Freud and the Ideal Self 223
ego] only too often yields to the temptation to become sycophantic,
opportunist and lying, like a politician who sees the truth but wants
to keep his place in pop u lar favor” (SE.XIX, 56). And then there
is the ego’s relation with the superego, which often persecutes it
harshly for small cause and from which it cannot fl ee.
For Freud, there is no authentically unifi ed I; there is no justifi -
ably cogent Self. (There is unjustifi ably coherent Being, but that is
another story.) Strictly speaking, one cannot answer the simplest of
questions. “Do you like sex with your lover?” Perhaps the It does—
though maybe it dreams of other, more forbidden “objects.” Perhaps
the I can be recruited to the program of momentary plea sure.
Though maybe it is worrying about time lost, about obligations,
about the risks to health, about contraception, about disease, about
the atmosphere of the room, about the toxic quality of the precoital
drinks, and fi nally about who will pay the hotel tab. (“You look so
beautiful I can hardly keep my eyes on the meter,” says Woody Allen
riding a New York taxi with Diane Keaton.) And the Over- I? The
Over- I presumably disapproves of almost anything that brings plea-
sure and creates no product. Where is the use in this? Where is the
profi t? You are wasting time. (The superego is in love with time as
chronos: a sequence of undiff erentiated moments that lead abso-
lutely nowhere. The superego, one might say, can be the Self hood
intensifi ed to a preternatural and nearly insane degree.) Thus the
Church— one of our many exteriorizations of the superego— will
proclaim that sex is only for procreation. Sex is the work of making
new beings. Sex is labor. The superego loves work. Anything that can
be cast in the idiom of labor has a chance to purchase its grudging
acquiescence. “Are you still working on that?” the waitress at the
upscale restaurant asks the eater lounging over an absurdly over-
priced entrée. Could she ask if he is still enjoying it, still taking
plea sure? No, not if the Over- I is to be included in the pleasure—if
that is what it is—of the overpriced meal.