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It is noteworthy and troubling that psychoanalysis has tended to avoid thinking very much about how moral reasoning actually works. As Donald Carveth convincingly demonstrates in “The Immoral Superego,” the Freudian model sidesteps the issue of how we actually make moral choices by displacing it, in question-begging fashion, onto the agency of the superego.
The Freudian superego may vary in quality from individual to individual, but it is essentially universal (Freud compares it to Kant's categorical imperative), because it functions by means of automatic judgments. According to the classical theory, these judgments reflect the authoritarian character of an internal psychic regime that has been erected upon the defeat of the Oedipal child and the repression of the child's natural feelings and sentiments in favour of the “law of the father” (which in practice may mean all sorts of things, depending upon the vagaries of the internalizable environment).
Carveth points out that traditionally in psychoanalysis, “we have focused on situations in which what we have been taught is moral while what we feel or desire is immoral or antisocial.” He asks why we have “mostly ignored situations in which what we have been taught is immoral while what we feel or desire is moral.” Of course, the superego theory would tend to select for such a bias, since it assumes that morality is lawful and imposed from above, rather than expressive and arising from “what we feel or desire.” Hannah Arendt's (1963/2006) portrait of Eichmann provides an example of the situations Carveth feels psychoanalysis overlooks. Eichmann was a questionable character to begin with, but the Hitlerian superego (German law and