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On the Paraphilic Superego (Numerical Discourses) 🎙️

(link, Parafilik Üstben: Sembolik Düzenin Sapkınlaşması)

The notion of a Paraphilic Superego encapsulates a paradoxical fusion of moral law and perverse enjoyment. In classical Freudian psychoanalysis, the superego represents the internalized authority of parents and society – an agency of moral conscience that imposes prohibitions and ideals upon the individual. Yet as later theorists like Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek have argued, the superego is not a simple voice of virtue, but often a duplicitous force – one that not only forbids transgression but secretly commands a kind of twisted enjoyment in the very act of transgressing its prohibitions. The term “paraphilic superego” builds on this insight: it designates a mode of superego functioning that has been “captured” by perverse logics – exhibitionistic display, voyeuristic fascination, fetishistic fixation, and an obscene compulsion to break and flaunt the law even as one enforces it.

This report undertakes a comprehensive exploration of the Paraphilic Superego. We begin with a theoretical foundation, examining Freud’s original concept of the superego and its reformulations in Lacanian psychoanalysis and Žižek’s cultural theory. We then define what is meant by a “paraphilic” superego, distinguishing it from classical conscience and other psychopathological structures. Following that, we trace its historical trajectory through key epochs – from medieval witch hunts and public punishments to modern totalitarian show trials – to show how the dynamics of moral law intertwined with enjoyment have repeatedly surfaced in social and political life. Next, we analyze contemporary manifestations of the paraphilic superego: in mass media and Internet culture, in politics and activism, and in art and everyday life. Specific case studies of pivotal events (e.g. the Salem witch trials, the French Revolutionary Terror, Stalinist show trials, and episodes of online “cancel culture”) are presented to illustrate moments when the logic of the paraphilic superego intensified with world-historical consequences. Finally, we synthesize these findings to reflect on what the prevalence of this obscene, law-and-enjoyment nexus reveals about human desire, authority, and subjectivity – and whether any escape or resistance is possible.

Throughout, our analysis emphasizes the perverse underside of the law: how moral crusades and ideological causes often harbor a shadow of jouissance (excess enjoyment) that perpetuates cycles of guilt, aggression, and symbolic violence. By illuminating the obscenity within the superego’s command – the bizarre injunction not just to follow the law, but to enjoy it – we aim to understand the paraphilic superego as a key to many cultural phenomena, from historic spectacles of punishment to today’s performative moralism.

Structure: We proceed in clearly demarcated sections. Theoretical Foundations lays out the fundamental concepts. Defining the Paraphilic Superego provides a working definition and delineates its characteristics. Historical Trajectory (with sub-sections for different eras) shows the evolution of the concept in practice. Contemporary Manifestations examines current domains where this dynamic is evident. Case Studies delve deeper into representative episodes. Finally, the Conclusion offers theoretical synthesis and critical reflection, considering the psychic and social implications of the superego’s perverse turn and contemplating avenues of critique or liberation from this insidious structure.

By drawing on psychoanalytic theory and a wide range of historical and cultural examples, this report seeks to demonstrate that the paraphilic superego is not a mere abstraction but a recurring “engine” of human social life – one that produces horrific suffering and paradoxical enjoyment in equal measure. It is our hope that uncovering this engine will deepen our understanding of the interplay between law and desire, authority and transgression, virtue and vice across the ages.

Theoretical Foundations: From the Classical Superego to its Obscene Underside

To grasp the paraphilic superego, we must first understand the classical Freudian superego and its later reinterpretations. In Freudian theory, the superego is formed through the internalization of parental authority during childhood (especially as the resolution of the Oedipus complex). It functions as an internal judge or moral conscience, upholding social rules and ideals while punishing the ego with guilt and shame for transgressions. Freud memorably described the superego as a “watch-dog of civilization” planted inside each of us. This inner voice is harsh, even cruel: it issues unconditional commands (“Thou shalt not…”) and is relentless in its criticism of the ego’s failures. The tension between the strict superego and the subordinate ego is experienced as an unconscious sense of guilt, often manifesting as a need for punishment. Paradoxically, Freud observed that the more obedient and virtuous a person is, the more stringent and unforgiving their superego becomes – “the superego is fiercest in those who set out to please it most”. In other words, the more we renounce our instincts to meet the superego’s demands, the more guilt and self-punishment the superego heaps upon us. As Freud wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents, “the more the [person] controls his aggressive instincts [in conformity with civilization], the more intensively does he develop within himself a strict conscience… The more virtuous he is, the more he feels himself to blame”. Civilization, built on instinctual renunciation, thus continually reinforces the superego’s punishing power, ensuring that “civilisation must make everyone feel guilty”.

Freud’s superego is primarily prohibitive – a “No!” to antisocial desires – and its effects are largely negative (guilt, anxiety, inhibited desire). However, even Freud hinted at a hidden excess in the superego’s functioning. He noted that neurotics often harbor an unconscious “need for punishment” imposed by the superego, suggesting that the act of being punished can itself be libidinally satisfying (a form of masochistic release of guilt). This begins to unveil the enjoyment dimension lurking within morality: the strange phenomenon where suffering under the law produces a grim satisfaction. Freud’s contemporary, Sabina Spielrein, introduced the idea of a “death drive” – a destructive instinct in tension with life instincts – which presages later theories that the superego has intimate links with aggression and even self-destructive enjoyment. Nonetheless, Freud did not systematically theorize an enjoying superego beyond noting its relentless cruelty. That task was taken up by Lacan and later Žižek, who reframed the superego in terms of structural linguistics and paradoxical commands.

Lacanian Reinterpretation: Jacques Lacan re-read Freud through a structural and linguistic lens, mapping Freudian agencies (id, ego, superego) onto his triad of the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real. For Lacan, the superego is closely tied to the Symbolic order – the big Other of law, language, and social norms – but it represents something like the point where the Symbolic short-circuits into the Real of jouissance. Lacan famously inverted the usual understanding of the superego by declaring that “Nothing forces anyone to enjoy except the superego. The superego is the imperative of jouissance – Enjoy!”. This startling claim means that beyond the explicit moral Law (the “Thou Shalt Not” of culture), there is an obscene supplementary command that urges the subject to carry on and enjoy transgressively. In Lacan’s Seminar VII, he equates the Kantian ethical imperative with the darker Marquis de Sade’s maxim – suggesting that the pure moral law and pure perversion meet in the figure of the superego. The superego is thus “a perversion of the Law that occurs within the Law”, an internal “dark law” that secretly supports the public law through illicit enjoyment.

Lacan’s point can be illustrated by a simple example: A stern father tells his child, “You must go to Grandma’s birthday and be polite, I don’t care if you’re bored – just do your duty.” This is the explicit Symbolic law of obligation. But the superegoic father would say, “Grandma really wants to see you, but you should only go if you truly want to; if you don’t want to, it’s okay to stay home.” On the surface this sounds permissive – it offers a choice – but as Lacan notes, “every child knows this is not a real choice at all.” The hidden message is “You should want to go and enjoy making Grandma happy – if you don’t, you’re a bad, ungrateful child.” Thus the child is ordered not only to obey, but to do so gladly, to enjoy doing their duty. The trick of the superego is that it enjoins enjoyment through the very language of personal desire and free choice, making the subject feel guilty for not wanting what the law wants. Lacan pinpointed here the structure of forced enjoyment: the superego is that peculiar agency that “orders you to enjoy!” even though genuine enjoyment cannot be compelled. This impossible command – enjoy whether you want to or not – produces a pervasive guilt, since of course one can never satisfy it. It “inverts Kant’s ‘You can, because you must,’ into ‘You must, because you can’”, as Žižek puts it. For example, with modern medical help like Viagra, if a man can physically have sex indefinitely, the superego insists that now he must do it whenever possible – and if he doesn’t, he should feel inadequate and guilty. The formal structure is: any liberation of capability (permissive “you may”) gets twisted into a duty (“you must make full use of every option and feel enjoyment”). In Lacan’s terms, the superego couples the law with the drive. It turns the prohibition itself into a source of jouissance (excess pleasure/pain) – or as one Lacanian commentator put it, “superego injects jouissance into the prohibition itself”.

Žižek’s Contributions: Slavoj Žižek, drawing on Lacan, has vividly expanded on the concept of the superego as an “obscene, paradoxical” engine of enjoyment that underlies ideology and social authority. Žižek emphasizes that every public law or official norm is accompanied by an unofficial, obscene underside – a set of unwritten rules or transgressive practices that allows the law to “enjoy” and that often sustain the law’s power. He argues that “the secret truth of any functioning law or social order is that it is internally sustained by some obscene and enjoyable transgression of it”. In other words, power requires a hidden perversion to keep itself thrilling and effective. For instance, Žižek points to the racial segregationist American South: the official laws enforced white supremacy, but the society was also held together by inherent transgressions – lynchings, rape, and violence against Black people that violated written law but were permitted in practice for whites as a way to bind their community through shared guilt and enjoyment. Such acts were “transgressions that reproduced the social order”, obscene supplements to the law that everyone knew about but didn’t officially acknowledge. This is what Žižek calls the “obscene underside of the law” – the dimension in which authority secretly laughs, revels, or winks at its own cruelty.

Žižek often encapsulates the superego’s command as “Enjoy!”, highlighting its paradoxical nature: it is ostensibly a call to pleasure, but in truth an impossible, anxiety-producing injunction. The more one tries to obey the command to enjoy (to have a perfect life, great sex, constant happiness), the more one feels inadequate. As Žižek writes, “permitted enjoyment turns into ordained enjoyment” under the superego’s reign. Contemporary society, far from getting rid of the superego, has intensified it in new forms: instead of an external Father telling you “No,” we now have a barrage of messages telling us to relax, consume, and be ourselves – which paradoxically feel like commands. We must achieve enjoyment and display it; failure to do so means we are “guilty – inadequate”. This leads to what Žižek calls a crippling “impasse of unfreedom – the command to enjoy that effectively prevents us from enjoying”. Under a permissive-seeming late capitalism, people experience not less guilt, but different guilt: guilt for not being happy or liberated enough, for not living up to the myriad opportunities to enjoy life that society presents. In this way the superego today often takes the form of an injunction to pursue jouissance (excessive enjoyment) – whether through consumption, self-improvement, or constant validation on social media – combined with an ever-unsatisfied feeling of guilt and inferiority for falling short. We see here the superego’s structural trick: it sets up demands that are by nature unachievable, so that our failure to reach the impossible ideal becomes proof of our guilt, which in turn feeds the cycle of self-punishment and further striving.

Crucially, Žižek insists that the superego is not a voice of pure reason or ethics, but fundamentally “a figure of obscene enjoyment”. It pretends to uphold virtuous laws publicly, but in the shadows it is giddy with illicit satisfaction. Think of a tyrant who sternly outlaws vice but privately indulges the very vices he condemns – that double-standard is the superego incarnate. Another vivid example Žižek gives is the functioning of totalitarian regimes. On the surface, a dictator might issue stern orders of self-sacrifice and purity to his subjects. But Žižek notes that the “effective injunction, discernible between the lines, is a call to unconstrained transgression”. In fascist and Stalinist rallies, for instance, followers are often given permission to unleash violence and hatred that would normally be forbidden – they are told, essentially, “You may now give full vent to your cruel impulses for the higher cause”. Žižek writes: “Although on the surface the totalitarian master demands renunciation and sacrifice, his secret message is: You may. All the dirty things you were forbidden in the old order – you can do them with impunity, as long as it’s directed at the designated enemy”. This “suspension of moral rules” is presented as a special privilege and creates a perverse excitement among the faithful. Nazi propaganda, for example, often depicted the dehumanized Other (Jews, minorities) as deserving any abuse; ordinary Germans were thus invited to participate in humiliation, looting, even killing – effectively told “go ahead, enjoy the violence, it’s not a crime when you do it to them.” This unleashing of what Herbert Marcuse called “repressive desublimation” turns obedience to the Leader into a source of personal jouissance. In Žižek’s terms, “obedience to the master allows you to transgress everyday moral rules… you are now allowed to indulge in [them] without punishment, just as you may eat fat-free salami without risk to your health”. The sly humor of that comparison (ideology offering “guilt-free” evil like diet food) underscores how enjoyment is actually being optimized by the superego strategy.

In summary, by the late 20th century psychoanalytic theory had transformed the Freudian superego from a dour internal judge into a dialectical, paradoxical force: one that both prohibits and incites, that speaks in the language of law but smuggles in desire, and that produces not only guilt but a perverse enjoyment of guilt and transgression. The superego’s “law” is thus inherently split: there is the official, public law of renunciation and duty, and a shadow law that “enjoys” – a Dark Superego which revels in what the public law denies. This doubling is often described as the difference between the Ego-Ideal (the normative ideal we try to live up to in others’ eyes) and the superego (the obscene agency that enjoys our failure). Žižek puts it succinctly: “Superego is the big Other’s unconscious”. It is as if society itself has an unconscious mind, full of repressed lust and aggression, which manifests as the superego urging individuals to enact the very things society overtly condemns.

With this in mind, we can approach the paraphilic superego concept. If the superego is already described by Lacan/Žižek as having a perverse, obscene character, what additional meaning does calling it “paraphilic” bring? To answer that, we define the term and differentiate this modality from other forms of superego and pathology.

Defining the Paraphilic Superego: Law in the Service of Perversion

The term “paraphilic” in psychiatry refers to the family of sexual perversions or atypical fixations – fetishism, voyeurism, exhibitionism, sadomasochism, and so on. To label a mode of superego as paraphilic is to suggest that the superego has been overtaken or structured by these perverse logics. In a paraphilic superego, the stern law is no longer content to simply forbid and punish behind closed doors; instead, it flaunts itself, fetishizes certain acts or symbols, and derives a lurid jouissance from the very behaviors it condemns. This is a superego that compels exhibition (public showings of virtue or of transgression), that is voyeuristic (obsessed with monitoring and witnessing transgressions), and that operates in a fetishistic manner (investing specific rituals, words, or figures with an exaggerated, irrational significance as objects of morbid fascination). The paraphilic superego, in short, is the superego gone wild: it is law in perversion, the law that gets off on the spectacle of its own violation and enforcement.

How does this differ from the classical superego or other pathological superego formations? A classical superego (as in a well-adjusted neurotic person) might chastise the individual for a forbidden impulse and induce private guilt. Its aim is to repress desire and uphold a norm (even if harshly). By contrast, a paraphilic superego doesn’t simply repress desire – it harnesses desire, redirecting it into morally sanctioned yet perversely tinged outlets. It does not keep transgression strictly hidden; rather it stage-manages transgression as a spectacle. In a sense, the paraphilic superego is two-faced: with one face it issues the prohibition, with the other face it winks at the transgression, encouraging a cyclic game of sin and penance that is itself gratifying. This can be seen as a kind of self-cancelling morality – one might say the paraphilic superego “gets high on its own supply” of sin and redemption.

Another way to distinguish the paraphilic superego is to see it as a pathological escalation of what Freud called superego’s harshness. In certain psychopathologies, like some forms of obsessional neurosis or perversion, the superego’s demands become extreme and structurally perverse. For example, in a perverse personality (in psychoanalytic terms), the subject often colludes with the law in a game of transgression: rather than feeling genuine remorse, the perverse subject finds ways to satisfy the law’s letter while enjoying its breach in spirit. The superego of a true pervert is not a distant punitive father, but an accomplice that provides enjoyment in the act of “getting away with it” or staging it. It has been noted that in perversion (e.g. fetishism), the subject disavows a reality (“I know this is just a shoe, but I treat it as if it’s a goddess”), and similarly the paraphilic superego involves a disavowal at some level: “I know this is forbidden, but in being forbidden it becomes erotic/compulsive.” The law itself becomes fetishized – obeying or breaking a specific rule becomes a source of intense fixation. For instance, someone with a paraphilic superego might be rigidly moralistic about most things, but obsessed with a particular taboo – oscillating between preaching against it and compulsively indulging it under cover. The superego has captured their drive, so to speak, channeling libido into the very scenarios of prohibition.

Crucially, the paraphilic superego thrives not just on hidden guilt (like a classic neurotic superego) but on display and excess. It represents a merger of superego with what Freud termed the “scopophilic” (pleasure-in-looking) and “exhibitionistic” drives. Thus, public humiliation rituals, show trials, virtue-signaling performances, and pornographic or gory spectacles justified in the name of morality are all expressions of the paraphilic superego. The compulsion to transgress and to exhibit that transgression – often under the pretext of denouncing it – is key. We see this when a moral authority describes in salacious detail the very sins it condemns. A historical example: The Malleus Maleficarum (1487), a manual for prosecuting witches by inquisitor Heinrich Kramer, spends pages salaciously detailing witches’ alleged sexual orgies with demons, deviant copulations, penis-stealing, and obscene rituals. Ostensibly, this is to educate readers on what to punish – but the sheer pornographic relish of the descriptions betrays a fetishistic fascination. The text turns female sexuality into a “deviant, perverted” spectacle in the guise of moral warning. In psychoanalytic terms, Kramer’s superego (as author) has a paraphilic streak: it fetishizes the sin (fixates on lurid sexual details), exhibits it publicly (in the text meant for judges and priests), and likely derives unconscious enjoyment from the very images of transgression that it declares anathema. Thus, the manual itself becomes a vehicle of perverse gratification, spreading the very “filthy acts” it tries to outlaw into the imaginations of its readers. This dynamic – moral discourse as a conduit for obscenity – is a hallmark of the paraphilic superego. The law here doth protest too much: its elaborate condemnations serve as a cover for its own illicit excitement.

In more everyday terms, we can observe the paraphilic superego in phenomena like virtue signaling or performative puritanism that actually revel in the process of shaming and exposing wrongdoing. On social media, for instance, when a mob “cancels” someone for an offensive remark, there is often a voyeuristic enjoyment in digging up the dirt and a sadistic glee in publicly punishing the offender. The participants justify it as righteous justice (superegoic law), but the frenzy, the repetition of the offensive content with commentary, the memes – these betray an excess of pleasure being taken in the act of moral denunciation. It becomes “a ritual of public humiliation”, as one observer noted about such online shamings. We can say that the collective superego in these cases is paraphilic: it is ostensibly enforcing norms, but it is driven by an exhibitionistic and voyeuristic impulse (to display the wrongdoing and watch the sinner squirm) and often a fetishization of certain terms or values. For example, certain words become taboo fetish objects – the mere utterance of a slur or a problematic phrase triggers an ecstasy of condemnation, as if the word itself has a magical evil power. This is analogous to a fetish in the sense of an overvaluation of a symbolic object, and the furor around it shows the superego-investment. Meanwhile, individuals participating might feel a compulsive need to show their own purity by casting stones (the exhibition of virtue). Psychoanalyst Alenka Zupančič describes this as “perverse moralism”, wherein moral injunctions become performative acts of enjoyment rather than genuine ethical behavior. The superego in such cases acts like an inner voice saying: “Show everyone how good you are (and secretly enjoy feeling superior and indulging in aggression)!”

To clarify, not all strong moral conviction or public moral outrage is paraphilic. The distinction lies in the mode of enjoyment and compulsion present. A healthy conscience might spur one to call out wrongdoing with a sense of duty or empathy, and one might feel satisfaction at justice served – but that is different from the gratified frenzy and theatrical excess characteristic of a paraphilic superego episode. In the latter, there is often a sense of compulsion – people feel forced to join in or to display their stance, as if an inner guilt will consume them if they don’t (this corresponds to the superego bombardment of demands). Additionally, there’s frequently a hypocritical or contradictory element: the same society or person will indulge similar “sins” in private or in other contexts. This hypocrisy is not incidental; it is the very sign of superego logic at work – as Žižek quips, the superego is the agent that makes you feel guilty for not sinning enough. In identity-based activism, Žižek points out the paradoxical commands (for example, telling white allies “Educate yourself about racism, use your privilege for good – but also remember you can never understand our experience and any attempt to do so is offensive”) which put the ally in a “you must, but you can’t” double bind. This double bind generates anxiety and guilt, which is relieved only by ever more self-critical display and obedience – a cycle that benefits those who wield the moral authority, giving them enjoyment of power without necessarily changing concrete social structures. Thus, a small elite can “terrorize” a majority into compliance by exploiting superego guilt in this manner. The content may be progressive, but the form is tyrannical and self-serving – again, a perversion of the law.

In summary, the Paraphilic Superego can be defined by several key features:

• Obscene Enjoyment of the Law: The law (moral or legal imperatives) is not only a source of anxiety but itself becomes a source of libidinal excitement. The superego experiences jouissance in the act of enforcing, witnessing, or even breaking the law. There is a surplus satisfaction gleaned from prohibition and punishment beyond any utilitarian purpose.
• Compulsion to Transgress: The paraphilic superego both forbids and inexorably draws one toward the forbidden. It’s as if the prohibition contains an embedded lure: “Don’t do X… (It’s so deliciously naughty, is it not?)”. The result is repetitive cycles of transgression followed by guilt/punishment, which themselves become ritualistic. This mirrors the structure of many paraphilias where the build-up of tension and the moment of “fall” are replayed obsessively.
• Exhibitionism and Voyeurism: Moral enactment under a paraphilic superego has a stage-like quality. There is an urge to expose sinners, to make examples of them, or conversely for the sinner to confess theatrically. Likewise, there is an urge among others to watch, to be spectators of the unfolding moral drama. The superego here wants a crowd – either to show off its virtue or to publicly shame the bad. We will see this dynamic in public punishment spectacles (historical) and in social media pile-ons (contemporary).
• Fetishization of Symbols/Values: Certain values or norms become fetish objects – treated with an absolutist, sacrosanct reverence disconnected from practical reality, much like a fetishist idolizes an object. Examples include the almost talismanic way terms like “patriotism,” “purity,” “equality,” or “free speech” (on different sides of politics) can be invoked. People display these values (flags, badges, hashtags) as if warding off evil. The fetish allows the superego to enjoy a sense of righteousness by attachment to a symbol, even if actual behavior deviates. Also, in many “purity crusades,” one narrow behavior (e.g. temperance – the avoidance of alcohol, or chastity – avoidance of sex) is fetishized as the measure of all virtue; this part stands in for the whole, a hallmark of fetish logic.
• Capture of Desire by Law: In the paraphilic superego, desire itself is structured by the law. Rather than the law opposing the subject’s desires, it speaks through them. The person finds themselves wanting the transgressive thing because it is forbidden (the classic “thrill of sin”), or wanting to obey the law in order to enjoy a feeling of moral superiority or martyrdom. We might say their drive (the repetitive kernel of enjoyment) has latched onto the law’s processes – e.g. they get off on punishment, on confession, on surveillance, on denunciation.
• Beyond Sexuality: Although “paraphilic” originates from sexual perversions, the concept extends to “symbolic, ethical, political, and cultural spheres.” The paraphilic superego can operate with non-sexual content but in a sexualized (libidinal) form. For example, a political ideology might become “pornographic” in how it displays violence or suffering (think of extremist propaganda videos showing graphic punishment of enemies – ostensibly a political message, but filmed like a snuff film for intimidation/enjoyment). Or an activist movement might center around public testimonies of trauma that become a kind of authorized voyeurism – spectators consume tales of abuse with both empathy and a grain of morbid fascination (the spectacle of suffering). When does raising awareness cross into fetishizing trauma? Arguably, when the emotional response becomes routinized consumption rather than spur to action – the suffering is repeatedly displayed because it is gripping, even as we lament it. Critics of so-called “trauma porn” in media note exactly this: “media that showcases a group’s pain and suffering for the sake of entertainment… created around the exploitation of marginalized people”. Such media can deaden real moral response and serve as a perverse thrill or a “feel-good” token for viewers who think witnessing = participating in justice. One journalist observed that the incessant replay of videos of police brutality against Black people risked becoming “a hopeless, vulgar spectacle” and compared passive viewers to “crowds at a lynching, comfortably seated while the show goes on.”. This sharp comparison underscores the idea that even empathetic outrage can slide into a voyeuristic spectacle – precisely the concern when the superego’s righteous mission becomes entwined with unconscious drives.

In sum, the paraphilic superego is distinguished by the perverse modality of its operations: it eroticizes prohibition, it publicizes what should be private, it delights in what it denounces, and it traps subjects in an oscillation of excessive law and excessive transgression. This is not the only way a superego can function pathologically (for instance, in melancholic depression the superego is pure self-cruelty without thrill, or in psychopathy arguably superego is deficient entirely). But the paraphilic superego is a particularly intriguing and culturally pervasive pattern. It represents a “turn” of the superego toward perversion – an internal coup where Master Morality becomes Marquis de Sade in disguise. To fully appreciate this concept, we will now trace its manifestation through history. We shall see that time and again, epochs of intense moralism and social control have revealed a hidden face of obscene enjoyment – what we can justly call the paraphilic superego at work in society.

Historical Trajectory: From Sacred Cruelty to Obscene Law

History furnishes many examples of what can be interpreted as the paraphilic superego operating on a collective level. In these instances, society’s ostensible guardians of morality engage in or orchestrate behaviors that fulfill perverse drives under the banner of righteousness. We will explore several key periods and contexts:

• Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Witch hunts, Inquisitions, and public punishment rituals (stocks, pillories, public executions) – where sin and punishment became mass spectacles of fascination.
• Enlightenment and Revolutionary Era: The paradox of enlightened ideals turning into purges and guillotine orgies (the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror), illustrating virtue wielded as fetish and terror as virtue’s “emanation”.
• Modern Totalitarian Regimes: Nazi and Stalinist practices of propaganda, public humiliation (e.g. forcing Jews to scrub streets), and show trials – demonstrating a fully developed obscene superego at the state level.
• Other Cultural Contexts: Brief looks at non-Western or earlier practices (ancient Roman arenas, etc.) where relevant, to show this dynamic is not confined to one civilization.

Through these, we chart a trajectory where forms of social control and moral enforcement increasingly employed theatrics of transgression and ritualized enjoyment, reaching a zenith in the 20th-century totalitarian stage, and morphing further in the digital age (to be covered in the next section). Each epoch’s specific technologies and beliefs gave a unique flavor to the paraphilic superego, but certain structural commonalities persist: the blending of sacred and profane, the didactic cruelty, the public’s ambivalent role as both disciples and voyeurs, and the use of scapegoats or deviant figures to both concentrate communal anxieties and provide communal thrills.

Witch Hunts and Inquisitorial Spectacles (15th–17th Centuries)

One of the most striking pre-modern eruptions of superegoic violence wedded to perverse enjoyment was the era of the witch hunts in late medieval and early modern Europe. Here we have the Church and secular courts in the role of the superego – enforcing God’s law and social order – while the process of enforcement itself took on a pornographic and fetishistic character. The Malleus Maleficarum and similar witch-hunting manuals exemplify how the authorities fetishized the sins they sought to eradicate. Kramer’s Malleus in particular obsesses over women’s sexuality, attributing to witches a litany of lurid acts (copulating with incubi, stealing men’s genitals or semen, causing impotence and abortion) in graphic detail. This effectively inscribed a new kind of fear and heresy onto female sexuality, branding it as inherently corrupt and tied to the demonic. The text’s tone betrays more than fear – it suggests fascination. By “salaciously detailing” these imagined crimes, the inquisitors created a kind of authorized outlet for the era’s repressed sexual curiosity. It is as if the Church said, “It’s forbidden to think of lewd acts – unless you’re studying them to fight witchcraft, in which case, please read these pages of explicit detail.” This is a classic superego maneuver: cloak desire in the guise of duty.

Once accused, witches were subjected to theatrical trials and public executions (typically burning at the stake). These events were heavily ritualized – often preceded by forced confessions wherein accused women (under torture) “described” obscene sabbats and orgies, thus providing more titillating material to horrify (and secretly excite) the public and judges. The trials themselves often functioned as morality plays: the witch, as the embodiment of sin, was displayed, questioned, sometimes paraded in stakes through town before execution. The public burning was at once a religious purification and a grisly entertainment. Contemporary accounts indicate that large crowds gathered for executions of witches and heretics, treating them as must-see events. In a sense, these were theatrical finales to the investigative “pornography” of the trial records. The crowd’s role was both to learn the moral (do not consort with Satan) and to enjoy the spectacle of divine justice in action. The superego here – Church or magistrate – orchestrated these killings ostensibly as penance for the community, but they had all the hallmarks of paraphilic enjoyment: exhibition (making punishment a public show), voyeurism (dwellers reveling in watching the agonies of the condemned), fetishism (for example, the idea that a witch’s body bore special marks or that certain objects like her broom or cauldron were mystical – these objects were often displayed as proof of guilt, invested with exaggerated meaning). The collective psyche was gripped by what historian Richard Kieckhefer called a “pornography of evil” – an obsession with the minutiae of wicked acts, which spread through pamphlets and gossip.

We have evidence that authorities sometimes reveled in creative punishments that exactly matched the crime in a darkly humorous way. For instance, in 16th-century London, a man and woman caught smuggling pigs were paraded through the city with dead pig carcasses around their necks, to publicly shame them in fitting fashion. A notorious card cheat was forced to wear cards pinned all over his clothes as he was trotted around on a backwards donkey. A man guilty of foul waste-dumping was literally made to stand in sewage. The chronicler notes a “twinkle in the eye” of the magistrates as they devised these “punishments that fitted the crime deliciously” – an unmistakable sign of sadistic enjoyment on the part of the law’s representatives. These punishments, although not explicitly sexual, have a perverse character: they are staged, ironic, body-focused humiliations, appealing to the crowd’s basest humor and bloodlust. The scold’s bridle, a device used in the 1600s to punish “nagging” women by locking their head in an iron cage with a tongue-bit that could cut the mouth, is another such invention. Not only did it physically torture and silence the woman, but it involved leading her in chains through marketplaces for public derision – a clear instance of moral punishment as a form of gendered sadomasochistic theater. Ordinary people participated avidly, jeering, throwing refuse, even physically attacking the exposed victim (with authorities’ tacit approval). In these moments, the line between justice and mob cruelty blurred; everyone becomes complicit in the “legitimate” sadism. The moral rationale (“she was a scold, she must be tamed”) gave cover for the crowd’s enjoyment in dominating and hurting someone.

Witch trials and shaming punishments also served a voyeuristic function for the community’s anxieties. By fixating on the (often fabricated) sexual depravity of witches or the indecency of the pilloried, society projected its own forbidden desires outward and then righteously punished them. Many scholars have noted that the European witch craze coincided with periods of great social strain (religious wars, plagues, shifting gender roles) – and that witches became scapegoats, accused of exactly the things people secretly feared or fantasized about (promiscuity, infanticide, power over life and death). The superego of the era – represented by Church and patriarchal authority – thus externalized guilt onto these figures and enacted extreme violence as a catharsis for society’s unconscious conflicts. The enjoyment came not only from seeing evil “destroyed,” but from being able to talk about and witness evil in detail under the cloak of virtue. This dynamic would repeat in later “moral panics.”

In some places, public executions of witches and criminals were conscious spectacles of state power. The crowds’ enthusiasm at these events could even turn dangerous – records show that at times crowds were so unruly in pelting pilloried offenders with rocks and garbage that the victims were literally killed by the mob on the scaffold, exceeding the intended sentence. In London in 1732, a man in the pillory (John Waller) was pelted to death by a gleeful crowd that first used vegetables, then heavier objects and even a dead cat, and finally tore down the pillory and stomped him. A pamphlet described this with “glee” at the mob’s actions – evidently, the report itself catered to readers’ morbid fascination. The fact that two crowd members were later tried for his murder shows that even in these spectacles there was a limit – but a limit often transgressed in the heat of collective jouissance. One can see the superego cycle here: the law arranges a humiliation to assert morality; the crowd, overtaken by bloodlust (enjoyment), goes beyond the law; then the law has to punish some in the crowd to reassert the boundary. The law is both enabling the violence and reining it – playing both sides, in a sense, for its own legitimacy.

Across these examples, we witness morality mixed with masochism and sadism, duty fused with desire. The persecutors (inquisitors, judges) often described their work in passionate terms – doing “God’s work” gave them license to relish the interrogation of the Devil’s servants. The condemned often fell into a strange complicity – some historians suggest that under torture, accused witches began to believe the narratives, in effect deriving a perverse pride in being the center of such an enormous cosmic drama. This is akin to what Lacan said of perversion: the pervert plays the role of the instrument of the Other’s jouissance. The witch’s forced confession – “Yes, I slept with Satan, yes I desecrated the holy cross” – can be seen as the subject gratifying what the big Other (the Church) unconsciously wants: proof of the Devil’s lurid presence. In this sense, the entire witch hunt phenomenon can be read as a massive paraphilic scenario staged by the superego of Christendom: the official aim is purity, but the process is one of wallowing in imputed filth to get pleasure from punishing it. It is striking that after the witch trials subsided, Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire commented on the irrational cruelty and sexual preoccupations of the craze, implicitly recognizing the perverse excess involved.

Revolutionary Purity and Terror (18th Century)

Moving forward, the late 18th century provides a dramatic case of superego logic intensifying in a new, secular form: the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror (1793–94). Here we see Enlightenment ideals of Virtue and Reason morphing into a quasi-religious cult enforced by state violence – a clear instance of the superego (in the figure of revolutionary leaders and committees) exhibiting a paraphilic character. Maximilien Robespierre, leader of the Jacobins, explicitly linked Virtue and Terror. In a famous speech in 1794, he declared: “If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror… terror without virtue is deadly, virtue without terror is impotent. Terror is nothing other than justice: prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue.”. This remarkable statement literally fetishizes terror as an expression of moral purity. For Robespierre, the guillotine’s blade is a holy instrument – “the despotism of liberty against tyranny,” as he phrased it – and he insists this merciless force is not a separate principle but “a natural consequence” of democratic virtue. In psychoanalytic terms, Robespierre has conflated the Law (virtue) with the Drive (death drive/terror) so completely that mass execution becomes an act of moral jouissance. The public executions by guillotine, held daily at the Place de la Révolution, were attended by cheering, jeering crowds as a form of patriotic theater. The apparatus of the guillotine itself became a spectral fetish-object – iconic of justice, yet also a source of macabre fascination (as evidenced by its lasting place in literature and legend).

During the Terror, moral panic and public spectacle reached a fever pitch. The Revolutionary Tribunal dispensed with normal legal protections; a mere accusation of lacking revolutionary zeal could send one to the scaffold. People attended these executions like they once did religious festivals – there are accounts of vendors selling program lists of those to be executed, of spectators knitting (the famous “tricoteuses”) while heads rolled. It was a deadly serious political purge, yet it had the atmosphere of a grim entertainment for the masses. This aligns with the paraphilic superego concept: the state’s superego (the Committee of Public Safety) demanded absolute ideological purity and literally fed on the spectacle of eliminating the impure. The delight some citizens took in turning in neighbors, or watching former nobles and even former friends die, indicates how superego duty unleashed underlying aggressive drives. The Law of the Father (the King) had been overthrown, but instead of freedom, a new obscene superego emerged in the figure of “The Republic” demanding sacrifices. Indeed, the Revolution even staged public rituals that mimicked religious ones, such as the Festival of the Supreme Being – Robespierre’s attempt to establish a deistic Cult of Virtue. At these events, Robespierre donned symbolic garments and played high priest. This demonstrates how the new superego set itself up as an object of worship, demanding not just obedience but enthusiastic emotional display. Citizens had to perform their virtue – wear tricolor cockades, speak the new vocabulary of citizenship, denounce counter-revolutionaries – much like parishioners at church. Those who failed to demonstrate zeal could be suspected of treason. The fetishization of virtue was such that any wavering was interpreted as absolute evil (compare to how a fetishist tolerates no criticism of the fetish object).

Significantly, the Revolution’s terror was explicitly justified as purging corruption to create an incorruptible society. This mirrors the logic of, say, a punitive parent who becomes abusive “for the child’s own good” – except on a massive scale. The enjoyment gleaned was evident in how violence escalated beyond pragmatic need. Even when the Revolutionary government’s enemies were largely subdued, the purges continued, increasingly targeting former allies (the infamous “eats its own children” aspect). This suggests that terror had become self-justifying, a source of jouissance for those carrying it out or cheering it on. For example, a contemporary observer, the Marquis de Sade (ironically sharing name with the term “sadism”), noted from his prison cell how the revolutionaries had adopted a kind of transgressive enjoyment akin to the libertines in his novels. Žižek has commented that the Revolution had a hidden injunction: “Nothing is forbidden to those who kill in the name of virtue.” It was as if by identifying completely with the superegoic cause, individuals were licensed to pursue violent impulses with a clear conscience. This is exactly the superego’s obscene underside in action.

We should also note moralistic exhibitionism present: virtue had to be publicly displayed to count. Revolutionary leaders and citizens engaged in performative acts – changing fashion (the modest “sans-culotte” dress), using “tu” instead of formal “vous”, changing street and calendar names – all to exhibit ideological purity. These acts carried a whiff of the absurd and excessive (e.g. the new calendar with ten-day weeks, eliminating Sundays – an attempt to break the Church’s hold, but also a kind of fetishistic re-ordering of time itself). The rigorous zeal in monitoring language and behavior (for instance, prosecuting someone for using the old royalist greeting) shows a fetishization of form over content. The smallest slip was treated as revealing the soul – a very superego attitude (totalizing judgment). It became so extreme that by mid-1794, a backlash brewed as people wearied of living under such a punitive gaze. After Robespierre himself was guillotined (Thermidorian Reaction), more moderate forces decried the “tyranny of virtue” that had prevailed.

In sum, the French Revolution demonstrates a historical moment when the superegoic demand for purity turned society into a cruel pantomime of morality. The Terror can be seen as a case where the paraphilic superego seized control of a whole nation: it fetishized an ideal (Virtue/Nation), mandated exhibitionistic loyalty, indulged in voyeuristic bloodletting, and got stuck in a repetitive cycle of kill and purge that outstripped rational purpose – indicating that enjoyment had become an end in itself. Robespierre’s own fate – sent to the guillotine without trial, with a bandaged jaw from a failed suicide, displayed to a jeering crowd – was the final tableau of this tragic drama, illustrating Hegel’s maxim that the Revolution devoured itself through its internal contradictions. The superego, in trying to eliminate all sin, became sin (unrestrained bloodlust).

Totalitarian “Show Trials” and Purges (20th Century)

Moving to the 20th century, we find the most systematic incarnations of the paraphilic superego in the totalitarian states of Stalin’s Soviet Union and Nazi Germany (as well as other regimes like Maoist China and the Khmer Rouge). These regimes explicitly turned politics into a kind of morality play with perverse enjoyment. Their propaganda and practices were saturated with what Žižek calls “the obscene superego supplement” of power – the unwritten, but understood, license to commit atrocities under the banner of the highest good.

Take Stalin’s USSR, especially the period of the Great Purges (1936–1938). During this time, Stalin orchestrated a series of “Moscow Show Trials” where former top Bolshevik officials were accused of fantastic, implausible crimes (sabotage, poisoning, plotting with Trotsky and capitalist powers). These trials were highly theatrical public events – held in a grand hall, attended by domestic and foreign press, and later disseminated as propaganda films. The key feature was that the defendants, after harsh interrogation and torture offstage, appeared in court and volunteered full confessions, often competing to condemn themselves in the most abject terms. One observer described it as “an orgy of self-abasement”. Old Bolsheviks like Bukharin stood up and declared, “I am a traitor, a degenerate, my crimes are monstrous and immeasurable…I fully deserve to be shot.”. This grotesque ritual had a clear superego structure: the accused internalized the Party’s gaze so completely that they became their own accusers, performing guilt and demanding punishment. It was as if the superego of the regime had taken residence inside each victim, compelling them to enact its script.

From a paraphilic superego perspective, the show trials allowed the regime to fetishize the Law – Stalin’s justice – while indulging a perverse pleasure in humiliation and sadistic control. The prosecutors, particularly Andrey Vyshinsky, would launch into tirades of righteous fury from the bench, screaming for the traitors to be executed “like dirty dogs”. His language was florid, dripping with performative rage that likely went beyond what he truly felt – it was a spectacle for the audience’s benefit, to stir up cathartic hate. The fictional nature of the charges was evident to many (e.g. the absurd claim one defendant put nails in butter to wreck the economy), yet they were carried with such verisimilitude by rehearsed confessions and choreographed emotions that many observers were temporarily convinced or at least in awe. One can say the Symbolic efficiency of the trials (their ability to present a coherent narrative) mattered more than truth. Everyone – judges, prosecutors, defendants – acted a part in a “grand ceremonial” of terror, motivated by fear, certainly, but also by a kind of worship of Stalin’s authority. The show trial was sacramental theater: by sacrificing themselves with confessions, the accused affirmed the infallibility of the Leader (the superego incarnate), thus cleansing society (in mythic terms).

There was unmistakable voyeuristic enjoyment in these trials for those watching, especially Stalin and his inner circle. Historians have noted Stalin would sometimes watch recordings of confessions or read transcripts with satisfaction. The trials were filmed and even shown to the public, indicating that the regime wanted people to see this intimate humiliation. It was the ultimate reality show of guilt and punishment. A British correspondent at the time described it as “mesmerizing” and “monstrous,” unable to look away from the psychological horror of seeing old revolutionaries denounce themselves. The public too, while fearful, likely experienced a perverse reassurance and thrill of taboo in hearing supposed details of conspiracies, murders, sexual subplots (some trials alleged moral degeneracy, etc.). And after each trial, mass executions followed, which were secret but known by rumor – a shadow spectacle that played on the imagination.

Stalin’s purges also extended to less public but equally ritualized terror: nighttime arrests, forced “confessions” behind closed doors, summary executions in cellars. Those lacked the public exhibition element but had a strong fetishistic and compulsive dimension. NKVD officers developed quotas (numerical fetish of how many “enemies” to uncover), and there is evidence some of them experienced a grim enjoyment or addiction to the process of breaking prisoners. There was even gallows humor and sexual innuendo among secret police – a dark sign of jouissance in the act of repression. The ideology justified it as cleansing parasites (again combining moral purity with dehumanization of victims, a sadistic thrill).

In Nazi Germany, the dynamic was both similar and differently configured. The Nazi superego was overtly racialized and sexualized. The regime obsessively fetishized racial purity (Aryan ideals) and demonized Jews and others as polluting forces. This fetishization was literal: the swastika emblem, the SS uniform, racial certificates – these were treated with quasi-magical importance (one’s blood purity document determined life or death). The enjoyment underlying Nazi ideology, as many analysts note, was in the permission it gave to “ordinary” Germans to unleash aggression on these scapegoated groups. The public humiliations of Jews in 1933–1939, before the full genocide machinery, serve as clear examples. For instance, shortly after the Anschluss (annexation of Austria in 1938), SS and Hitler Youth forced Jewish men and women in Vienna to scrub streets and toilets with brushes while crowds of Austrian civilians watched, laughed, and even took photographs. Such photographs (e.g. Jews on hands and knees with buckets as onlookers smirk) circulated as postcards – a disturbing fact that shows enjoyment was so overt that it became a souvenir. The Holocaust Encyclopedia notes that the Nazis deliberately used public humiliation to degrade victims and to “reinforce Nazi racial ideology for German citizens”. Bystanders, including children, were exposed to these spectacles, effectively becoming voyeurs and participants in the sadism. The superego message was: “It’s not just allowed but encouraged to treat these people as vile. In doing so, you prove your loyalty and superiority.” On the one hand, it delivered a lesson (reinforcing the racist law); on the other, it provided a sanctioned outlet for sadistic pleasure. Diaries and reports from 1930s Germany/Austria testify to an initial shock followed by a growing callousness and even excitement among the populace at such events – the society’s moral compass was being recalibrated to align cruelty with goodness.

Perhaps the most iconic example of Nazi superego exhibitionism were the Nuremberg Rallies – massive choreographed events where hundreds of thousands gathered to salute Hitler, with grandiose rituals of light, marching, and oaths. These rallies were ostensibly celebrations of German unity and obedience (the Ego-Ideal of Volksgemeinschaft), but they had a profound libidinal aspect: participants often described feeling swept up in a euphoric loss of individuality, a near-orgasmic surrender to the mass (what one might call a kind of organized jouissance). The film Triumph of the Will shows this clearly, with its aestheticization of bodies, discipline, and ecstatic faces. This was enjoyment in obedience – the superego injunction (“Follow the Führer!”) producing visible pleasure among followers. Žižek might call this the superego command to enjoy through obedience. Meanwhile, the rallies also had an obscene underside: in Nazi camps and military units, soldiers and officers told dirty jokes, engaged in hazing rituals, and committed atrocities with a wink – behaviors that, as long as done in the anti-Semitic or militarist context, were indulged. For example, SS guards would force concentration camp prisoners into degrading acts for amusement, a pure expression of permitted perversion under authority.

The Nazis’ treatment of public violence as a spectacle culminated in events like Kristallnacht (1938 pogrom) – essentially a nationwide “demonstration” of hatred where synagogues were burned and Jewish shops wrecked while crowds and stormtroopers revelled. It was advertised as “spontaneous outrage” but was orchestrated – indicating the regime wanted it seen. Afterward, many Germans actually expressed discomfort at the chaos, which suggests the superego perhaps overshot in making the enjoyment too visible. Nonetheless, by WWII, the Nazi killing apparatus moved mostly out of sight (mass shootings in the East, death camps) – showing perhaps a different superego tactic: to enjoy fully, we hide the worst excess (a return to private/secret enjoyment rather than open). Stalin’s regime similarly did a lot in secret (the executions were not public). So both totalitarian systems had a mix of public spectacles and hidden horrors. We might say: the paraphilic superego has two modes – exhibitionistic (for reinforcing fear and involvement of all) and clandestine (for even freer indulgence without disrupting public order).

What unites them is the spirit of moralized transgression. In Stalinism, it was class virtue (socialism, Leninism) that justified transgression; in Nazism, racial health and honor. In both, ideology served as a fetish that masked the drive element. People could claim, “I am doing this horrible thing for a great cause” – allowing them to both consciously feel virtuous and unconsciously satisfy cruel or voyeuristic impulses. The famous photo of a German mob gleefully jeering a Jewish woman forced to march with a sign in 1935, or of Soviet peasants happily denouncing a “kulak” to NKVD – these freeze-frames show ordinary faces alight with an obscene thrill under the banner of righteousness.

From medieval witch-burnings to modern show trials, a pattern emerges: periodic eruptions of social superego energy where a group tries to purify itself by dramatically expelling or punishing some element, and in doing so, savors the process far more than any resulting purity. These are the historical peaks of the paraphilic superego. We have now covered up through mid-20th century. The latter half of the 20th century and early 21st saw the decline of overtly theatrical state violence in many places – but as we’ll discuss next, the logic did not disappear. It migrated and transformed under new technological and cultural conditions.

Contemporary Manifestations: Obscene Enjoyment in the Age of Media and “Virtue”

In our current era, overt public executions or mass witch hunts are (in most regions) a thing of the past. However, the structure of the paraphilic superego is alive and well, manifesting in diverse domains: mass media and entertainment, social media and online behavior, law and politics (especially around public scandals and cancellations), and artistic or subcultural trends. The content has shifted – we are less likely to see literal blood flowing in the town square – but the psychic mechanics are strikingly similar. In many cases, digital technology has amplified the reach and speed of superego phenomena, creating global crowds where once there were village mobs.

Let’s examine a few key contemporary spheres:

Media and Entertainment: Reality TV, Voyeurism, and Public Shaming Online

Modern media, particularly the rise of reality television and ubiquitous camera/social media culture, has turned everyday life into a potential spectacle. Reality TV shows since the late 1990s have perfected the formula of public humiliation as entertainment: from talent competitions where judges mercilessly scold contestants (and viewers relish the harsh critiques), to “social experiment” shows that put people in morally compromising situations for us to judge (Big Brother, Temptation Island, etc.), to tabloid talk shows that invite guests to reveal scandalous behavior and then be chastised (the Jerry Springer/Maury Povich genre). These formats explicitly play to the voyeuristic impulse – the audience gets to peek into others’ intimate failings or conflicts – and to the judgmental superego impulse – the audience is encouraged to feel morally superior and delight in the comeuppance or drama. The phrase “guilty pleasure” often describes such shows: viewers unconsciously know they are enjoying something a bit perverse (someone else’s pain or embarrassment), but they frame it as just entertainment, perhaps even educational (“serves them right” or “what not to do”). This mirrors the witch trial spectators or pillory crowds in form, though without physical violence. For example, in talent shows like American Idol, early episodes notoriously highlighted the most terrible auditions – effectively inviting millions to laugh at delusional, untalented individuals who are then insulted by the judges. There is an undeniably cruel joy in this setup – a superegoic dynamic of “Look how foolish and uncouth they are, we (the judges and viewers) are better.” The obscene enjoyment is thinly veiled by the premise of finding talent (the “law” of the show).

Even more explicitly, shows like Cheaters or To Catch a Predator in the 2000s directly combined voyeurism, sexual transgression, and public shaming. Cheaters would film people caught in adultery and then confront them on camera, airing their meltdown for entertainment. Audiences experienced the titillation of the illicit affair footage and the satisfaction of seeing the cheater exposed (complete with moralizing voice-over). To Catch a Predator collaborated with police to lure would-be sex offenders and then broadcast their arrest and humiliation. Ostensibly a public service, it undeniably had an exploitative thrill – viewers got to see graphic chat logs (voyeurism into perversion) and then the dramatic bust (punishment spectacle). The superego here: “We are exposing these perverts to protect society,” but the method – setting up stings and making good TV of it – indicates excess enjoyment in the very depravity being fought. Critics indeed accused the show of verging on entrapment and indulging audience’s prurience.

The advent of social media made everyone a potential participant in such dynamics. Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have given rise to what’s popularly called cancel culture or online shaming culture. Now the crowd’s pillory is a Twitter timeline, and the rotten tomatoes are tweets and memes. When someone (often a public figure or sometimes an ordinary person) is deemed to have transgressed – say, by making an offensive comment or unethical act that comes to light – there’s an almost ritualistic online process: users collectively express outrage, denounce the person, often dig up additional dirt, sometimes demand they lose their job or platform (the “punishment”), and engage in rounds of performative condemnation. This has been compared explicitly to historical public shamings: author Jon Ronson in So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed draws parallels between a woman globally vilified for a bad joke on Twitter and medieval stocks. He notes how the crowd in both cases feels righteous but is also enjoying the destruction of a person’s reputation. The audience responses online can be extremely vitriolic – death threats, mockery, doxing – far exceeding any measured critique of the original wrong. One journalist called it “a wildly out-of-proportion attack” akin to mob justice. This disproportion itself is evidence of jouissance: something in the dogpile is gratifying the participants beyond the stated aim of accountability.

We even see language of addiction: people talk of outrage on social media as “the outrage porn” or being “shame addicts” refreshing feeds to get the latest scandal. The term “Facebook outrage” suggests it’s a cycle that users feed off. Indeed, neuroscientists have suggested that getting likes or joining a pile-on triggers reward circuits – a dopamine hit tied to moral aggression. This is the paraphilic superego in each individual being stimulated by the big Other of the social network. The virtue-signaling aspect (posting performatively to show one’s good stance) is the exhibitionist side of this, and the lurking or screenshotting of others’ mistakes to call them out is the voyeuristic side. There’s a telling observation in an article: “Virtue signaling and cancel culture are two sides of the same coin” – in other words, those who publicly display virtue often are first to denounce vice, and both acts serve to elevate themselves. This corresponds to the superego dynamic of “prove your purity by casting stones” that we saw historically.

A concrete example: in 2013, PR executive Justine Sacco tweeted a crass joke before a flight (“Going to Africa, hope I don’t get AIDS, just kidding, I’m white!”). She had only ~170 followers, but someone found it and by the time she landed 11 hours later, Twitter had erupted in fury, her tweet had gone viral worldwide, and she was summarily fired. The glee with which strangers anticipated her downfall (there were thousands of tweets imagining her horror when she’d land and see the reactions) was palpable. She received rape and death threats – punishment far beyond her offense. This became a classic case study of online shaming. What drove so many to join? Many would say righteous anger at a racist joke. But the extremity and enthusiasm point to enjoyment of moral bloodsport. People were making jokes about the situation, competing to be the most indignant or witty in tearing her down. It turned into a spectator event, complete with a “countdown to her plane landing.” This shows how the digital medium allows a global crowd to mimic the energy of a medieval mob, amplified by anonymity and virality. The superego reasoning (“we must hold her accountable”) quickly morphed into pure id-like aggression (since no single person felt responsible, they unleashed more). The superego thus functioned as a justification for unleashing the unconscious drive.

Another domain is pornography and sexual content on the internet – a more literal kind of voyeuristic enjoyment – which raises a curious point: ironically, the superego’s imperative to enjoy can also push individuals toward compulsive consumption of pleasures (like endless adult content) and then rebound in guilt. We see a cultural pattern where societies oscillate between permissiveness and moral panic about sexuality. The internet made sexual content more accessible than ever, which arguably fed certain paraphilic interests (the rise of niche fetish communities, etc.). Then there’s often a reaction: movements to ban or restrict porn, citing moral decay. Those reacting are sometimes the very ones who indulged – a superego backlash. This dynamic can be personal (someone bingeing porn then feeling immense shame and becoming a crusader against it) or collective (like “NoFap” anti-masturbation forums which have a zealous almost puritan streak, a new form of superego voice telling young men “true freedom is total self-denial – and be proud of it”). The interplay of sexual enjoyment and moral renunciation here is itself paraphilic-superego in structure (renouncing pleasure becomes the new fetish).

In summary, media and social media today allow paraphilic superego behaviors to proliferate in new guises: reality TV and viral videos turn private transgressions into public theater, and online outrage culture turns moral policing into a mass participatory sport. Everyone with a smartphone can indulge their inner inquisitor or voyeur with a few clicks. We see an “economy” of attention where outrage and shame are commodities, leading to what some call “outrage porn” (consuming scandal for thrills) and “trauma porn” (endlessly circulating images of suffering). Even news media, chasing clicks, often emphasize sensational, morally charged stories, reinforcing the cycle. As a result, the boundaries between sincere moral action and perverse enjoyment have blurred. Many activists lament that online activism can devolve into performative outrage with little real outcome, a feedback loop of feeling righteous and angry (thus satisfying the superego’s need for moral high ground and perhaps sadistic glee in attacking opponents) without constructive resolution.

Law, Politics, and Activism: Virtue Signaling, Cancel Culture, and Ideological Purges

The political-cultural sphere has seen a revival of puritanical zeal in both left-wing and right-wing forms – what we might call the new secular moralism. On the progressive side, identity politics and social justice movements have achieved important awareness and changes, but observers like Žižek and others have critiqued a certain strain of it as “pseudo-radical moralism” where the form of radical protest obscures an underlying complicity with the status quo, enabled by superego guilt dynamics. For instance, in some academic and activist circles, there’s intense policing of language (to avoid any microaggressions or offensive terms), leading to a climate of self-censorship and anxiety – essentially, a very strong superego presence. You must constantly self-interrogate, “Am I checking my privilege? Did I use the right pronouns? Am I fully anti-racist in everything?” While these are noble aims, they often become impossible standards one can never fully meet, producing either paralyzing guilt or performative piety. Žižek points out the paradox: “You must strive eternally to understand the experience of the oppressed… yet you can never truly understand, and if you think you do, you’re racist.” This is exactly the superego paradox – a command that is fulfilled precisely through failure, generating constant guilt. As he quips, the more the liberal tries to be anti-racist, the more guilty they feel and are accused of still being racist in unconscious ways. This dynamic can lead to what’s sometimes derisively called the “woke eating their own” – allies turning on each other for minor infractions in an endless purification ritual, reminiscent of Jacobins during the Terror.

We have seen episodes in activist communities or organizations where a small ideological disagreement or a single ill-phrased comment results in ideological purges – someone is ousted, statements of denunciation are circulated, struggle sessions ensue. These have clear analogies to earlier revolutionary purges (though on a much less lethal level): they serve to reinforce group conformity and give members an opportunity to demonstrate their virtue by punishing the deviator. A milder example: online, if someone in a community is accused of problematic behavior, others might rush to publicly condemn and distance themselves – not just privately resolve it – because not doing so might mark them as impure too. This is essentially moral panic logic, scaled to subcultures. The enjoyment is subtle but there: people feel a catharsis in expressing moral outrage, a unity in shared indignation, and even a secret pleasure that “I am not the one being targeted, I’m on the good side.” This resonates with Freud’s idea of the “narcissism of minor differences” – communities often fracture over the smallest of doctrinal issues because doing so lets them affirm superiority in a fine-grained way (and enjoy punishing the heretic).

On the conservative side, there is a mirror phenomenon: a rise of performative patriotism or religiosity (e.g. ostentatious flag-waving, “prayer shaming” – scolding those who don’t pray in public, etc.), and moral panics about cultural decline (over sexual education, LGBTQ rights, etc.) that lead to calls for public punishment or exclusion of perceived deviants. For instance, some US states have seen school board meetings turn into spectacles of outrage about library books, with parents reading aloud graphic passages (not unlike a priest reading “filthy” witches’ confessions) to fan anger, ultimately deriving a kind of righteous thrill from the process of condemning sexual deviance – again, enjoying the very thing they abhor under guise of protecting children. The push to publicly expose and shame certain teachers or public figures as “groomers” (a slur implying sexual predation) has that paraphilic superego quality: extreme moral fervor fixated on sexual transgression, often with scant evidence, but a lot of imaginative embellishment. The communities rallying behind this feel they are virtuous crusaders (superego ideals of family, purity), while what emerges is often cruel harassment campaigns (drive satisfaction). This is akin to a new witch hunt, complete with its own Malleus Maleficarum (in the form of viral conspiracy theories and lists of supposed offenders).

Another striking contemporary pattern is the public apology ritual in politics and media. When a figure is caught in wrongdoing or offensive speech, they often make a very public, scripted apology – sometimes even with tears or symbolic acts (e.g. donating to charity, taking a photo kneeling, etc.). These apologies have become almost theatrical necessities, yet they are rarely accepted at face value by the outraged public. Often the person is still “canceled” or at least humiliated further. From a psychoanalytic view, this resembles the forced confessions of old: the superego demands a display of remorse and abasement. The apologizer may not truly feel it (hence terms like “YouTuber apology video” being often mocked as performative), but they must perform guilt to try to placate the mass superego. The public, in turn, often savors the apology as validation of their power and righteousness (“See, we made them bow”). But interestingly, accepting the apology would end the cycle, and that’s often not done – instead, the apologies are picked apart (“not genuine enough, they’re only sorry they got caught”), prolonging the shaming. This suggests the aim isn’t reconciliation but the continued enjoyment of moral superiority. A sincere closure would deprive the superego mob of further jouissance, so unconsciously they reject it. Thus the hapless apologizer is in a no-win scenario: damned if they don’t apologize (stubborn heretic), damned if they do (admission of guilt and still unclean). This is exactly how purity spirals function – nothing is ever quite enough to be redeemed.

On a larger political scale, we see the fetishization of values like freedom or equality by governments or groups that then commit transgressions in their name. For instance, the US after 9/11 justified torture, illegal surveillance, and war by invoking “freedom” and “security.” Officials even called harsh interrogation techniques “taking the gloves off” for a righteous cause. This had a superego logic: “We hold human rights dearly, but to protect them we must temporarily suspend them – and in doing so, prove our superior resolve.” Darkly, some CIA personnel who participated in torture reported feeling psychological trauma, but also a sense of patriotic duty – a kind of forced enjoyment because it was framed as serving the higher law of preventing terrorism. The public, too, was complicit to a degree: many approved these measures at the time, effectively saying You may to the government’s secret transgressions, indulging a punitive desire under cover of national virtue. Only years later did a guilt/reflective reaction come (when the superego pendulum swung back to remorse, as it eventually does).

In sum, our political and activist landscape is replete with obscene injunctions to enjoy or punish disguised as high principle. Whether it’s a Twitter mob joyfully “dragging” a racist tweet’s author, or a fundamentalist preacher railing against sin while secretly reveling in describing it, or a corporation doing grandstanding virtue-signaling ads while exploiting workers (seeking moral cachet as a cover for greed), the pattern of duplicity thrives. Žižek calls this the age of “soft permissive oppression” – where power doesn’t just say “No,” it says “Yes, enjoy, but on my terms,” which is even more insidious. We are commanded to have fun, be unique, speak out – but within tightly policed lines of acceptability. The clash of various superego regimes (progressive, conservative, corporate) battling in society can itself become a spectacle – each side accusing the other of being the real witch or fascist, thereby becoming somewhat mirror images in method.

The consequences on subjectivity are significant: individuals, especially youths, often experience high levels of anxiety, burnout, and identity confusion from living in this panopticon of judgment and expected performance. Many describe a sense of walking on eggshells, or conversely, some give up and indulge in cynicism and trolling (flipping to an anti-superego stance that itself becomes a new perverse law: “Thou shalt offend everyone!” as seen in certain online subcultures).

Art, Literature, and Everyday Life: Fetishizing Identity and Spectacles of Suffering

Finally, consider how the paraphilic superego operates in the cultural sphere of art, literature, and daily social life. Art and literature have long been arenas to explore transgression safely. In the contemporary scene, there is a notable trend of works that foreground trauma, identity struggle, and extreme experiences – often critically termed “trauma porn” or “misery lit” when overdone. For example, a spate of memoirs or novels that detail harrowing abuse, addiction, etc., sometimes face accusations of exploiting the author’s pain for shock or pathos, and satisfying readers’ voyeuristic appetite for misery. The readers might justify it as increasing empathy or awareness (a moral rationale), but when such works become a dominant genre, one wonders if there’s also a consumption of suffering as entertainment. The spectacle of suffering in art can be elevating and important (think of Picasso’s Guernica or Toni Morrison’s Beloved – they confront atrocity to spur reflection). But a line can be crossed into sensationalism, where the audience gets the thrill of horror or titillation without engagement. Horror movies or violent video games could be mentioned – they externalize our violent impulses into a safe play, arguably a kind of sanctioned transgression for enjoyment. But more pertinent is socially conscious art that inadvertently fetishizes the very thing it aims to critique. As the Santa Fe Reporter noted, repeated graphic displays of violence against Black people in media risk turning into a “hopeless, vulgar spectacle” that can desensitize or perversely fascinate viewers, comparing passive consumers to “crowds at a lynching” who sit back and watch. One sees here the worry that the call to conscience (stop racism) gets subverted into an obscene spectacle (endless videos of Black death that some watch with grim fascination).

In identity politics in everyday life, the concept of “fetishizing identity” refers to when an identity category (race, gender, sexuality, etc.) is treated not as a complex lived experience but as a kind of fixed object of fascination or veneration. For instance, companies or institutions might tokenize a minority individual – continuously showcasing them as the face of diversity, effectively fetishizing their identity for the brand’s image. This often reduces the person to a symbol – exactly what fetishism does (elevating a part over the whole). Meanwhile, ironically, the real structural issues remain unaddressed (the company gets woke advertising, but still has pay gaps or poor labor conditions – a classic disavowal: “we know we exploit, but look, we champion this cause publicly, so it’s okay”). On a personal level, some individuals might lean heavily into their identity label in online bios, etc., performing it in a very curated way (which can be empowering, but also potentially limiting if one feels obliged to conform to the expected narrative of that identity – a new superego form: “as a good queer person I must like these things, use this jargon,” etc.). Virtue signaling in daily social media posts – like constantly declaring one’s support for every cause – can become less about real action and more about maintaining a self-image, which psychoanalytically might be seen as appeasing one’s own superego (“I’m a good person, see, I said the right thing”) and also enjoying the social applause that follows (likes and shares as the community’s nod). It’s exhibitionistic morality, which we’ve established is a sign of superego with a touch of perversion (because it’s more about the ego’s enjoyment of being seen as good than actually doing good, a displacement of aim).

Even in the micro-interactions of daily life, one can notice superego paradoxes: e.g., the pressure to be happy and authentic (a common cultural imperative now). People feel they must enjoy life to the fullest (travel, hobbies, self-care) and broadcast it, otherwise they are failing. Social media exacerbates this – everyone curating highlights of their life, implicitly commanding others to enjoy vicariously and feel pressure to keep up. This is exactly what Žižek talked about: today “one’s duty is to be happy,” which ironically can make one miserable and feeling guilty for not being as happy as others. It’s a privatized superego phenomenon, but widespread: a kind of internal drill sergeant that says “Are you seizing the day enough? Look at those Instagrammers – get out there and live your best life or you’re a failure!” That injunction to enjoy ties into consumer capitalism nicely, motivating purchases and experiences – a collusion of the market with superego (some scholars call it “the branded self” – performing lifestyle as duty).

One final everyday aspect: surveillance and voyeurism in society. We live in an age of ubiquitous cameras (CCTV, smartphones). People have become both watchers and watched. This has normalized a bit of voyeuristic tendency (we expect to see any interesting incident caught on video) and also a performative adjustment (knowing one might be filmed, some act differently or do outrageous things for the camera). The superego tie-in is that people often justify pervasive surveillance as necessary for security or accountability – a moral reason – but it also appeals to a dark curiosity (why else do millions watch “leaked” CCTV footage compilations on YouTube for entertainment?). And consider “Karen” videos phenomenon (compilations of people – often white women – caught on camera behaving badly, which go viral and subjects them to public shame). Those who film and upload often claim to be exposing wrongdoing (which may be true in racist incident cases), but the mass consumption of these videos can take on a car-crash entertainment quality. The individuals get doxxed and harassed, sometimes losing jobs – very reminiscent of the stocks and pillory. There is a genre now of these vigilante shaming videos. The initial moral spark (say confronting racist behavior) becomes content that strangers enjoy feasting on – the outrage, the humiliation, the drama.

In all these cultural trends, the common thread is the entanglement of desire/jouissance with normative pressure. We see a lot of compulsion to perform, compulsion to judge, and compulsion to consume shocking content, all under veneers of either pleasure or principle. The paraphilic superego is the scriptwriter behind the scenes: making sure even our rebellion or fun stays caught in a certain repetitive loop of guilt and excess.

Having painted how the paraphilic superego manifests today, let’s now focus on a few specific events that exemplify turning points or crystallizations of this logic, as requested: from historical watersheds to modern incidents. These case studies will ground our analysis in concrete narratives and further illuminate how the superego’s perverse turn “intensifies” at certain moments.

Case Studies and Pivotal Events: Turning Points of the Paraphilic Superego

Throughout history, we can identify moments when the dynamics we’ve discussed reach a crescendo – a symbolic event that lays bare the obscene underside of the law/desire relationship. We will examine a selection of such events, each from a different context, to see how the paraphilic superego logic plays out and evolves:

1. The Salem Witch Trials (1692) – a notorious episode of communal hysteria in colonial America, representing the tail end of the witch-hunt era. Salem encapsulates the process of moral panic inflamed by the enjoyment of accusation and punishment within a tight-knit community.
2. The Reign of Terror in the French Revolution (1793–94) – we touched on this broadly; here we’ll recount a specific moment (perhaps the Festival of the Supreme Being or the execution of Robespierre) to illustrate the peak and collapse of that superego regime.
3. The Stalinist Great Purge Show Trials (Moscow Trials, 1936–38) – focusing on the trial of Nikolai Bukharin as a dramatic instance of forced confession and self-denunciation.
4. The Cultural Revolution “Struggle Sessions” in China (1966–69) – an example outside the West: Mao’s China saw students and Red Guards publicly tormenting and confessing elders, a blend of ideological zeal and sadistic theater. We’ll discuss one emblematic case (perhaps the humiliation of notable officials or teachers).
5. The #MeToo Movement and the 2017–18 Wave of Public Accusations – as a modern positive social movement that nevertheless had aspects of paraphilic superego dynamics in the way public accusations and apologies unfolded as mass spectacle.
6. The Capitol Riot (Jan 6, 2021) – a different kind of case: here the superego was the false idol of a “stolen election” narrative, driving people to transgress violently while convinced of their moral righteousness, with an almost carnivalesque atmosphere in the Capitol invasion (think of horned QAnon Shaman posing in the Senate chamber – law and transgression blurred).

Each case will show an intensification of obscene law/desire interplay, often following or causing a major shift in social consciousness.

Case Study 1: The Salem Witch Trials – Hysteria and Hidden Enjoyment in a Pious Colony

Salem, Massachusetts in 1692 is one of the most analyzed incidents of mass hysteria and moral panic. On the surface, it was about eradicating the devil’s work in a Puritan community: a group of adolescent girls began experiencing fits and “possessions,” and under pressure, they accused various local women (and some men) of bewitching them. Within months, the town and surrounding areas were in throes of witch hunt fever – special courts convened, neighbors turned on neighbors. By the end, 19 people had been executed (14 women, 5 men hanged; one man pressed to death with stones) and many others imprisoned. What interests us is how Salem exemplifies the paraphilic superego mechanism on a small scale.

Firstly, Salem’s Puritan ethic was intensely religious – a strict superego code governed daily life, emphasizing modesty, hard work, and constant self-scrutiny for sin. The colony had recently gone through hardships (war threats, smallpox, factional strife), so anxiety was high – often a precursor for paraphilic superego eruptions (society looks for a scapegoat). When the girls (Betty Parris, Abigail Williams, etc.) started having strange symptoms, the community’s superego narrative (devil is attacking us because we are sinful) kicked in. Authority figures like Reverend Samuel Parris and the magistrates framed the situation as a battle of Good vs Evil. They interrogated the afflicted girls and implicitly (or explicitly) encouraged them to name witches.

What might have started as the girls’ mischievous or psychosomatic episode soon became a stage where they performed dramatic accusations – writhing, screaming that specters were stabbing them, etc., in the courtroom. This was theatrical exhibitionism rewarded by adult attention. The girls arguably found an unconscious enjoyment in the power they wielded (suddenly, these otherwise powerless youths could accuse adults and be believed – an inversion of norms that must have been thrilling). As historian Marion Starkey put it, the girls became “artists of the invisible” weaving exciting narratives of midnight Sabbaths and dark rituals to captivate the court. In doing so, they were indulging in precisely the fantasies of forbidden acts that their Puritan upbringing normally suppressed – under cover of condemning them. This is classic paraphilic superego: they spoke the unspeakable as if to destroy it, but thereby relished speaking it. Court records show vivid testimonies: e.g., one girl claimed a witch’s specter tempted her with a book promising fine clothes if she signed the devil’s book – a telling detail, since fine clothing was vanity in Puritan Salem. The enjoyment glimmers through: these girls got to talk about dancing, conjuring, and trappings of worldly life, all in the form of denouncing them.

The trials were public spectacles. Large crowds from Salem and neighboring towns packed the meetinghouse to watch the proceedings. Witnesses described the afflicted girls putting on sensational displays – at one moment all falling as if struck collectively by an unseen force when an accused witch merely looked at them. The judges and ministers took this as proof of witchcraft, but one can also see it as synchronized acting. The crowd was enthralled and also complicit – their gasps and cries created a feedback loop of excitement and fear. Scholars have likened it to a kind of theater or mass hypnosis. For the community, attending these trials satisfied multiple drives: fear (of the devil, wanting safety), resentment (some accused were socially disliked or envied, so people got to watch them brought low), and lurid curiosity (hearing testimonies about witches’ banquets with the devil, etc.). It was both terrifying and perversely entertaining – an early American horror show with real blood.

The superego of Salem’s theocracy demanded absolute moral purity, and witches became the embodiment of impurity. Thus, doing terrible things to them felt righteous. One particularly sadistic execution was that of Giles Corey, an 81-year-old man who refused to plead to witchcraft charges (knowing the court was a sham). By law, his refusal meant he could be subjected to “pressing” – heavy stones piled on his body to coerce a plea. Over two days, Corey was crushed slowly. According to legend, his only words were “More weight.” This grim incident was essentially torture unto death, performed in public (pressing usually took place in jail yard, witnessed by officials and possibly others). We see here a barbaric cruelty exercised under the guise of legal procedure. The authorities’ superego justification: Corey was obstructing godly justice by not pleading, so force was needed. But one can imagine some officials or onlookers derived a certain awe or satisfaction in literally pressing a stubborn old man (who had a reputation for being quarrelsome) into the ground. It is telling that pressing was extremely rare in New England – Salem’s frenzy made the unthinkable thinkable. When superego zeal peaks, even previously taboo punishments resurface (like a regression to medieval brutality).

Salem’s denouement also fits the pattern of superego overshoot and collapse. After months, accusations got out of hand – even the governor’s wife was mentioned. The credibility of the girls waned as they pushed their luck (paralleling how in Stalin’s purge, eventually targets included loyal communists who weren’t plausible traitors). The educated elite in Boston started to question spectral evidence. Finally, the governor halted the trials. In hindsight, the community felt ashamed – a wave of remorse swept Salem. Judges and jurors did public penance years later; one judge begged forgiveness, and a day of fasting and soul-searching was declared. This is the guilt hangover after the paraphilic binge. Salem had a reckoning: they realized their “virtuous” violence was actually a great sin. This corresponds to the superego flip: the same mechanism that drove them to punish now turned inward, making them punish themselves with regret.

Salem’s legacy, beyond being cautionary, also sparked literature (Arthur Miller’s The Crucible) which explicitly drew analogies to 20th-century witch hunts (like McCarthyism). In those analogies, we see recognition of the recurring human vulnerability to superego-driven moral panics. Miller portrayed the sexual repressions and desires (Abigail’s affair with Proctor, etc.) fueling Salem’s crisis – implying that denied desire mutated into destructive puritanism. That reading is very psychoanalytic.

Thus, Salem stands as a microcosm: within it, we saw youth indulging exhibitionist accusations, authorities enjoying punitive domination, neighbors relishing scandalous gossip, and a whole town briefly caught in a trance where doing evil felt like doing good. It was a turning point that later American society looked back on with horror, arguably inoculating future generations (the USA never had another large witch hunt after Salem, as the superstition lost credibility – the superego had to find new outlets).

Case Study 2: The Festival of the Supreme Being (1794) – Virtue’s Pageant and the Terror’s Climax

Amid the French Revolution’s Terror, on June 8, 1794, a remarkable event took place in Paris: The Festival of the Supreme Being. Devised by Maximilien Robespierre, this was meant to be a grand republican replacement for religious (Christian) holidays – a celebration of the new deistic civic religion centered on Virtue and an abstract Supreme Being. The festival was highly theatrical: Robespierre, as President of the Convention that month, took on the role of a high priest. Dressed in a sky-blue coat, holding bouquets of flowers, he led members of the government in a procession. Huge crowds gathered in the Tuileries gardens and Champ de Mars, where artists had constructed an artificial mountain. At the climax, Robespierre ascended this “Mount Sinai” and delivered orations about the triumph of republican virtue over atheism and vice. Symbolic figures (large mannequin effigies) representing Atheism, Ambition, and Egoism were burnt, revealing statues of Wisdom beneath. Choirs sang hymns composed by Gossec; it was the Revolution’s attempt at sacred theater on a massive scale.

This festival can be seen as the superego of the Revolution in operatic display. Robespierre intended it to unify and purify the populace, but many observers found it forced and even absurd. Some in the Convention murmured that Robespierre had become vainglorious, placing himself as a quasi-divine figure. Indeed, paintings of the scene show him front and center, arms outstretched – a Moses or new messiah leading the chosen people. The festival occurred just as the Terror was at its bloodiest peak: only a few days earlier, the notorious Law of 22 Prairial was passed, eliminating many legal rights of the accused and accelerating executions. So paradoxically, while Robespierre spoke of virtue and goodwill under sunny skies, the guillotine was working overtime in Paris (nearly 800 executions in June 1794 alone, a record high). This disconnect hints at the event’s perverse underside: it was as if by constructing a euphoric spectacle of purity, the regime tried to cover or compensate for the torrents of blood it was spilling.

In psychoanalytic terms, this is reaction formation and fetishism. The Festival – all flowers and sunshine – was the fetishized image of purity that allowed the Jacobins to disavow the obscene reality of daily massacres. The more they killed, the more they needed to loudly proclaim Virtue. One could almost say the festival was the superego’s self-congratulatory orgy, an apex of exhibitionism (“look how virtuous and enlightened we are!”) that runs concurrently with unacknowledged guilt. Reports say many common people attended sincerely, enjoying a day off, spectacle, and feeling of unity. But deputies and insiders were more cynical – they saw an element of insanity in Robespierre’s display. Some remarked that now he had gone too far, acting like a pope. The event actually contributed to his downfall: a little over a month later, on July 27 (9 Thermidor), Robespierre was arrested and guillotined. Enemies cited the Festival as evidence he aimed at dictatorship or even divinity.

The Festival thus marks a turning point: it was the last triumphal display of the revolutionary superego before the backlash. It condensed the paradox of the Terror: delirious Idealism hand-in-hand with delirious Violence. The crowd burning effigies of Vice and worshipping Virtue – what is that if not a mass paraphilic ritual? Consider the burning of “Atheism” effigy: revolutionary fans had earlier been executing real people for being too pious (counter-revolutionaries), now suddenly atheism (extreme anti-religion) is demonized and God (Supreme Being) is back in symbolic form. The Revolution was eating its own tail, flipping values overnight yet always with the same absolutism. This whiplash is characteristic of superego excess: no nuance, just total identificatory swings (yesterday’s ally is today’s traitor, etc.). During the festival, participants were effectively absolving themselves of past violence by fervently professing new pieties. One could analogize it to a serial killer who prays intensely between murders – except here the whole state was in that schizophrenic role.

Interestingly, some Jacobins later admitted feeling unease or absurdity at the festival. That subliminal recognition (“this has become a farce”) was likely one factor in mustering will against Robespierre. In a sense, the obscene enjoyment had peaked and was losing its charm – the festival’s artificial cheer may even have broken the spell of terror for some. The event was meant to shore up the regime’s moral authority, but it instead exposed how empty and performative it had become. As cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek might note, the festival was an attempted “quilting point” to fix meaning (“We are virtuous!”) at a moment of disintegration – a typical superego panic maneuver – but it was too late; the Real of rampant guillotining undermined the Symbolic show.

Thus, the Festival of the Supreme Being stands as a vivid case where we see the superego making a spectacle of itself – literally. It was ideology as pageant, with Robespierre directing aesthetics to move the masses. The enjoyment was primarily for those performing power (the Committee of Public Safety convincing themselves of their righteousness in a collective high), while the crowd’s enjoyment was more straightforward (holiday leisure, communal ecstasy – manipulated, but still some authentic collective joy). When that ephemeral joy dissipated, all that remained was the guillotine’s terror, and within weeks the people and deputies were emboldened to topple the tyrant. On 9 Thermidor when Robespierre was shouted down and arrested, one deputy yelled, “The blood of Danton chokes him!” referring to Robespierre’s earlier execution of fellow revolutionary Danton. This indicates guilt had returned as open accusation. The superego tide receded, revealing the crimes it had cloaked. Robespierre’s attempt to embody the pure Big Other (the supreme moral authority) ended with him as just another broken body on the scaffold.

Case Study 3: Stalin’s Show Trial of Bukharin (1938) – The Theater of Guilt and the Pleasure of Submission

One of the most infamous show trials was the Trial of the Twenty-One in March 1938, the last of the Moscow Trials, whose chief defendant was Nikolai Bukharin – a former top Bolshevik, renowned theorist, and one-time ally of Stalin turned “traitor” in the regime’s narrative. This trial encapsulates the climax of Stalin’s Great Purge, showing in microcosm how the paraphilic superego operated within a totalitarian context.

Bukharin had been arrested in 1937 after months of pressure. He initially resisted confessing to false charges (sabotage, plotting to kill Lenin and Stalin, espionage for foreign powers – all absurd). After long isolation, threats to his young wife and infant son, and likely torture or at least psychological breaking, he capitulated. At the trial, Bukharin delivered a remarkable final speech that went on for hours, in which he confessed to being the “vile organizer of monstrous crimes,” yet in a twisting way also asserted his ideological loyalty to socialism. Observers described Bukharin’s performance as mesmerizing – an intellectual with tears in his eyes analyzing his own supposed villainy.

For Stalin (not present but orchestrating), the trial was a spectacle of superego triumph: the old revolutionaries symbolically castrated and bowing to Father Stalin’s narrative. The prosecutor Vyshinsky spat venom at the defendants: “Shoot these rabid dogs…!”, to which they responded with self-denunciations – a perfect sadomasochistic loop. Bukharin, under the superego’s sway, provided what Stalin craved: a public display of complete submission. In psychoanalytic terms, Bukharin identified with the aggressor (Stalin) so fully that he became an agent of his own punishment. His long monologues were almost ritualistic purges of self, as if offering himself up as the necessary sacrifice to cleanse any doubt of Stalin’s righteousness. This is reminiscent of religious penitents or even of someone deriving a twisted satisfaction from martyring themselves. Indeed, some historians argue Bukharin, unable to see a way out, sought to at least craft a narrative and die “on his own terms” – which tragically meant colluding in the farce, maybe hoping his speech-coded some truth between lines. If so, that hope was slim; the spectacle rolled on with its script.

The public and press invited were witness to an incredible performance of guilt. There is evidence many attendees didn’t fully believe the charges but were swept up in the drama. Foreign journalists noted how “the defendants incriminated themselves with gusto”. The word “gusto” is telling – it implies a certain energy, even enjoyment, in the act of self-flagellation. Can we say Bukharin “enjoyed” it? Consciously, likely not – he was broken and choosing death to save maybe his family. Yet unconsciously, the superego paradox is that by yielding utterly, one atones for guilt through punishment, which brings a dark relief. Freud said neurotics sometimes find satisfaction in suffering as it assuages unconscious guilt (the “need for punishment”). Bukharin’s compliance could thus be seen as that logic hyper-politicized: the regime induced in him a state where he believed (or acted as if) only by being punished could he serve the revolution he loved. It’s like a perverse loyalty test he endeavored to pass by failing (confessing). As he said cryptically at trial: “If the Revolution needs my life, I shall gladly give it.”

For the audience (and Soviet masses via newspapers), there was a dual enjoyment: moral and lurid. Moral: seeing “traitors” punished reaffirmed their faith in the system (superego satisfaction). Lurid: the details of alleged plots (meeting Trotsky, poisoning Gorky’s son, etc.) were intriguing spy-thriller stuff to gossip about – a kind of sanctioned conspiracy porn. The Soviet press printed full transcripts; people read them like a macabre novella. So the state both fed and fed off a collective jouissance in these confessions.

After the trial, all defendants were executed swiftly. Bukharin was shot, his last letters (heartbreaking, one to Stalin professing twisted fealty) kept secret. The aftermath for society was chilling: many felt fear and relief; fear that they could be next (so they must toe the line), relief that internal “enemies” were gone (false sense of purification). However, just like Salem and the Terror, eventually the Purge devoured itself – months later, Stalin dialed it down as it threatened to destabilize the state.

Bukharin’s trial is pivotal as a negative turning. It marked the end of the Great Purge fervor – a crescendo after which even some Stalinists felt things had gone too far (e.g., some secret police were themselves arrested – scapegoated for “excesses”). Within a year, World War II shifted focus externally.

Why is this trial a key example of paraphilic superego logic? Because it shows how under extreme conditions, the superego can produce a total theater of guilt and submission that all participants know, at some level, is inauthentic, yet all collude in. It’s perversion at the level of the Big Other: everyone knows these confessions are false – the prosecutors, the public, even Stalin likely – yet they treat them as true (“the show must go on”). This is what Žižek calls the obscene underside sustaining the system: the population sort of knows it’s staged but accepts it as necessary fiction, deriving a cynical enjoyment (“They must be guilty of something to have fallen so low”, etc.). The open secret aspect – not unlike how in certain pornographic scenarios the acting is fake but viewers go along for arousal – is analogous. Only here, the arousal is ideological and sadistic rather than sexual, but structured similarly.

Thus, the Bukharin trial stands as a monument to the lengths a regime’s superego will go to force not just obedience, but enthusiastic complicity from its victims, turning even their dying words into affirmations of the cause. It’s a chilling peak of the “paraphilic superego”: law becomes full travesty (perversely enjoying its own negation of justice), and subjects become voluntary objects of their own punishment (finding a perverse peace in total capitulation).

Case Study 4: Cultural Revolution Struggle Session – The Public Torture of Authority (China, 1966)

In 1966, Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution in China, mobilizing youth (Red Guards) to purge remnants of “old culture” and bourgeois influence. This movement quickly took the form of violent struggle sessions – public humiliations and beatings of people accused of insufficient communist fervor (intellectuals, officials, even teachers and parents). One representative incident occurred at Beijing Normal University in August 1966, where the vice principal Bian Zhongyun was brutally beaten to death by Red Guards (many of them teenage girls) in one of the first lethal struggle sessions.

Eyewitness accounts and later research reveal the gruesome details: Bian and other teachers were forced to don humiliating signs, wear degrading dunce caps, kneel or stoop in front of hysterical masses of students, who yelled slogans and accusations. Bian was paraded, had boiling water poured on her, and was clubbed with wooden sticks – all while her students chanted revolutionary quotes. She died from this ordeal; her body was left in a garbage cart. The Red Guards, far from hiding this, boasted about eliminating a “reactionary.” Mao later declared such acts to be in line with the revolution’s goals.

This is a stark example of youthful superego unleashed in perverse fury. These students were raised under Mao’s ideology (their superego shaped by “Mao Zedong Thought”). Suddenly given license (and encouragement via Mao’s big-character poster and the Party faction supporting Red Guards) to attack authority figures, they transformed overnight from deferential pupils to savage inquisitors. The enjoyment they appeared to take is often noted with horror by survivors: they smiled, danced around the victims, took delight in inventive cruelties – like forcing teachers to eat dirt or excrement, or to self-denounce in degrading ways.

One can analyze this as a massive societal example of Freud’s idea of the return of the repressed. These youths had grown up under strict discipline and respect culture (Confucian tradition still lingered). When Mao’s campaign flipped the script – “It is right to rebel!” – their built-up frustrations and unconscious resentments toward their teachers/parents found explosive release. The superego (Mao/Party line) not only permitted but glorified this violence: beating educators was reframed as the highest virtue (“revolutionary action”). This is classic paraphilic superego: the taboo (violence against respected elders) becomes the mandate, with a moral halo around it.

The struggle session itself was choreographed like obscene theater. Typically, the victim had a placard listing crimes, was made to adopt the “airplane position” (bent forward, arms out – extremely painful over time), and was interrogated and forced to confess to absurd charges (like being a capitalist roader, a traitor, etc.) while the crowd jeered and occasionally struck them. A particularly perverse aspect: victims were often forced to insult themselves and others, betraying loved ones under duress, which added to their humiliation. In some sessions, there was a sexual humiliation element too – women had their hair shaved (a big shame in Chinese culture then), clothes torn, or were groped under pretext of searching for capitalist items. The combination of moralistic and sexual degradation indicates how the liberation of one form of violence tends to bring out other repressed drives.

These sessions took place across China by the thousands in 1966–68, essentially a carnival of cruelty as policy. But by 1968, Mao reined in the Red Guards, sending many to the countryside – the chaos was destabilizing production and the Party’s own security. Again, we see the pattern: the superego unleashes terror to refresh its authority, but eventually must clamp down as the enjoyment threatens order. Many Red Guards later felt disillusioned or traumatized by what they’d done, some undergoing decades of guilt or rationalization.

The Bian Zhongyun case is notable as the first teacher killed in Beijing – it set a precedent. Photographs exist of similar early struggle sessions (like of writer Ding Ling being struggled) – showing students with armbands, faces contorted in zeal, victims with ink-smeared faces and signs. These images are haunting, akin to some medieval vision of demons tormenting a damned soul, except it’s modern youth in uniform.

Cultural Revolution struggle sessions underscore how a regime can co-opt youthful idealism and latent sadism under a moral banner. The youth truly believed they were agents of purity – destroying the “Four Olds” (old ideas, culture, customs, habits). The cruelty was not senseless in their mind, it was purificatory. One Red Guard recollected that as a teenage girl she felt ecstatic smashing things and beating “bad people” – it was like dancing on the edge of a volcano, high on righteousness. That euphoria is the paraphilic superego high.

This event marked a turning point in Chinese society – the collapse of traditional respect and the eruption of peer-on-peer and child-on-elder violence permanently scarred that generation. It also showed the world a stark example of mass psychosis induced by ideology. After Mao’s death, the Cultural Revolution was denounced by the new leadership, indicating a belated recognition of how deranged it had become. In psychoanalytic hindsight, one could say China went through a national Id-release orchestrated by the superego figure (Mao) – a kind of bizarre group psycho-session that instead of healing inflicted new traumas.

Case Study 5: The #MeToo Movement and Trial by Public Opinion (2017–2018)

In October 2017, allegations of sexual abuse against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein were published, sparking the #MeToo movement on social media. Women (and some men) worldwide began sharing stories of sexual harassment and assault, often naming powerful perpetrators. What followed was a cascade of public accusations and reckonings across industries – a phenomenon sometimes lauded as overdue justice, other times criticized as a “witch hunt” or trial by Twitter. This wave marks a modern instance where the superego of society – here in the form of feminist and ethical norms – rises up to punish transgressors with an intensity that carries both righteous power and a whiff of the uncontrolled fervor we’ve seen in past case studies.

Take the case of Harvey Weinstein himself: once his crimes came to light, he was swiftly ostracized. But notably, long before any court convicted him (that came in 2020), the court of public opinion had effectively sentenced him. He became a pariah, and the image of him – the once untouchable mogul – being perp-walked in handcuffs in 2018 was celebrated internationally. There was an undeniable schadenfreude (pleasure at his fall) not only because he deserved it, but because it symbolized toppling an abusive power structure. For many, it felt like a cathartic festival of justice: “the mighty pig has fallen.” This echoes historical crowds cheering at a tyrant’s execution, albeit Weinstein’s “execution” was social and career-wise initially.

The #MeToo era saw dozens of high-profile men exposed: actors, directors, CEOs, news anchors, even judges. A typical pattern: a social media post or investigative article would drop detailing misconduct; within hours, thousands would weigh in online condemning the accused; often their employer would fire them promptly; they’d issue an apology (or denial) which in many cases was further scrutinized and mocked. The speed and scale was unprecedented – it felt like a cultural revolution of accountability. Indeed, some commentators explicitly likened it to a witch hunt or Cultural Revolution (meant critically). Others said no, it was a long-delayed correction. Both can be partly true: many deserving abusers were finally exposed (the moral necessity), and there were elements of over-correction and collateral damage (the potential superego overreach).

For instance, in early 2018, allegations were made against actor Aziz Ansari via an online article. The anonymous accuser described a bad date and feeling pressured; it wasn’t assault per se. Yet, the story was widely circulated and debated. Ansari’s reputation took a hit, he went silent for a year. This case drew backlash as an example of #MeToo going too far – some women wrote “this was just a bad date, not worth public shaming.” It shows the fine line: the superego energy unleashed by #MeToo – “believe women, hold men accountable” – was immensely important socially, but also risked becoming undifferentiated fury at times. There was a climate where even mild misconduct or awkward behavior got conflated with serious predation. The paraphilic superego mechanism here: society’s pent-up disgust and anger at systemic sexual abuse (very valid) sometimes sought to fetishize every misstep as equally evil, leading to arguably disproportionate pile-ons.

Social media was the arena of these struggle sessions. Instead of physical crowds in a square, we had trending hashtags and viral posts. The humiliation was not being pelted with vegetables but with memes and insults globally. People watched with grim satisfaction as, say, comedian Louis C.K. admitted to sexual misconduct and saw his career crumble overnight; commentary posts often had a tinge of glee (“good riddance, creep”). While deserved, it’s instructive how the vocabulary of moral outrage (creep, pig, monster) was universal and unsparing – reminiscent of how French revolutionaries or Red Guards labeled enemies with dehumanizing epithets.

One particularly pivotal event was the public downfall of TV news giant Matt Lauer (NBC anchor) in November 2017. He was fired within 24 hours of a complaint, and soon many lurid details emerged (like a secret button under his desk to lock his office door, which he allegedly used to trap women). The swiftness and sensational quality had society collectively agog – watercooler talk everywhere recounted his misdeeds. It had a morality play structure: trusted public figure revealed as deviant, swiftly punished, persona non grata. For the audience, again, a measure of thrill at seeing power shamed – much as townsfolk might’ve been astonished to see a respected burgher put in the stocks in colonial times.

To highlight a more ambiguous case: the “Shitty Media Men” list. This was an anonymous crowdsourced Google spreadsheet started in October 2017 where women in media shared names of men who had allegedly harassed or assaulted them, with brief descriptions. The list went viral privately, then leaked. It was never verified or formal, yet several men on it faced consequences (one magazine editor resigned preemptively). Some named strongly denied accusations. This list exemplifies the vigilante aspect of #MeToo superego – born of frustration with official channels failing, women took justice into their own hands via whisper network turned digital. Ethically it was fraught: some innocent names may have been included; at the same time, many genuine ones were. The existence of the list itself shows how the desire for punitive action found new mediums. It’s analogous to a secret pamphlet circulated in a village naming suspected witches – bypassing due process out of perceived necessity.

The #MeToo movement’s first wave was a crucial social reckoning – arguably predominantly positive in outcome (some measure of justice and deterrence, empowerment of survivors). Yet it unmistakably carried an undercurrent of collective emotional release – anger, grief, vengeance, solidarity – which has the structure of what we’ve termed paraphilic superego energy (the law of respecting women’s autonomy finally flexing muscle, but with zeal that occasionally bordered on indiscriminate). People were glued to each new accusation in a way that wasn’t purely solemn; it was also dramatic, like following a serialized purge of the high and mighty. It became a cultural cleansing ritual, not state-orchestrated but crowd-sourced.

The pivotal nature of these events is clear: a shift in norms occurred. Behavior once swept under rug now leads to (at least social) death. In psychoanalytic terms, a repressed truth (mass prevalence of sexual misconduct) returned with a vengeance, flipping the superego script practically overnight in many industries: now the fear changed sides – potential predators became fearful, women felt freer to speak. This is a positive superego realignment – but accompanied by that usual potential for fanaticism, which society continues to negotiate (e.g., debates about due process, redemption, differentiating levels of offense).

Theoretical Synthesis and Critique

Having traversed the historical and contemporary landscapes of the Paraphilic Superego, several overarching themes and insights emerge about desire, enjoyment (jouissance), authority, and subjectivity in human society. We can now synthesize these findings and also pose critical reflections on the consequences of the superego’s perverse turn, as well as consider possible alternatives or ways to mitigate its harms.

1. The Paraphilic Superego as Engine of Collective Fantasy: One striking revelation is how much collective fantasies and anxieties are shaped by the superego’s obscene underside. In each epoch, the official ideals (whether religious piety, revolutionary virtue, racial purity, or social justice) are accompanied by phantasmic scenarios that both terrify and secretly enthrall the collective imagination. For instance, the witch hunts were fueled by lurid fantasies of witches’ Sabbaths – essentially the society’s own forbidden desires (sexual deviance, power through magic) projected onto a scapegoat. Under Puritan superego strictness, these fantasies took on a life of their own, directing real-world violence. Similarly, totalitarians like Stalin conjured elaborate plots of sabotage and espionage – a fantasy of the Other’s malevolence that justified endless purges. Žižek would say these narratives of “the enemy who enjoys secretly” (e.g., the fascist fantasy of the Jew stealing enjoyment, or the Stalinist fantasy of the Trotskyite wreckers) actually reflect the regime’s own disavowed knowledge that its ideology is inconsistent. The superego in these cases feeds on fantasy: it gives people a story (witches, spies, traitors, predators) that makes sense of their anxieties and lets them channel jouissance through hatred. Thus, the paraphilic superego shapes collective fantasy by providing a cast of characters – the depraved Other – whose punishment is enacted as a grand drama, a necessary purging.

2. Enjoyment (Jouissance) in the Law and its Transgression: Perhaps the most important theoretical insight is confirming Lacan’s claim that the superego is the imperative of jouissance. Wherever authority presents itself as purely virtuous and prohibitive, we discovered an undercurrent of excess enjoyment. People do not simply obey the law; they find ways to get something out of obeying (or enforcing) the law. This may be sadistic jouissance – the pleasure of punishing, as seen in crowds cheering executions or Red Guards joyously beating teachers – or masochistic jouissance – the enjoyment of being punished or humiliated for a cause, as in Bukharin’s self-abasing confession. In many cases, it’s both: a reciprocal loop. Freud’s somewhat mysterious concept of the “death drive” – a drive toward repetition and destruction beyond the pleasure principle – finds tangible expression in these cycles of moralized violence. The superego’s commands often result in self-destructive outcomes for society (Salem decimating itself, the Terror consuming the revolution, the Purge weakening the USSR’s cadres, etc.), yet they repeat. Why? Because jouissance is at stake. There is a surplus enjoyment that people (unconsciously) find in these processes – an enjoyment in one’s own suffering even, as guilt is relieved by punishment. This explains why simply telling people “this is not in your rational interest” does not stop witch hunts or purges; logic is impotent against the libidinal satisfaction being derived. Thus, a critique of social phenomena must factor in jouissance: moral panics and ideological crusades are not mistakes of reason alone but enjoyment economies, trading in thrills of righteousness and transgression.

3. Authority’s Two Faces – The Public Ideal and the Obscene Supplement: The paraphilic superego concept clarifies the paradox noted by Slavoj Žižek and others: authority (the Big Other) always has a “split law”. There is the explicit, ideal face (God’s law, Party line, legal code, etc.) and a hidden, tacit set of unwritten rules that allow – even demand – certain transgressions. This duality was evident in every case study. For example, in Nazi Germany, officially cruelty was cloaked in euphemism (“special actions”), but informally it was expected that a good Nazi would show no mercy to Jews – essentially “You may” commit violence, even though publicly we maintain a façade. In the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s thought said “Rebel against authority” even as the structure of authority remained – effectively giving license to break one set of rules (respect teachers) to uphold another (loyalty to Mao). The psychological effect on subjects is profound confusion and often psychological splitting: one must navigate the big Other’s inconsistent demands. This leads to a kind of collective delirium – people performing absurd rituals (like fake trials, coerced confessions) that everyone half-knows are untrue but that symbolize obedience to the actual superego command (e.g., “show total loyalty by condemning yourself”). The subject in these regimes often becomes cynically hyper-aware (knowing it’s a lie) yet psychically invested (going through the motions with zealous affect). This state is damaging: it produces what some call “doublethink” or “ideological cynicism”, where belief and disbelief coexist, and genuine moral judgment is eroded. The person basically abdicates personal agency to the superego’s dictates entirely, which is dangerous (they’ll do whatever is ordered and rationalize it). In freer societies, the split law still exists (as corporate culture or social norms vs. written rules, etc.), causing stress and hypocrisy. Recognition of this dynamic is key to any critique of ideology: to change a system, one must target not just the official laws but the obscene supplement – the hidden incentives and enjoyments that sustain it.

4. Psychic and Social Consequences: The superego’s perverse turn is by no means cost-free – it leaves deep scars on both individuals and communities. Psychically, individuals living through these episodes often suffer trauma, guilt, and fragmentation. We see survivors of witch hunts or political terror plagued by nightmares, or by fervent clinging to denial to avoid guilt. The Red Guards in their old age, for instance, had to reconcile with the horrible things they did as teenagers – some have publicly apologized in attempts at self-forgiveness. This relates to Freud’s notion that the superego, when overly harsh, leads to pathological guilt or depression (the “pathological saint” who can never be good enough). A society under a paraphilic superego regime tends to oscillate between manic fury and depressive regret. After Salem, there was remorse; after the Terror, a longing for normalcy (the Directory’s relative hedonism was a swing to the opposite); after Stalin, a quiet cynicism permeated (people no longer believed fervently, retreating to private life). So one consequence is loss of trust and meaning – when people see morality weaponized and then exposed as sham, they may fall into nihilism or extreme skepticism. For example, many Americans post-McCarthy era became deeply wary of mass movements; “witch hunt” entered the lexicon as something to avoid.

Another consequence is injustice – obviously many innocent suffered terribly (e.g., the majority of those executed as witches were not guilty of anything like the charges). Families and social bonds were torn apart (children testifying against parents in Moscow trials or Cultural Revolution). These create generational wounds – e.g., the Cultural Revolution left Chinese intellectual culture devastated and interpersonal trust low for decades. Even today, one can trace how societies that underwent these convulsions have to work through collective PTSD, often via art or belated truth commissions.

5. Why the Superego Turns Perverse: It’s useful to ask why does the superego so often “go rogue” like this? One answer from psychoanalysis: because the superego itself arises from an internalization of aggression. Freud said the superego forms by turning the child’s hostile feelings toward authority inward – hence it is a “culture of insatiable reproach” at core. If external structures weaken (say a crisis undermines traditional law), the superego tends to explode outward again – unleashing aggression externally in moralistic guise. This might explain, say, why the Reign of Terror happened: the old king’s law collapsed, the internal checks were gone, and aggressive idealism soared. Another angle: whenever there’s a blockage in finding legitimate satisfaction (like sexual repression in Puritan society or lack of political voice in a dictatorship), the drive finds a detour through moral outrage. People derive substitute enjoyment from being the punisher or the martyr. So the perverse superego is a symptom of underlying dissatisfaction or contradiction. Recognizing this can be a first step to addressing it: e.g., improving transparency and justice in institutions might curb the appetite for vigilante shaming – because people resort to mob justice when official justice fails them (as arguably happened with #MeToo and years of ignored harassment).

6. Alternatives or Resistances: Is there a way out of this vicious cycle? Psychoanalytic and philosophical thinkers provide some clues. One notion is cultivating an ethics beyond the superego – an ethics of truly assuming one’s desire without guilt, which Lacan phrases as “ne pas céder sur son désir” (do not give ground relative to your desire). This means acting not out of a compulsory need to please the Big Other (superego pressure) but from one’s authentic subjective responsibility. If more individuals did that, they’d be less easily swept into cruel crowds or ideological frenzies. In practical terms, it means critical thinking, empathy, and individual moral courage as buffers against groupthink. For example, a few Salem villagers (like Rebecca Nurse’s family) spoke against the trials – they were heeding personal conscience over mass panic. Those voices are vital but often drowned out; societies can nurture them by protecting dissent and nuance. Education in history and psychology can help people recognize the signs of superego mania (“We’re all suddenly certain group X is evil – wait, let’s reflect”).

Another approach is ritualizing transgression in harmless ways (the “carnival” principle). Medieval carnivals let people invert roles and blow off steam (even mocking the Church) for a time, which arguably helped avoid constant informal eruptions. Today we have art, comedy, and protests as outlets. If these are vibrant, perhaps the need for violent purges lessens. A healthy society might incorporate controlled symbolic challenges to authority to prevent the buildup of an obscene underside. For example, freedom of speech and satire can puncture the self-seriousness of leaders – draining superego excess via laughter rather than blood. It’s notable that regimes with little humor (Nazis, ISIS, etc.) are the cruelest – they have no pressure valve. So encouraging humor and humility in power structures is a subtle resistance. In psychoanalytic terms, humor is a classic way to subvert the superego (Freud said jokes allow forbidden thoughts safely).

Moreover, rule of law and due process are Enlightenment achievements designed to constrain collective superego impulses. A fair trial, presumption of innocence, evidence standards – these cool down the hot immediacy of passion. When societies circumvent these (lynch mobs, show trials, cancel culture’s worst excesses), they regress to superego domination. So doubling down on procedural justice is key – though ironically it’s precisely superego fervor that tends to toss procedure aside as “inconvenient.” Thus, we need not just laws but a culture that values restraint over instant retribution. That is an ethical project: promoting virtues of patience, doubt, forgiveness – not as weakness but as wise guardrails.

Finally, some psychoanalysts might say fostering genuine mutual recognition and care in communities addresses the root of the problem (lack of empathy is what allows cruelty under moral banners). Building empathy dilutes the binary of pure good vs pure evil that superego frames rely on. If you can see the accused as a complex human (even if accountable), you’re less likely to revel in their suffering. Conversely, encouraging people to see the authority figures as mere humans too, not gods, prevents blind fanaticism. In other words, demystify both the Law and the Other – which brings the superego to a more moderate role.

In conclusion, the Paraphilic Superego concept reveals a cyclic pattern in civilization: the eternal return of the repressed in moral guise. Understanding it helps explain why periods of extreme symbolic violence (to use Žižek’s term) keep surfacing – and warns us that inside every righteous crusade, a beast of enjoyment may lurk. This does not mean all morality is a fraud – rather it implores us to be vigilant about our own investments in morality. Are we pursuing justice, or also getting off on the hunt? Are we defending the law, or using it as an excuse to play God? By asking such questions, we engage the part of ourselves that can resist the paraphilic superego – the part capable of self-awareness, compassion, and reason.

The history and contemporary forms we’ve surveyed shed light on this tension at the core of human subjectivity: the struggle between genuine ethical responsibility and the superego’s pernicious enjoyment. Progress may lie in tilting that balance towards the former – cultivating an ethic of humility and care, and an ability to recognize and reclaim our projections (owning our desires and aggressions instead of projecting them onto scapegoats). In so doing, we chip away at the obscene support that gives tyrants and mobs their dark power.

Ultimately, the study of the Paraphilic Superego shows us that to build a more humane world, we must not only change laws and policies but also reckon with the secret pleasures of punishing and purity that seduce the human psyche. It is a call to integrate our shadow rather than exorcise it onto others – arguably the most difficult, but most crucial, revolution of all: the revolution within.

Sources:

• Freud, Sigmund – Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)
• Lacan, Jacques – Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (on superego enjoyment)
• Žižek, Slavoj – “You May!”: The Postmodern Superego; The Fragile Absolute; etc.
• Havel, Vaclav – “The Power of the Powerless” (on living in truth vs. ideology’s lies)
• Historical accounts of Salem (e.g. Marion Starkey), French Revolution (Robespierre), Stalinist trials, Cultural Revolution (memoirs), #MeToo journalism.