Quotes from Joseph Sandler

repression, which "proceeds from the self-respect of the ego … [the person] has set up an ideal in himself by which he measures his actual ego [self]…. For the ego the formation of an ideal would be the conditioning factor of repression" (1914c, pp. 93-94).

Freud answers by suggesting that the harshness that can be shown by the superego is a result of the channelling of part of the id's destructiveness through the superego.