My Mother as My Ego Ideals

As a psychoanalyst, I see ego ideals as a component of the superego. The idealizations of primal maternal care-

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taking I experienced growing up as the child of Eastern European immigrants developed into an appreciation of capable, giving, idealistic figures with whom I identified and wished to please.

Ego ideals are the model with which the growing child attempts to conform, in order to retain its love. The ego ideals I formed observing my parents, especially my mother, in action and conversation, and my need to win and retain their love and approval, involved how to behave in relation to others, with the assumption that the well-being of others involved self-sacrifice. Respect for individuality and needs of others was the most important element of morality. Yes, there was a degree of moral masochism involved, yet the underlying moral values are meaningful to me still. I have tempered the masochistic elements of my ego ideal, the result of years of intensive psychoanalysis, and 30 years of psychoanalytic clinical work. However, I retain gratitude for the moral values I learned and integrated into my ego ideal from both parents.

When I was a little girl, my parents told me iconic stories about their childhoods, rich with history, meaning, and moral and ethical resonance. My mother described a World War I childhood of desperate poverty, during which her younger brothers died of starvation. Every day her mother bought 100 loaves of bread, carried the sack of loaves several miles to the train station, and sold the bread to passengers. My mother, unable to attend public school because she was Jewish, wandered the streets unsupervised. After the turmoil of WWI, at age 10 she and her eight-month pregnant mother traveled third class rail from Poland to France, to set sail for the “golden land” of America.

Their arduous 1920 journey from Warsaw to New York City was traumatic. A group of drunken Polish soldiers grabbed my mother and grandmother, cursing the “dirty

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Jews”—threatening to throw them off the speeding train. Someone intervened, and the soldiers released them. My mother said she could not tell if they intended to frighten them, or to actually throw them to their deaths. In Germany, drunken German soldiers began to sexually abuse a Polish Christian girl traveling alone. Again, someone intervened, and she was not bothered again. My mother told me she learned from these events that any ethnic group could be abuser or abused. Victims and victimizers were not defined by their ethnicity, but by power and by evil intent.

I was born in Brooklyn, New York, August 7, 1942. My parents were gentle, self-educated, idealistic working-class Jews who married during the Great Depression. All my life I have identified with their value system. Whatever form my rebellions took during adolescence, I never rebelled against their essential world-view, because I shared their values—as do my children and grandchildren. Their values began with a basic egalitarianism, the belief that all human beings are to be related to as individuals. People are not to be pre-judged because of ethnicity, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, age, or country of origin. In other words, “avoid prejudice.” Other values include a respect for education, love of culture and the arts, Zionism, a knowledge of our Jewish heritage from a secular perspective, and left-liberal politics.

As I learned these ethical values at home, I learned more about the world in the street. When I was eight years old, as I walked home from school, a group of children from the neighborhood grabbed my book bag and threw it into nearly impenetrable bushes. They shoved me, yelling “Communist!” I didn’t know what the word meant, but I gathered it was shameful, something really bad. Around the same time I directly experienced anti-Semitism in my neighborhood. Jewish kids got dressed up on the Jewish holidays. Christian kids from a few blocks away, carrying

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handkerchiefs wrapped around small stones, which we called blackjacks, “blackjacked” the dressed up kid who could not fight back because it was forbidden to fight on a holy day and we might ruin our good clothes. I discovered being Jewish meant not only that I was like most of the people in my world, but that somehow I was unlike most people in the outside world.

By the age of nine, my atheist mother had taken me to the house of worship of every religion we had access to in New York City, including a Buddhist temple in Chinatown, and eventually to a Baha’i temple in Chicago, in order to teach me religious tolerance. She gave me a children’s book describing religious practices from all over the world, including Jainism, Zoroastrianism, and Shinto.

My ego ideal therefore is based, too, on my identification with my parents’ values, although certainly some disidentification was necessary to allow for my own personality. What I have admired most in my mother is her open mindedness, sociability, quest for knowledge, willingness to love, and courage. In my working class and lower-middle class, predominantly Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood, my mother actively campaigned for racial integration and tenants’ rights, representing the Tenants’ Council and other organizations. I aspire to all these traits, admire them in others, and experience a great sense of validation if I am recognized by others as possessing them.

The roots of my mother’s altruism fascinate me. She was born in a tiny Polish village in 1910, moved to Warsaw with her family in 1915, and came to the United States in 1920. During World War I, as Europe was devastated by war, poverty and hunger were widespread. My mother was the first-born child in her family, and the only child who survived in Europe, although two American-born children survived into adulthood. She saw her younger siblings die of

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malnutrition, watching them starve to death, while her strong constitution and the advantage of having had enough to eat in her earliest years allowed her to survive. Her imagination was fired by her early experiences of deprivation and loss, and she became dedicated to the advancement of all oppressed and deprived people. Nancy McWilliam’s study of the background of altruistic people having good-enough nurturance, significant loss in early childhood, and role models exemplifying strong value systems and clear moral principles (McWilliams, “The Psychology of Altruism,” Psychoanalytic Psychology 1 [1984], pp. 193-213) describes my mother.

I expected myself to be as idealistic and altruistic as my mother. Perhaps because I was American-born (while I grew up poor by American standards, I certainly was not poor by war-torn countries’ standards), I did not become the activist and idealist my mother became. My altruism has been satisfied by my choice of profession and my left-liberal politics and ballot choices.

My parents’ continued dedication to civil rights and egalitarianism formed a meaningful background to my developing value system. I learned what it meant to be a Jew by living it, and I imagined what it might be like to be African-American because of my parents’ willingness and ability to identify with others who had been victimized. My ego ideal grew to encompass the ability to imagine the life of another, essential to my eventual profession as a psychoanalyst. But most important to me, I learned that values are lived.

These accumulating experiences taught me as much, really more, about the value system of my society, culture, and country, as what I learned in school about the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the founding of the nation, the Civil War, our participation in World War I and World War II, the Great Depression, and the Holocaust. I became an American by living here, identifying with my im-

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migrant parents’ values.

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