Mark Edmondson is with us. His article Milton's Apple and Ours appeared in the April issue of First Things. Please read it. If you haven't. It's a wonderful piece. He is

professor of English at University of Virginia and author of many books including why read,

another why teach in defense of real education, and a very popular best-selling book,

teacher, the one who made the difference. His new book is The Age of

Guilt, the Super Ego in the Online World. That's our topic today. Welcome, Professor Edmondson.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on.

You begin by discussing, naming a certain tyrannical authority in human affairs. You take William Blake

and Sigmund Freud, with a couple of others, as your sources. What is this figure of power? Where

does it abide? Yeah. Well, Blake and Ford are its primary theorists, at least to me, but the book began in observation, and it began in the observation of my students, who are from my point of view extraordinarily super ego-ridden. The standard of performance is very, very high. And when they don't reach it,

the result is sometimes, well, it's depression, but sometimes high anxiety and really significant

mental illness. And Freud's terminology is so far out of keeping these days that I thought I'd introduce the superego,

maybe to people who didn't know much about it,

and almost start with a line of Adam Phillips's who says,

people need to understand, young people need to understand in particular,

there's something inside them that does not like them.

And once you have that understanding and once you've named it, you can go on to understand it a little bit better and maybe do something about it.

You know, I think an insight like that, that when you're facing someone who may be angry, indignant, acting out,

or in some emotional condition, and one can certainly react immediately to what you see,

but if you have an idea of it, look, this person has something inside him or her that is, that is

causing trouble. Now, maybe there's some good reasons for that, but whatever, but it,

that kind of insight gives depth to your understanding of, of those people across the table, you know?

Yeah, I think it does.

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