Thomas Nagel on his essay The Absurd denotes the … absurdity… of the individual’s existence and the consequential existentialism that follows the realising one is insignificant. He asserts “Human life is full of effort, plans, calculation, success and failure: we pursue our lives, with varying degrees of sloth and energy.” (719) Freud takes this absurdity and focuses on the effects on one’s person with how, often creatives and thinkers, develop a ‘melancholy’ to which he acknowledges a certain self-awareness. He believes this self-awareness leads to the ability to make fun of oneself within this absurd world and existence of living as one person amongst billions in a seemingly endless cycle of life. He poses that one can take a step back and to look down upon oneself to make fun of or even degrade oneself- this creates the super-ego and ego respectively. In his essay building on Freuds ideas on humour Simon Critchley adds “Humour has the same formal structure as depression, but it is an anti-depressant that works by the ego finding itself ridiculous.” (101) He then goes on to discuss the matured super- ego as the ‘super ego II’ (103) Once a person can look at oneself with a new perspective seeing the humour and ‘ridiculousness’ in a situation, giving oneself the ability to move on with life. Critchley creates the image:
If ‘super-ego I’ is the prohibiting parent, scolding the child, then ‘super-ego II’ is the comforting parent. Or better still, ‘super-ego II’ is the child that has become the parent: wiser and wittier, if slightly wizened. (103)
I believe a visual example of both the ‘super-ego- I’ and ‘super-ego II’ is Netflix’s Living with Yourself staring Paul Rudd… twice. He plays an unsatisfied husband working an uninspiring inconsequential job in an office. His problems are mundane in the grand scheme of things, but he is unhappy. His solution, though he didn’t realise to would work the way it did, was to go to a spa and create a clone of himself without all the bad, ‘melancholic,’ properties he was used to living with. His original self was supposed to be killed but something goes wrong and as the title of the show suggests he ends up living with himself. I propose that in this scenario his original self becomes the ‘super-ego I’ and the new version, the more kind and caring version, becomes the ‘super-ego II.’ Each of them have opposite approaches to how the version of himself (the ego) is seen by the world but more importantly his wife is seen. The situation is absurd yet entirely self-contained.
This scene is them fighting after the ‘super-ego I’ (the original Miles) tries to commit suicide… and thus completing the treatment… but is stopped by the new Miles who as Critchley states is kinder and thus with his humour and perspective allows Miles the ego to go on living within himself and the world.
This is such an interesting example and I love how you show the two Miles as a physical manifestation of the ‘super ego I’ and ‘super ego II’. I haven’t seen the show but the concept of creating your own double reminds me a bit of Severance. If you apply your logic from this post to Severance, perhaps the ‘innies’ and ‘outies’ from that show also can fit into the roles of ‘super ego I’ and ‘super ego II’.
This is a great, literal interpretation of the relationship between the ego and super-ego, as well as how the conceptual melancholic person has a higher level of self-awareness than others and thus is able to make fun of themself as if they were another individual.
Like the other comment, your analysis reminded me of Severance! The relationship between innies/outies, and your connection between the original/cloned Miles and the “super-ego I”/“super-ego II” illustrates how self-aware humor can navigate existential absurdity.