The distinction between “medicine” and “power”, following Julian Jaynes’ Bicameral Theory of Mind, and Kuhn’s historical analysis of  paradigm evolution, brings us back to the pre-Industrial Era mind.  At that time, “power” more or less translated to what we, in Western cultures, would call “therapeutic power.’  The concept would have had no domestication dynamic.  Power was not yet recognized as a separate “tool” of the tribe, much less the individual.  It seems a likely corollary that power-over is the newest of three cultural understandings, with power-with-others emerging out of the more ancient root of power-from-within-us.  “Us”, back in the era of 2,000 B.C. (Eastern) to 1,000 B.C. (Western) emerged as analogically defined by the neuron-patterns “Not-Other”.

A richly fertile blend of therapy and power is rooted in the Old Brain/Right Hemisphere Dominant cultures, so that the ability to perceive “not me” was itself the core identity of what later became differentiated as “therapy,” “healing,” and “not my power.”

The first cultural experience of power, then, was the ability of “self-awareness;” a “self” that was identifiable from “not-self” because of a perceived narrative difference between what “self” could control, and what self could not autonomously control.  If “I” can’t predict it, then that is “Other.” There would have been no possibility of awareness, or confusion between “independent power” and “interdependent, or mutual, power.”

The original “self-awareness”, consciousness of a distinguishable self, would have emerged from an infrastructure of “we-ness,” an emotive confluence with mutual synergy between “self” and “other.” That was the original experience of undifferentiated “power.”  The power to be an individual evolved from the ancient cultural gnosis of the power to be together, the experience of “community.” That cultural experience, evolved as the “exegetical” infrastructure for differentiating the “eisegetical-I.”  This places the development of Freud’s superego well before the development of the “id.”  It would seem that Freud’s theory transposed development history.

I am curious, though, why would psychologists have not noticed that particular developmental transposition since about the time of Piaget’s influence on child development theory?  Oh yes, I see, Freud was the more “tried and true” scientist, which would also explain why Piaget’s interpretations of pre-linguistic learning remained controversial for so very long.