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Only just saw this subthread.

>Its been proved that incarceration and corporal punishment inhibits and eradicates superegos eventually. Something to think about?

Where the fuck did you pick THAT up?

No doubt people become less moral in prison, and their trust in authority might be reduced if they're treated badly by powerful people, so I guess that would count as loss of superego. But there were prisoners in Auschwitz still bootlicking the guards till the end.

I bet you're confusing superego with ego, since there's plenty of evidence that torture, harsh prisons/camps, cruel/inhuman/degrading treatment, and also abusive families, undermine ego-functioning. If you're imagining this makes people more other-centric and compassionate, think again. The ego handles reality-checking and instrumental actions. Ego-collapse due to punishment/abuse either leads to extreme impulsiveness (since the ego's check on the id is gone), severe depression (the superego keeps flagellating the weakened ego), or psychosis (the ego-functions disappear or fuse with those of the id and superego). In the rare cases where punishment produces a kind of attachment relation, the result is to STRENGTHEN the superego. There's a discussion in Theweleit of Rudolph Hoss, the Nazi who became head of Auschwitz. He'd been jailed before (for murdering another Nazi) and initially had a psychotic collapse, but then came to identify massively with the prison as an institution because it provided a the totality-machine functions he sought. He was remoulded into the perfect screw basically, and tried to run Auschwitz as a smoothly running machine. 'Arbeit macht frei' was also his doing: in his philosophy, most prisoners are scum who deserve the worst possible treatment, but those who endure, work, and remould themselves into fascist personalities should be freed. Most of the other people Theweleit discusses suffered extremely cruel treatment in cadet training schools and this was a big part of how they were turned into fascists (a desire-structure in which pleasure is excluded, the body is only a site of pain, and the rigid armouring is always turned against anything living).

Superego =/= big ego. Superego = internalised moral part which criticises and punishes the ego, usually modelled on a parent or authority-figure who has been introjected. "Psychopaths" either have no superego or (more likely) a superego oriented to a self-image as evil (or "tough", ruthless, etc... a Machiavellian ethos). "Narcissists" (in the current sense of the term) identify ego with ideal-ego to avoid any possibility of superego criticism (i.e. they have a high ideal of who they want to be, but instead of trying to achieve this ideal, they pretend they already ARE what the ideal demands).

>So yes, let's beat the superego out of narcissists And megalomaniacs before they harm someone.

Same issue as above... superegos can't be beaten out. Not sure in this case if you're saying this yourself, or attributing it to the bigots you're discussing. If yourself then you're clearly confusing ego with superego. I'd also add: you can't tell someone's a narcissist or whatever, until they harm someone.

There's easy proof that punishment or the desire to punish is not innate: if if was innate then it would be found in all societies; it isn't; therefore it can't be innate.

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