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **May 2, 2024** 

 06:00PM - 06:00PM EDT 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **Barker Center, Room 114**  



 

 



 

##  [DIALECTICAL THINKING IN THE HUMANITIES](/dialectical-thinking-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.



 

 



 

 See also:- [ Seminar ](/event-type/seminar)
- [ Dialectical Thinking in the Humanities ](/seminars/dialectical-thinking-humanities)
 
 

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