Four Contributions to the Theory of the Superego, Guilt, and Conscience: Freud, Women, and Morality: The Psychology of Good and Evil By E. Sagan New York:  Basic Books, 1988,  270 pp. A Dark Trace: Sigmund Freud on the Sense of Guilt By H. Westerink Leuven, Belgium:  Leuven University Press. Translation from the Dutch:  Language Centre, University of Groningen, 2005.  319 pp. You Ought To! A Psychoanalytic Study of the Superego and Conscience By B. Barnett Psychoanalytic Ideas Series, I. Wise & P. Williams (Eds.) London:  Institute of Psychoanalysis and Karnac Books, 2007,  173 pp. The Quest for Conscience and the Birth of the Mind By A. Reiner London: , , pp.

For decades what Freud (1933) himself regarded as “the preferred field of work for psychoanalysis,” namely “The problems which the unconscious sense of guilt has opened up, its connections with morality, education, crime and delinquency” (p. 61), has been neglected in favour of a preoccupation

with narcissism, shame, self, relatedness, and, most recently, the neurological foundations of mind. But recently, issues concerning the superego, guilt, and conscience appear to be returning from repression. No doubt this “comeback” amounts to a reflection in psychoanalysis of a shift in the wider culture: the “culture of narcissism” (Lasch, 1979) got us into hot water. What three decades ago Rangell (1980) described in The Mind of Watergate as the “syndrome of the compromise of integrity” led eventually to the 2008 crisis of “casino capitalism.” It's about time we began rethinking the psychoanalytic theory of morality. These issues are central to the four related, yet quite different, studies reviewed here.

In his neglected classic, Freud, Women and Morality: The Psychology of Good and Evil , the psychoanalytic sociologist Eli Sagan elaborated a theory of conscience and superego as distinct psychic functions developing in different ways and at different times. Whereas Freud viewed conscience as one of the three functions of the superego (the others being self-observation and maintenance of the ego ideal) and saw it as arising at around five years of age with the shattering of the Oedipus complex due to fear of castration by the rival, Sagan posited a pre-Oedipal origin of conscience grounded in the infant's love for, and identification with, the primary nurturer.

Although Klein is not central to Sagan's theorizing, her work supports his general argument. Kleinians have long distinguished persecutory guilt, which amounts to self-torment, from depressive guilt, which instead of being all about the self (as in shame and self-persecution) is about caring for and making reparatio