McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. 2013.
Freud’s vision of the superego emphasizes its role in prohibition. The superego restricts what the subject can think and do; it extends the power of mastery by placing an authority within the subject’s psyche that is more demanding than any external master.
… Lacan picks up on Freud’s claim that the superego draws its energy from the reservoir of the id … Lacan dissociates the superego from prohibition and aligns it with an imperative to enjoy. Even when the superego bombards the subject with imperatives that appear in the guise of prohibitions, Lacan insists that these imperatives actually command enjoyment. 183
The superego … constantly reminds the subject of its failure to enjoy, and it promulgates an ideal of the ultimate enjoyment as a measuring stick against which the subject can contrast its own failures. No subject can obey the demands of the superego because the ideal it provides remains ever out of reach. The closer the subject approaches to it through obedience, the faster it recedes. The superego enjoins an enjoyment that it never allows the subject to find. 183
… the superego only emerges as such with the rise of expert authority and the decline of the traditional master. .. under the regime of the master, the idiotic and purely despotic dimension of the law manifests itself in the figure of the master. The master lays down the law that must be obeyed not because it is justified or practical but simply because the master says so, and the master’s authority derives from the nonsensical and completely random fact of birth or wealth.
This idiotic dimension of the law seems to disappear with the rise of expert authority. In every way, the expert’s status and dictates have a justification that the master’s don’t. 183
Under the regime of the expert, the idiocy of the law migrates to the superego, allowing the superego to exert a power that it never had under the rule of the master.
Thus, the proper birth of the superego occurs with the rise of expert authority and the evacuation of the external law’s idiocy. As the horror of external punishments abates — the practice of drawing and quartering criminals in public is no longer widespread, for instance — the internal horrors mount. This is a ramification of the rule of knowledge. 184