Free Beyond the Pleasure Principle by Sigmund Freud

delusion or, more correctly, object-of-
scrutiny
delusion, that crops up so conspicuously in the symptomatology of paranoid illnesses, and which may perhaps also occur as a separate illness or as a random element in a transference neurosis. Patients then complain that all their thoughts are known, their actions watched and monitored. They are informed of the workings of this entity by voices, which characteristically speak to them in the third person (‘Now she's thinking about that again’, ‘Now he's going away’). The complaint is justified, it depicts the true situation: such a power really does exist, and it exists in all of us in normal life, registering, scrutinizing, criticizing our every intention. Object-of-scrutiny delusions reflect it in a regressive form, thereby revealing both its genesis and the reason why the patient rebels against it. For what first triggered the formation of the ego-ideal – the duly appointed keeper of which is the conscience – was the critical influence of the individual's parents, communicated by voice, who were joined in the course of time by others involved in his upbringing, by his teachers, by the vast and indeterminate mass of all the other people in his milieu (people in general, public opinion).
    Large quantities of essentially homosexual libido are drawn on for the purposes of forming the narcissistic ego-ideal, and achieve discharge and gratification through keeping it going thereafter. Conscience is instituted basically as an embodiment first of parental criticism, and subsequently of criticism by society at large, a process that more or less repeats itself in the emergence of repressive tendencies stemming from prohibitions and obstacles initially encountered in the external world. Neurosis then brings to light both the inner voices and the indeterminate mass, and the whole developmental history of the person's conscience is thereby regressively reproduced. However, his recalcitrance against this
censorial entity
derives from the fact that – in full accord with the fundamental nature of his illness – he wants to free himself from all these influences, starting with that of his parents, and withdraws his homosexual libido from them. He then sees his conscience in regressive refraction as a hostile force bearing down on him from outside.
    The bitter complaining characteristic of paranoia also demonstrates that the self-criticism expressed via the conscience is essentially all of a piece with the self-scrutiny upon which it is based. The same mental process that has taken on the function of conscience has thus also lent itself to the exploration of the inner self, which is what provides philosophy with the material for its cerebrations. This may well have considerable bearing on the urge to construct speculative systems that is characteristic of paranoia. 33
    It will doubtless be a significant step for us when we are able to find evidence in other realms, too, of the activity of this entity dedicated to critical scrutiny – duly elevated to its role as both conscience and agent of philosophical introspection. I would like to draw here on what Herbert Silberer has termed the ‘functional phenomenon’, one of the few incontestably valuable additions to the theory of dreams. As is well known, Silberer has demonstrated that in states between sleeping and waking one can directly observe the conversion of thoughts into visual images, but that often in such circumstances what is actually represented is not the thought content but the
state
(of willingness, tiredness etc.) that the person fightingsleep finds himself in. He has also shown that dream closures and breaks within dreams in some cases signify nothing but the dreamer's own perception of sleeping and waking. He has thus proved that self-scrutiny – in the sense of paranoid object-of-scrutiny delusion – plays a role in dream-formation. This role is not a constant one; I probably overlooked it because it plays no