Often, when Freud mentioned morality, he was referring to a culture's restrictions on sexual behavior - a code regularly endorsed yet routinely defied. He was deeply interested in exposing the reasons for such restrictive sexual codes, and the dynamics of our deviations from them. Still, for Freud, it is not the sexual content nor the societal enforcement of certain constraints that makes them moral; moral constraints are, rather, constraints that play a particular role within the psychology of individuals - namely, the role of “superego.” While the emergence of a superego is, according to Freud, bound up with the dynamics of sexual desire in general and the oedipal complex in particular, in the end it is the relational properties and not the content of the superego - specifically, its historical relations to other people and its ongoing relations to the ego - that make it a superego and make it the agency of morality. An account of the formation and the character of the superego is, then, simultaneously an account of the formation and the character of morality.

To understand Freud's account of the superego, and the closely related ego-ideal, we must understand how a self or an ego is constituted and how characteristics of other people may be internalized to become parts of oneself. This story forms the crucial metapsychological background for Freud's account of morality, and I offer a somewhat novel interpretation of this background in the first and second sections of this chapter.