The meaning of the ego can easily be agreed upon. I and self-confident consciousness are to be equated. The term It as a term in the sense of the seat of the instincts seems quite old-fashioned, so I prefer the term desire machine [Deleuze/Guattari], which also clarifies this matter. The superego remains: already the term has never pleased me. The superego as master of ego and ego, as conscience, without which man becomes a beast. The approach alone is confusing, since only man can mutate into a beast at all. An un “cultivated” little person will never be able to become a mass murderer or a destroyer of states. It is the culture of mankind that makes both beauty and murder possible. An animal is never a murderer, but cannot paint Mona Lisa either. The superego is the conglomeration of cultural rules that regulate action. A large part of these rules are directly mediated by the people acting as parents (~ parents). This also includes mistakes of the parent generation, which are transported to their doom in the offspring. The underlying mechanism is the obligation to repeat, protected by resistance. The compulsion to repeat does not only include the trauma that one has suffered and constantly renewed by acting out, in order to finally find a way out of the drama whilst someone (even if it is one’s own ego) finally perceives the powerful self-destructive feelings that the trauma has triggered and then again – this time successfully – banishes them, but also traumas of the preceding generations or simply wishes and actions of the preceding generations, which must often also be repeated compulsively, although they are unsuitable or harmful for the existence of the descendant.