Sounds like the Super-ego thing. When you use the term "Super-ego" now, people can't help thinking of a Superman or Super-egotist but it was diagramatic in Freud's Latin-derived schema of the psyche: the Super-ego sat on top of the Ego, stifling it, like a negative, parental voice.
It's the voice that says, "Don't chuck it, it might come in handy!" or "Don't go out without an umbrella!" or "Unplug the telly in a storm, because it might blow up!"
Just now and then, the Super-ego says something worth listening to. Mainly, it's a confounded pest to those afflicted! :wear:
There is a broadly similar concept in Transactional Analysis, which is an approach to therapy by giving the patient an easily visualised set of tools and mechanisms so that with some degree of self-awareness and guidance, they can recognise what is going on in their own heads and in their relationships and use strategies to improve or correct things.
TA has a 3 part personality model: Parent, Adult, and Child.
The Child has some similarities to the Id. It is that part of your personality that responds naturally and reflexively to the world around you. The child is the source of sudden flashes of need, anger, fear, laughter, etc.
The Adult is in some respects similar to the Ego. It is the rational and reasoning part of the mind.
The Parent is the one that is most like the Superego. The parent is your internalised interpretation of the things you have observed from authority figures such as your parents. It may be nurturing, or judgemental, or over protective (etc.) depending on how your parents (or other authority figures) acted in your formative years, but as interpreted and internalised through the filters of the person you were at the age that you were observing it.
What happens with the formation of the "Parent" is complex because of course your actual parents sometimes behave as if they were Parent, Adult, or Child, and you may completely misinterpret their actions or motives and internalise the wrong message.
A simple example of these three states of you personality is if you are driving your car and someone overtakes you and cuts you up.
If you are generally in a good mood, or if you are already in a bad mood, you may react as a CHILD. That may come out as hooting and gesticulating, but quickly forgetting about it, or it may come as a more aggressive reaction, or even as "taking the challenge" and racing them.
The same thing could happen in the same circumstances when you have your family in the back of the car, or you are on your way to an important meeting and you may react from the PARENT part of your personality. This may come out as something judgemental. ("Look at that idiot. People like that shouldn't be in the road.") You may well use expressions and a tone of voice that you heard your father or mother use.
If you are in the right place mentally when it happens, you may react as a rational ADULT. You may think, "That person is driving aggressively. I'll drop back a bit in case he does anything else dangerous. He could be racing someone so I'll check my mirror."
The point is that you are the same person, presented with the same basic stimulus according to where you happen to be "in your head" at that very moment.
There is a lot more to this. I have read extensively on TA, although many years ago. However, for this post I just wanted to highlight some of the similarities of the Parent ego state to Freud's idea of the Superego. They are not identical, but they are two models with similarities.
