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HOW DO YOU CONCEIVE OF SUPEREGO development? Do you view factors from various stages as influencing superego development and functioning? How do you distinguish between a developmental arrest and a regression? How do you distinguish between superego lacunae or defect and behavior deriving from defensive identification? Is superego development interminable? What is the nature of the analytic experience on superego integration and function? These are some questions Rothstein asked in his introduction.
Rothstein pointed out that Freud's superego construct resulted, in part, from his efforts to understand behavior he conceptualized as beyond the pleasure principle. In so doing he suggested that once the superego was formed it assumed a role equal to that of the id as a motivational system, and that it was in interminable and multifaceted conflict and relation with both the ego and the id. However, conceptual differences remain with respect to superego genesis, functioning, and relation to the mode of therapeutic action of psychoanalysis. Although Freud emphasized the resolution of the Oedipus complex as the central organizing point in superego development, he also felt that inherited prehistory, identifications with parental standards, and postoedipal parental substitutes contributed. Hartmann and Loewenstein felt that the superego was not structuralized until it functioned autonomously to insure adherence to moral codes and resisted regressive instinctualization. Such a superego, they maintained, was derived from the resolution of oedipal conflict. This insistence, Rothstein pointed out, has contributed to further problems in superego