Freudian: delusions of reference

Sigmund Freud considered that ideas of reference illuminated the concept of the superego: ‘Delusions of being watched present this power in a regressive form, thus revealing its genesis…voices, as well as the undefined multitude, are brought into the foreground again by the [paranoid] disease, and so the evolution of conscience is reproduced regressively’.[5]

In his wake, Otto Fenichel concluded that ‘the projection of the superego is most clearly seen in ideas of reference and of being influenced…Delusions of this kind merely bring to the patient from the outside what his self-observing and self-critical conscience actually tells him’.[6]

Lacan similarly saw ideas of reference as linked to ‘the unbalancing of the relation to the capital Other and the radical anomaly that it involves, qualified, improperly, but not without some approximation to the truth, in old clinical medicine, as partial delusion’[7]—the ‘big other, that is, the other of language, the Names-of-the-Father, signifiers or words’,[8] in short, the realm of the superego.

I wonder how my suppression of my ego has caused my superego to go into overdrive or lose control of itself causing me to have the delusions of reference. But I feel the delusions of reference lead to the delusions of grandeur, which may also not have been helped by my confused ego.

I was a horse with no jockey. The control of the horse is the ego. So I alternated between feelings of worth and feelings of nothingness. I think it is all related to the ego being out of whack. Both down and up.

Man I love Freudian concepts. I hate Freud himself but love the ego Id and superego and stuff!!!

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This. There are several other related theories. My psychotic episode seemed to be meeting a super-ego very briefly. Since then I have been collecting theories of other’s in mind. The most recent I have come across claims that if you meet your super-ego you may suffer from schizophrenia (Rochat, 2009, p.207). So I guess that even if one figured this out, which I have not, one could not tell any one, who does not already have schizophrenia at least.

Rochat, P. (2009). Others in mind: Social origins of self-consciousness. Cambridge University Press.

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