You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
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 shame, narcissism, self, relatedness, intersubjectivity and, most recently, the neurological foundations of mind. Prior to the 1960s, psychoanalysts viewed superego analysis as central to the analytic process. Some analysts never lost sight of Freudian and Kleinian insight into the dynamics of guilt and self-punishment, but I think it is fair to say that many of the newer psychoanalytic approaches that came to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s tended to downplay intrapsychic conflict in favour of an emphasis upon trauma, deprivation, abuse, and neglect by caretakers, that is, the ways in which we are more injured than injurious.
By the late 1950s, Sandler (1960) had already noticed that in the indexing of cases at the Hampstead clinic there was a “tendency to veer away from the conceptualization of material in superego terms”; he was wondering why “therapists have preferred to sort their clinical material in terms of object relationships, ego activities, and the transference, rather than in terms of the participation of the superego” (p. 129). Two decades later, Arlow (1982) observed, “Superego function has been shunted to one side by the current preoccupation with the persistence of the regressive reactivation of archaic idealizations” (p. 230) and that “the concept superego itself rarely appears as the central topic of a clinical or theoretical contribution”