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Joseph Sandler (1960) was among the first to recognize the flight from the superego that characterized psychoanalysis for almost half a century. Ironically, at the very time it was studying narcissistic characters incapable
of bearing guilt, psychoanalysis was itself evading it. But early in the new millennium the repressed began to return in psychoanalytic discourse in the form of books and articles with titles such as You Ought To! A Psychoanalytic Study of the Superego and Conscience (Barnett, 2007); Guilt and Its Vicissitudes: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Morality (Hughes, 2008); The Quest for Conscience and the Birth of the Mind (Reiner, 2009); The Still Small Voice: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Guilt and Conscience (Carveth, 2013); “Reflections on the Absence of Morality in Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice” (Frattaroli, 2013); and Guilt: Origins, Manifestations, and Management (Akhtar, 2013). (See Carveth 2012 for a review of some of these titles.)
In my view, the fact that this intellectual shift took place virtually simultaneously with the 2007-2008 crisis of “casino capitalism” was no coincidence: our thinking forms part of the ideological superstructure that, however much its elements may correspond to varying degrees with inner and outer “reality,” is profoundly influenced, if not ultimately determined, by the socioeconomic substructure. This is as true of psychoanalytic thought as of any other. While “the culture of narcissism” (Lasch, 1979) created by consumer capitalism put the study of narcissistic pathology on our agenda, it simultaneously infected us with it, giving rise to our five-decade-long “forgetting” of the superego and of what I distinguish as the conscience (Carveth, 2013).
In Reshaping the Psychoanalytic Domain: The Work of Melanie Klein, W. R. D. Fairbairn, and D. W. Winnicott (1989) Judith Hughes surveyed the emergence of psychoanalytic object-relations theory. In Guilt and Its Vicissitudes (2008) she focuses in depth upon the evolvi