Introduction
After I wrote my post Beyond Self-Care: Towards a deeper humanism, I read with interest Emma Collin’s piece Identity Abandonment: On mysticism and the mental health crisis, which touched on many of the same issues. In her round-up of criticism of therapeutic culture from the left, right and centre, Collins included a link to Beyond the Therapeutic: Three new books aim to transcend the therapeutic mindset by Alexander Stern. One of the books that Stern reviews is The Age of Guilt: The Super-Ego in the Online World by Mark Edmundson, a professor of English at the University of Virginia and a specialist in Romanticism.
The premise intrigued me (a reading of Freud, Nietzsche and Blake to explain how the Internet became “a forum for cruelty and judgment”), so I decided to read it with an eye to reviewing it.
I was rather disappointed: Edmundson adds little to the Freudian insights he lifts from the brilliant British psychoanalyst and author Adam Phillips; he fails to convincingly extend Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals to the present; and he abandons poor Blake by page 34. He quotes Blake’s maxim that “all deities reside in the human breast” to justify engaging with Freud’s myth-making, but only wrestles with Urizen, the most obvious analogue to Freud’s concept of the super-ego, and ignores the rest of the pantheon.
In fact, Edmundson seems intent on ignoring anything that might complicate the simplistic framing he has chosen for his observations on an ambitiously broad range of topics (a consecutive list of the some of the 30-odd chapters in a book of 184 pages: Internet!; The Super-Ego and the Sense of Time; Beauty and the Super-Ego; Patriarchy and the Super-Ego; The Super-Ego and Race). Once you see the spectre of the super-ego, it seems, you can’t unsee it.
The book makes for a brisk read, but most of the brief chapters contain little more than a few thought-provoking quotations and commentary that wouldn’t have looked out of place under an Unherd article. For a book inspired by Freud, it contains preciously little analysis.1
Nevertheless, in the spirit of creative criticism, I decided to not just write a snarky takedown, but to offer some alternative perspectives on themes covered in the book (and engage in some gay-on-gay antagonism on the way).2 I have structured my review according the the four main parts of the book.
Diagnoses
The first part of The Age of Guilt starts off with an account of how Freud discovered late in his career that psychological strife is due not only to battles between the ego and the (largely unconscious) id, but also between the ego and the (equally unconscious) super-ego, or over-I:
The over-I’s special domain was morality, much as the id’s special domain was desire. But—and here Freud found a curious paradox—the ego was also in charge of administering morals, so in effect people walked through their daily rounds with two moral agents functioning at once. One of them, the ego, could be rational and reflective, and make plausible and more or less consistent judgments about what is right and wrong. But the other did no such thing. The over-I’s moral code (if you could so dignify it) was regressive, irrational, inconsistent, and punitive. It was the code a tyrannical father might inflict on a dependent child. In fact the over-I thought of the I as a child, who needed constant disciplining and frequent punishment.
In what will become a running theme in the book, almost everything can be taken as a sign of the nefarious influence of the super-ego:
Anxiety, depression, impotence, stomach troubles, back troubles, and headaches can all be manifestations of the super-ego’s profound unhappiness with the individual. For the ego is inadequate.
We also get an intriguing glimpse of Freud’s thoughts about the origin of the super-ego:3
Says Freud, enticingly and somewhat enigmatically, one’s super-ego is not based on one’s father but on one’s father’s super-ego. So an ostensibly mild father can inject a brutally demanding super-ego into a child. He may be outwardly kindly, generous, and permissive. But the child senses that within him is a force at variance with his lenient exterior, and that force is what the child responds to and fears. Many people who are driven hard internally do all they can to hide it. That is sometimes the condition of the benevolent, “enlightened” father.
However, Edmundson seems hesitant to get too specific about Freud’s theories too soon and therefore proceeds to first indulge in some myth-making of his own. Drawing on Nietzsche and Arendt, he muses darkly whether the super-ego could be “the ghost of God” or “authority’s corrupted ghost”, only to walk these claims back and conclude rather unhelpfully:
The conditions that Nietzsche and Arendt describe did not create the super-ego. That involves another dynamic. But the crises of authority, religious and secular, do leave a space for inner, regressive authority to expand and expand and never be cultivated or displaced.
Since Freud’s own theory about the super-ego being a residue of the Oedipal Complex is presented without much conviction, we are left wondering if there is any plausible (even mythopoetically plausible) explanation for the origin of this omnipresent, though unconscious, psychic force. No matter, because we are swiftly introduced to the even murkier concept of the “cultural super ego” which, according to Freud in Civilisation and its Discontents, issues demands (known as ethics) in an effort “to remove the greatest obstacle to civilisation, the constitutional propensity of human beings to mutual aggressions”, most recently in the form of the impossible-to-keep commandment “Love thy neighbour as thyself”.
Edmundson then attempts to frame Foucault’s theories of discipline and punishment as describing “the post-modern super-ego” (an extension which in my view further weakens the coherence of the concept, since Freud clearly distinguishes between the fear of authority and the fear of the super-ego). Edmundson also wonders why Freud himself didn’t extend this brilliant concept to his theories on dreams and the death drive.
This leaves us with a question about the relationship between the personal and the cultural super-ego: does the cultural super-ego only manifest it self through the personal super-egos of each individual, or does it have its own independent agency? Unfortunately, this question is never fully answered and the rest of the book flips between the super-ego as a psychological and sociological phenomenon: a catch-all explanation for all manner of things.
The cultural super-ego
Part of two of the book can, with little exaggeration, be summed up by the following classic tweet:
Hypnotic despots? A transference of the super-ego. Social justice warriors? A projection of the super-ego’s judgements onto others. Rednecks supporting Trump? A rebellion against the cultural super-ego. Gen Z? Unread and oversocialized, “an easy mark for the super-ego and the forces in society that support and reflect it”. The search for a stable identity? A “super-ego-driven quest”. Adderall and Ampetamines? Super-ego drugs. [Really!] Being asked to pay attention? A demand of the super-ego. Twitter mobs? The cultural super-ego demanding a scapegoat. Having an accurate sense of time? A sign of being “super-ego-ridden”. Self-beautification? A defence against “the ravening super-ego”. Being “in thrall to patriarchy”? Being “in thrall to the super-ego”. Gangsta rap and black face? A fantasy of living without the super-ego.
Applying Edmundson’s own standard in the Preface (“The ultimate test of Freud’s thinking is its power to illuminate and transform.”), I did not find the reframing of these well-worn topics as manifestations of the spectral super-ego especially enlightening.
Internet!
Which of the following explanations are more parsimonious?
Sally joins a Twitter mob to escape the judgements of her super-ego, which is an internalisation of her instinct towards outward-directed aggression.
Sally joins a Twitter mob because of her instinct towards outward-directed aggression.
In trying to explain these dynamics, I found it odd that Edmundson does not once mention (even to refute) Girard’s mimetic theory, which is probably by now the most widely accepted explanation of such troubling online behaviour, not least among the designers of these online systems themselves. Edmundson also does not avail himself of the prominent “wokeness as religion” thesis to explain how the void left by the death of god and tradition has resulted in a frantic need to embrace (a politically acceptable) identity.4 Other inexplicable omissions are anxieties about climate change and the plandemic (oops, Freudian slip), which surely are emblematic of the growing societal divide between those who seem ready to uncritically embrace the new emerging cultural super-ego and those who, often in a rather childish manner, try their best to resist.
Edmundson mentions Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies in discussing some wacky Tumblr genders, but does not engage with her discussion about the rise of the online right.5 We cannot understand the super-ego in the online world without considering the id.
One of the marvels of modern capitalist societies is that we have found less demanding ways to channel the id than sublimation: as Avenue Q knew back in 2003, the Internet is for porn! It is also for virtual violence. But as the Internet became more social, it encouraged users to rediscover the thrill of cruelty towards real human beings — at a safe distance. New super-ego doctrines emerge all the time as a justification, but often (on all sides of the political spectrum) “the cruelty is the point”.
In his review of Tao Lin’s Trip, John Pistelli wrote that the Internet is “perhaps the ultimate psychedelic”. Perhaps it is also the ultimate psychoanalyst: algorithmically prodding the psyche for latent fears and desires that can be explored and amplified. Many of us will be familiar with “going down a rabbit hole” with the tantalising promise of discovering something new and profound about ourselves and the world — only to wonder why we wasted so much time on nothing (or doubling down in the face of growing self-doubt).
Tonnes have been written about the nefarious effects of the Internet — most of it published on the Internet. Do we really need more concepts to understand what is going on? Or do we lack the courage to face the truth and what it may demand of us? In his characteristically wise response to Ted Gioia’s popular article The State of Culture, 2024, LM Sacasas reminds us that focusing on the nature of our distractions can itself be a distraction from the important, but difficult, question of what we are trying to distract ourselves from. He points us towards Pascal:
The only thing which consoles us for our miseries is diversion, and yet this is the greatest of our miseries. For it is this which principally hinders us from reflecting upon ourselves, and which makes us insensibly ruin ourselves. Without this we should be in a state of weariness, and this weariness would spur us to seek a more solid means of escaping from it. But diversion amuses us, and leads us unconsciously to death.
The transsexual super-ego
To usefully psychoanalyse our contemporary culture, we have to grapple with the fact that we have spent over a century engaging with Freud (whose notions of the super-ego was rooted in his deep suspicions of Christian culture, quite understandable for a Jew in Vienna in the 1930s). It is pointless to naively apply his original theories to the present.
It might be more helpful to imagine a Freud of our time. She is Jewish (although from New York); she has the same tendency for wild generalisations and crude imagery; she has the same weakness for the white stuff; she is familiar with the work of the OG Freud and his followers and detractors; but she is also aware of how the 20th century unfolded and the cultural significance of Lady Gaga and Dylan Mulvaney. Let’s call her Signy Leid and hear what she has to say:
Freud’s patriarchal origin story for the super-ego needs updating, not because it is sexist, but because it is not reflective of current realities. God is dead. Tradition is dead. Father no longer threatens the boy child with castration because there is no Father. The super-ego now identifies as Mother. The ideal warrior became the ideal worker became the ideal consumer. The ego and id have been pacified through being passivised.
After the attempted cultural revolution of the 1960s, aptly described by Didion as “the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create community in a social vacuum” the Individual made a new pact with the Machine: the Individual will become a cog in the Machine yet again, as long as the Machine becomes less demanding of the Individual. The Child never has to grow up — it can forever suckle on Mother’s mechanical breasts. What is fully automated luxury communism other than an unlimited subsidy of the demand for consumer goods?
We do not live in an age of guilt, we live in an age of shame. Guilt is when you fall short of an internalised ideal. Shame is a tactic to get you to fall back in line, regardless of whether you agree with the prevailing morality. The Freudian myth that best describes our situation is not the Oedipal Complex but his attempt “to trace the ontogenesis of the herd instinct”.6 The Child would like to be alone with Mother’s milk, but has to accept the presence of a sibling:
The elder child would certainly like to put its successor jealously aside, to keep it away from the parents, and to rob it of all its privileges; but in face of the fact that this child (like all that come later) is loved by the parents in just the same way, and in consequence of the impossibility of maintaining its hostile attitude without damaging itself, it is forced into identifying itself with the other children. So there grows up in the troop of children a communal or group feeling, which is then further developed at school. The first demand made by this reaction-formation is for justice, for equal treatment for all. We all know how loudly and implacably this claim is put forward at school. If one cannot be the favourite oneself, at all events nobody else shall be the favourite.
The masculine super-ego says to the ego: “You are a worthless piece of shit! Stop fapping and clean your room! You want to change the world, but you can’t even change a tyre! You’ll never amount to anything!”
The feminine super-ego says to the ego: “You are perfect just the way you are; do not try to become anything greater. Do not stray too far away from Mother, otherwise Mother won’t be able to protect you. Nobody will ever love you as much as Mother does.”
Naturally, there are constant foolhardy attempts to re-instate the masculine super-ego. There are also those who to wish rid society from any incarnation of the super-ego (Father, Mother, Mother-Father) and live according to the untrammelled Will of the Ego. If we have to talk about Oedipus, we should remember how the story ends. Oedipus does, in fact, end up killing his Father and in the process destroys his Mother-Lover. Unable to face what he has done, he gauges out his eyes. Now he is left in darkness, with nowhere for his gaze to turn but inward, hypnotised by this own psychodramas, oblivious to the beauty of the world around him.
Fighting back
In the third part of the book, the cultural super-ego is largely forgotten and we are treated to reflections on the various individual means by which people try to escape their depression and anxiety (which by now we know are tell-tale signs of the super-ego). There are plenty of valuable (if hardly novel) insights in this section: laughter is the best medicine, alcohol and drugs temporarily silence the conscience only to have it come back with a vengeance, when misfortune befalls us we have the irrational tendency to look for the fault in ourselves.
I was surprised to see Edmundson refer to Laura Kipnis’s Love in the Time of Contagion in the “Bibliographic essay”, because in my mind I had already unfavourably compared his work with Kipnis’s incisive, psychologically astute cultural criticism.
Take Edmundson’s tepid and abstract discussion of love gone sour:
No criticism is quite so sharp as that which comes from a beloved who at one time praised your every act and word. Now she’s taken on remarkable authority as a super-ego substitute, and even her simplest criticisms cut with an uncanny sharpness. Having merged with the super-ego, she has taken on some of its power.
Compare this to Kipnis’s novelistic portrayal of the same phenomenon:
He'd find himself thinking, Yeah, I must really be a bad person, that's why she's a drunk. Yeah, I must really be a really fucking selfish person who never thinks of other people and dominates every dinner conversation, like she said. Part of him knew none of it was true and she was just projecting her self-hatred onto him, she was like a projection machine. But the genius part of codependency is that it may be projection, but it's never entirely untrue either. She'd say things that were tremendously shaming— that he was a failure at things he too worried he was a failure at. That he was a failed man. There were constant beatdowns, and sure she was plastered, but her aim was pretty accurate.
Beyond the Super-Ego
It is not uncommon for the “What is to be done?” section of a book to be less convincing than the diagnostic part. In the present case, however, the proposed solution undermines the very premise on which the critique was built. To defeat the Super-ego, Edmundson suggests, we need to internalise even higher ideals (the bravery of Hector, the self-examination of Socrates and the compassion of Jesus). He concludes by rhapsodising about those that embrace these ideals:
They have done and do what few human beings can. They have transcended their history and their culture. They have transcended themselves.
Where super-ego was, there human ideals may be.
There, in a thriving democracy, they may be.
Ah, transcendence! Why didn't Freud think of that? But he did, of course. At the beginning of Civilisation and its Discontents, Freud dismisses the transcendent “oceanic feeling” (which he admits to never have experienced himself) and reaffirms his belief that any religious desire can only be explained by daddy issues:
To me the derivation of religious needs from the helplessness of the child and a longing for its father seems irrefutable, especially as this feeling is not only prolonged from the days of childhood, but constantly sustained by a fear of the superior power of fate. I cannot cite any childish need that is as strong as the need for paternal protection. The role of the oceanic feeling, which might seek to restore unlimited narcissism, is thus pushed out of the foreground. The origin of the religious temperament can be traced in clear outline to the child’s feeling of helplessness.
One doesn’t have to agree with Freud on this point, but if one disagrees, it seems a bit odd to devote a whole book to employing his cynical theories as a way to scrutinise modern culture only to dismiss them at the end.
Edmundson mentions Jung a handful of times on tangential matters, once curtly calling him “no Freudian”, but does not explore his critique of his former mentor’s theory of the super-ego, which is all the more a shame given the author’s own belated come-to-Jesus moment:
As for Freud’s idea of the “super-ego”, it is a furtive attempt to smuggle in his time-honoured image of Jehovah in the dress of psychological theory. When one does things like that, it is better to say so openly. For my part, I prefer to call things by the names under which they have always been known. The wheel of history must not be turned back, and man’s advance toward a spiritual life, which began with the primitive rites of initiation, must not be denied. It is permissible for science to divide its field of enquiry and to set up limited hypotheses, for science must work in that way; but the human psyche may not be parcelled out. It is a whole which embraces consciousness, and is the mother of consciousness. Scientific thought, being only one of its functions, can never exhaust all the possibilities of life. The psychotherapist must not allow his vision to be coloured by the glasses of pathology; he must never allow himself to forget that the ailing mind is a human mind, and that, for all its ailments, it shares in the whole of the psychic life of man.
In good conscience
We do not lack for ideals. Even an enfant terrible like Chu justifies her demands with appeals to Freedom and Justice (“the belief that we have a moral duty to accept reality just because it is real is, I think, a fine definition of nihilism”). Appealing to ideals is easy, perhaps it has become time to reckon with Yeats’s reminder that “all the ladders start in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart”.
Those who suffer pass on their suffering to others: for Weil this is a law with the regularity of gravity, escapable only through the mysterious quality of grace. If we wish to rebuild a sense of shared societal norms, this may be a better starting point than yet more lofty ideals: first do no harm. As Freddie de Boer pointed out, Chu’s article does not only undermine the core ethical commitment of the physician, but also fails to apply this principle in considering whether the thrill of provocation outweighs the foreseeable harm to others.
If we focus on applying this simple but exacting maxim in our own lives, we may be less tempted to measure ourselves — and others — against unreachable ideals. Murdoch:
The utter chanciness of human life and the fact of death make virtue always, really, perhaps, when the illusory backgrounds are removed, something gratuitous, something which belongs in the absolute foreground of our existence, along with self-evident goods such as eating enough and not being afraid. And it is in this way, I think, that we see it in the greatest literature. Goodness is needful, one has to be good, for nothing, for immediate and obvious reasons, because somebody's hungry, or somebody's crying.
Correction: An earlier version of this post referred to Edmundson’s book as ‘The Age of Anxiety’ rather than ‘The Age of Guilt’. I regret this embarrassing error, which serves me right for complaining about the book being poorly edited!
I don’t know whether it is fair to blame Edmundson: maybe Yale University Press made blandness a criteria for publication. However, the book hardly comes across as tightly edited: the intellectual history is often remarkably shallow (e.g. the concept of a God-shaped hole is attributed to Salman Rushdie, with no mention of Augustine or Pascal) and obvious mistakes make the author look comically out of touch (e.g. the misuse of pronouns is called “dead naming” rather than misgendering).
Disclaimer: I have no subject matter expertise in psychology, apart from plenty of lived experience with self-torment. Any criticism is offered in the Blakean spirit of opposition being true friendship (and/or an attempt to sublimate my repressed anger).
Although he doesn’t quite put it in Freudian terms, the psychologist Alan Downs theorises in his influential book The Velvet Rage that many gay men internalise the (unconscious) disgust they sense that they invoke in their father:
This little boy grows up to be a man who is supremely knowledgeable of culture and fashion, a man of Adonis-sized proportions and many lovers, a man of great success and wealth, a fabulous and outrageous host, an arbiter of good taste and elegant design, a pop culture aficionado.
To a great extent, these are the gay men we have known. This is you and me, a little boy with a terrible secret who hides his curse behind a curtain made of crimson velvet. It may surprise many to learn that his secret is not his sexual appetite for men. No, it is something darker, stinging and filled with rage.
His secret he cannot reveal, not even to himself, for fear that it will consume him completely. Deep inside, far from the light of awareness, the secret lives. Go down beneath the layers of public façade, personal myth and fantasy. Peel away the well-crafted layers, for only then can you see the secret clearly for what it is: his own self-hatred.
I read the book before embarking on my own homosexual lifestyle; it had all the utility of Cassandra’s gift of prophecy.
Blake Smith and Taeho Kim document in a new article for the Chronicle of Higher Education that even previously marginalised identities such as “gay man” and “lesbian” aren’t safe from the political demand to problematise all norms. However, I am sceptical of their proposal for a reformed Gay and Lesbian Studies. Allow me to channel my character Johann Richter to defend the philistine preference for an uninstitutionalised and untheorised homosexuality:
The problem with Queer Theory is not that it is queer but that it is theory.
The solution is not a more jealously guarded academic Bantustan.
In every society, the clerical caste needs to prove itself useful (or at least not actively harmful) to the economically productive population. American academics are clearly failing at this task. It’s a much bigger problem than a lack of respect towards cis white gays.
Fortunately, the academy is not the only way to maintain cultural traditions and much of gay culture is not Yanigihara or Hearstopper. I am no fan of Yanigihara-style gay trauma porn, but plenty of gays are. Luckily, there are many more choices on offer in the gay cultural buffet: RuPaul, Troye Sivan, Kim Petras, Dua Lipa, Mike White, Jennifer Coolridge, John Cameron Mitchell, Pedro Almodóvar, Tom Ford, Alexander McQueen, Celine Dion, Madonna, Cher, Elton John, Judy Garland, James Baldwin, Jean Genet, Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, Rimbaud, Michaelango and Plato, to name but a few. Not all of these artists are gay and neither is all of their art, but they all inspire millions of actually existing gays — what else is a culture for? And as far as I know, none of them were the products of a Gay Studies department. We don’t need more Bergmans to write about Holleran and Kramer, we need more Hollerans and Kramers!
I have no fear of disappearing into liberal tolerance (whatever that may mean). I have no nostalgia for the ghetto.
Listen to David Graeber: act as if you are already free! There is an astonishing amount of insightful literary and cultural criticism self-published on this platform every day.
Leave academe. Let the dead bury the dead.
I have not read Nagle’s book, but from articles and interviews I understand that she places herself in the lineage of Rieff and Lasch (which, as Stern points out in his review essay, are also conspicuously absent in Edmundon’s discussion), emphasising the need for societal norms, which both the market and political progressivism continue to erode.
I got this reference to Freud from Contrapoint’s video Envy (transcript), a much more insightful look at the same phenomena that Edmundson tries to explain.
Signy Leid!!!!
Great review! I read an Edmundson book about a hundred years ago—it was called Why Read?—and observed most of the same issues you point out. I think academics writing for a popular audience try to dumb it down way too much, or are ordered to do so. I agree with you that, if we're going to use psychoanalysis for this task, Jung's psychic model explains the internet better than Freud's, from shadow projection for the cancellation and purity spirals on both left and right to anima/animus-possession for some of the Tumblr-gender phenomena. (I love Signy Leid, by the way.)