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Arnold Rothstein began by stressing the centrality of the superego concept in Freud's development of the structural theory. In introducing the concept, Freud placed the idea of an unconscious wish for punishment, or sense of guilt, on a par with that of the drives, which had been the primary motivational system of the topographic theory. Rothstein stressed that in spite of significant differences within and between competing schools of psychoanalysis, the concept of the superego as a structure has been used by analysts of all persuasions in the organization of their clinical experience. The majority of analysts today, he said, including Dorothy Holmes on this panel, still value the concept; others, including the panelists Charles Brenner and Ernest Wolf, question its value.
Kohut, according to Rothstein, maintained that the conceptualizations of mental-apparatus psychology can explain structural neurosis and guilt/depression, whereas the psychology of the self is necessary to explain the pathology of the fragmented self and the depleted self; he believed that the theory of drive primacy and drive taming and the theory of movement from dependency to autonomy and from narcissism to object love have burdened the practice of psychoanalysis with hidden moral and educational goals. Wolf, noted Rothstein, continues to make this distinction between Freud's “guilty man” and Kohut's “tragic man,” whereas Brenner has recently questioned the validity of dividing the mind into separate structures or agencies. He maintains that the attribute of morality to a special agency has hampered the analysis of moral conflicts. Brenner holds also that guilt should be considered one of the calamities of childhood, the calamity of parental disapproval, instead of a special category of the mind.