Ego ideal

In Freudian psychoanalysis, the ego ideal (Ichideal) is the inner image of oneself as one wants to become. It consists of "the individual's conscious and unconscious images of what he would like to be, patterned after certain people whom ... he regards as ideal." In French psychoanalysis, the concept of the ego ideal is distinguished from that of the ideal ego. According to Jacques Lacan, it is the ideal-ego, generated at the time of the infant's identification with its own unified specular image, that becomes the foundation for the ego's constant striving for perfection. By contrast the ego ideal is when the ego views itself from that imaginary point of perfection, seeing its normal life as vain and futile. Freud's essay "On Narcissism: an Introduction" [1914] introduces "the concepts of the 'ego ideal' and of the self-observing agency related to it, which were the basis of what was ultimately to be described as the 'super-ego' in The Ego and the Id (1923b)." Freud considered that the ego ideal was the heir to the narcissism of childhood: "This ideal ego is now the target of the self-love which was enjoyed in childhood by the actual ego. ... What he [man] projects before him as his ideal is the substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he was his own ideal." In the decade that followed, the concept played an increasingly important part in Freud's thinking. In "Mourning and Melancholia" [1917], he stressed how "one part of the ego sets itself over against the other, judges it critically, and, as it were, takes it as its object." A few years later, in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), he examined further how "some such agency develops in our ego which may cut itself off from the rest of the ego and come into conflict with it. We have called it the 'ego ideal'... heir to the original narcissism in which the childish ego enjoyed self-sufficiency." Freud reiterated how "in many forms of love-choice ... the object serves as a substitute for some unattained ego ideal of our own," and further suggested that in group formation "the group ideal .