superego

plural superegos · alternative super-ego

1. human sciencesThe part of the mind that acts as a self-critical conscience, reflecting social standards that have been learnt.

   Anthropic has positioned itself as the AI industry’s superego: the firm that speaks with the most authority about the big questions surrounding the technology, while rival companies develop advertisements and affiliate shopping links […].

   2026 January 28, Matteo Wong, “Anthropic Is at War With Itself”, in Jeffrey Goldberg, editor, The Atlantic, Washington, D.C.: The Atlantic Monthly Group, →ISSN, →OCLC

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   Still, it would be an error to believe that psychoanalytic theory makes no contribution to describing and assessing different types of ethical conduct. The crucial notion in this connection is the relative rigidity or flexibility of the superego. The childish, immature, or neurotic superego is rigid; it is characterized by slavish adherence to rules which, moreover, may not be clearly understood. The mature or normal superego, on the other hand, is flexible; it can evaluate the situation at hand and modify the rules accordingly. Thus, in an early, classic paper, Strachey suggested that the basic aim of psychoanalytic treatment is to make such “mutative interpretations” as would help to render the patient’s “rigid superego” more “flexible”.⁸ Like the psychoanalytic theory of the superego, on which it is based, this view suffers from the limitation of being silent on what sort of rigidity is considered bad or undesirable and what sort of flexibility is considered good or desirable.

   1974, Thomas S. Szasz, chapter 9, in The Myth of Mental Illness, →ISBN, page 152