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A remarkably persistent assumption about the superego runs through psychoanalytic theory despite the abundance of historical examples of cruelty and horror committed in the name of morality itself. Corruption of the superego, superego lacunas, maladaptive or unconsolidated superego formation, sadistic superego functioning, or the disappearance of the superego have all been invoked to explain inhumane behaviour at both individual and social levels.
The originator of the concept of the superego, Freud, was already deeply ambivalent about its moral status. He described the superego as potentially delusional: “From the point of view of instinctual control, of morality, it may be said of the id that it is totally non-moral, of the ego that it strives to be moral, and of the superego that it can be super-moral and then become as cruel as only the id can be… It is like a displacement, a turning round upon his own ego. But even ordinary, normal morality has a harshly restraining, cruelly prohibiting quality.” (1923, 54)
Despite Freud's own insistence on the cruelty and excess of moral conscience, much of the subsequent psychoanalytic literature - particularly within dominant developmental and institutional frameworks - has tended to construe the superego as the resolution of the Oedipus complex, embedding it within a teleological narrative of moral maturation.
Versions of this developmental assumption appear across a wide range of psychoanalytic traditions. In ego psychology, Hartmann (1946) conceives superego formation as part of the ego's increasing adaptation to reality, whereby instinctual life becomes progressively regulated through the internalization of parental authority. Anna Freud (1927, 1928, 1966), while acknowledging that the superego may become excessively harsh, nevertheless distinguishes mature neurotic conflict, organized around unconscious guilt and an established superego, from more primitive conflicts governed by external authority. In both accounts, guilt