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As a resident, many years ago, I was embarrassed when one of my respected mentors discovered that I did not know the difference between the terms "character" and "personality." I soon found myself zealously reading the numerous references suggested to me by that instructor, references that left me reverberating with the line from Goethe's Faust, Und bin so klug als wie zuvor ("and I ended up only as wise as I was before")—Faust's rumination about the end result of his scholarly labors. I have more or less come to terms with my intractable agnosia on that distinction, but now, with this book, I reencounter another minor definitional bane of my life: the relation between ego ideal and superego. I had learned early on that the ego ideal is the heir of primary narcissism and the superego the heir of the Oedipus complex. I struggled with understanding the clinical and theoretical implications of this formula, and tentatively concluded that in clinical work the individual variations in appearances, history, and quality of the both superego and ego ideal phenomena were so immense as to render this formula of only the most rudimentary value. Nor could I reliably or usefully distinguish between ego ideal and superego, and most of my supervisors seemed to have little investment in what discussion I tried to generate on that subject. Common sense or introspective psychology tells us that we have aspirations, yearnings to be a certain way or a certain kind of person, as well as prohibitions and exhortations. The psychoanalytic attempt to conceptualize these notions more precisely has been of interest and of significance, especially in uncovering some of the seamy sides of personal morality. But it has not succeeded in creating something much beyond a very rough map and very crude set of instructions, as it were, for exploring, understanding, and occasionally modifying the moral and spiritual pushes and pulls in the lives of our individual patients. The glory of the ps