Freud’s theory of the mind rather famously postulates three components: The id, ego, and superego. The id is instinctual and seeks out pleasure, the ego negotiates between the desires of the id and reality (and the superego), and the superego is the internalization of societal, and above all parental, guidance about what one should do. The superego is formed when the child identifies with the parent (especially the father) and internalizes the parent’s judgments about what should be done. The superego critiques the id and is an internal voice of judgment. Freud could not, of course, simply say “conscience.”
There’s all sorts of criticisms to be made of Freud and of this concept of the mind, but he did create an interesting (and sometimes useful) way of conceptualizing human beings, and some insights have come out of the field of psychology he founded. The concept of internalizing parental values is probably true in its broad strokes and can make sense of a lot of behavior.
If one extends beyond parents to any authority figure in childhood, then broad cultural shifts begin to be explanatory in terms of new authority figures whose values are internalized by children. I believe that value sets exemplified by mass media are an important source of superego formation (or conscience, or internal judgment). This is true not necessarily of what is valued, but how things are valued.
Children in America are estimated to view in excess of 40,000 commercials per year. This doesn’t include advertisements in physical space, which they also see when they accompany their parents. Just through sheer quantity this represents a primary input and even authority figure during a child’s formative years. Adults will occasionally remark that children (or the youth, generally) are very savvy about advertising: They know it is a game to sell things, they are skeptical, and so on. I think this is all quite true. However, the form of advertising is a kind of authority, and this form is internalized as part of the child’s developing personality. This kind of personality, which internalizes the worldview of advertising, then grows into an adult who has the superego of a marketing agency.
The rosy interpretation of this is that society creates people who understand the world around them (in this case, how advertising works). But the superego, or the conscience or the judgment machine, doesn’t just judge the outside world: it also judges the internal world. A superego that comes from a parent’s religious dictates will pass judgment on the self based on the values of the religion. The self can then become part of a process of internal judgment and correction to measure up to an internalized religious ideal. A superego that comes in part from advertising will pass judgment on the self based on the dictates of marketing. The self becomes both producer and consumer of marketing copy for itself.
Christopher Lasch wrote 40 years ago that narcissism was becoming more prevalent as a personality trait in western (above all, in American) society. He didn’t think this was without reason, but that our society was structured to reward narcissistic behavior. Being a narcissist was adaptive in US society. The book holds up remarkably well, and makes one stand in awe of how much further along this narcissistic path society is now from when Lasch first criticized these social changes.
Millennials and younger people (the ominously-named Gen Z) are alternately denounced by the older generation as narcissistic or worried over for being insecure, with serious mental health problems. From the perspective of a self that operates as its own marketing agency (for customer number one: the self’s superego), these aren’t contradictions at all. A self-advertising machine is narcissistic because it is concerned with its self-image. It is also insecure because it is its own top customer and knows that the advertisement image is false.
There are a lot of gymnastics people undergo to get out of this impossible bind. I think most talk about “identity” is part of this self-marketing cycle. “Who am I, and what do I mean to myself?” is not a question that appears very much in older literature. People worry about their role with respect to their family, their society, their neighbors, but they don’t typically try to craft an image of themselves for themselves. This is new. And it is new because of how the superego forms. Generations prior to about 1950 didn’t have the authority figure of an advertiser to incorporate into their personality.
I was in a sociolinguistics course in graduate school where the professor said that all acts of language were acts of self-expression: what accent one had, which words one chooses, and so on, were ways for a person to express an image of themselves they wanted others to see. I found this to be perfectly insane. Why in the world would we assume human beings work as perfect little narcissists down to such minutia? But in fact there is a point here, it’s just not trans-historical or universal. It’s true that people who produce and consume their own self-image might behave this way. It’s true for self-marketing machines.
This self-marketing machine creates a kind of identity churn. The superego always finds some flaw in the output of the advertising copy, and demands something better. I am a certain sex, male, but what does that really say about myself, to others? To analyze this form a marketing perspective, the advertising crew can come up with lots of possible answers. You can form a new product – not man or woman, but something else or neither. And if one is non-binary in this way, then one may not be like the other non-binaries in the marketplace, but a special kind, a masculine non-binary femme (or whatever combination of words). This image can then be presented to the superego for evaluation. But there’s an infinite number of ways to market the self. One also cannot be a conservative or liberal, but a particular sub-sub-species, complete with a peculiar label and well-produced explanatory copy. And on with sexual attraction, personality qualities (or even the products that one consumes or synergizes with). The self-image in every way becomes an advertisement. And while other people may view it, this product is mostly for the superego to view and judge as a good advertisement or not. And on this process goes.
When human beings form we internalize the world around us into a concept of our selves. Children have inside them a little internalization machine. A large part of society that is puzzling at the moment comes from, I think, the internalization of marketing as a part of the self.