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Do psychoanalysts still care about psychic structure? It's a fair question to ask at a time when analysts increasingly are drawn to being “near”—near to the here-and-now process, near to transference and countertransference, near to enactments and to the meeting of two minds. Analysts today are much more likely to speak of the self and subjectivity than of ego and superego. In today's world, the idea of psychic structures may strike analysts as distant instead of near, old instead of “now.”
In “You Ought To!”: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Superego and Conscience, the British psychoanalyst Bernard Barnett makes a valuable contribution to contemporary analytic discourse with this thoughtful study of the superego, one of the two great structures of the mind (the other being the ego) engaged in managing an individual's instinctual life. Readers of Barnett's slender but rich volume will be reminded of the remarkable developmental story of the superego in which early, important external relationships are transmuted into an enduring internal structure. Fueling this transformation during childhood are primal anxieties that, incurring parental disapproval, will have traumatic consequences, either the loss of parental love or bodily injury such as castration. When those fears come to a head with the oedipus complex, the superego becomes firmly established (it is, famously, “heir to the oedipus complex”) to enforce good behavior by the child. In essence, by internalizing—and structuralizing—parental injunctions the child chooses parental love and protection over gratification of desires.
If love of the parents during childhood launches the formation of the superego, “murder” of the parents spurs its consolidation during adolescence. Both Loewald and Winnicott refer to the emancipatory murder of the parents that is necessary for an individual to develop a superego independent of parental authority. For Loewald (1980), it is not “murder” (in quotes) but an actual form of murder.