Sigmund Freud’s Allegories of Psychic Self-Discipline

This essay places Sigmund Freud in a long tradition of allegorists who portray the psyche as self-disciplining. While Freud’s writings on the ego, id, and superego are reminiscent of premodern allegories, however, Freud is considerably less willing than many of his predecessors to encourage conscious self-discipline. Though he conceived of the superego as a disciplinary agent, Freud believed that analysis often calls for “the slow demolition of the hostile superego.” Psychoanalysis, in other words, entails a counter-confession: an intersubjective asceticism through which analyst and analysand discipline the discipliner within. The conclusion posits that the uncanny resemblance between Freud’s allegories and those of his premodern predecessors presents us a pedagogical opportunity to teach our students the long history of psychological allegory and help them appreciate the dynamic complexity of both Freud’s works and the archive of premodern allegory—bodies of writing that they often presuppose to be static, reductive, or irrelevant.