ABSTRACT
How is it that as humans we reach for an ideal of who we should be and hold others up to our individual, national, or cultural ideals is the subject of Chapters 2 and 3. In asking about the “role of the ideal in everyday life,” Noshpitz shows his creative ability to frame a question in a way that facilitates imaginatively playing with the concept. Through this framing, he is able to consider how ideals are a part of learning even as infants strive to walk independently, an adolescent boy asks a girl out on a first date, or an adult goes for his first job interview. In these and countless other real-life examples, he argues that the ideal is always present, sometimes prominently in the foreground as, for example, when the young basketball player practices hours on end to achieve a semblance of perfection like his idol, and sometimes quietly in the background as in the models or standards that are available for imitation (and encouragement). This is a fresh take on the ideal grounded in everyday life, and, as such, it is easy to underestimate the profound implications of Noshpitz’s statement that in every act of learning or developmental progress “there is always the inner awareness of what this would look like if perfected, how it could best be done, how it could most closely be made to approach the ideal.” He is arguing that having a model, someone to imitate, is a prime motivator of learning and that it is peculiarly human to compare ourselves with such standards as an individual and group motivator for moving forward. From this commonsense approach to the ubiquity of ideals, he makes the theoretical argument that an individual collection of ideals is contained within the mental structure of the superego and that this individual collection, or ego ideal, shapes and regulates personality.
