Some Developmental Aspects of the Superego1

The following observations of behaviour in childhood seem to throw some light upon the problem of the precursors of the superego and to reveal certain complex ego capacities that may be required for superego formation.

The particular ego capacity I would like to deal with at some length is that of empathy, which I would define in short as the capacity for making a partial identification with another person. In the instances under study here, this was seen as the capacity to experience the painful quality of an affect in the other person that may, in some instances, have been evoked in the observed person by an act of the observer. When a forerunner of the superego is involved, either the child ends up saying, "I am sorry, " in actual words, or else this is to be understood from the nature of his consoling behaviour toward the object. Although one can also infer concern for the object—or, in Kleinian terms, the restitution of the destroyed object—from the child's behaviour earlier in life, the affective statement, "I am sorry, " involves, I believe, a significant step forward in development. The child is conscious of the harm that he or someone else or something else has done to a person whom he loves; he is able to feel along with the person (empathize with the object), and then to express to the object his sympathy or concern. He is no longer simply overwhelmed by contagion, or merely shocked and blank in expression. He begins, on the contrary, with the expectation that, with his omnipotence, he can make it all better.

If one thinks for a moment in terms of the possible anxieties involved, one's thought is directed to the forerunners of the sadistic superego. In the "I am sorry, " there is surely embedded the statement, "Don't be angry at me, even though I have hurt you."

To return to empathy in broad theoretical terms, in reference to ego development this capacity is based upon a very firmly established differentiation of self and object, side by side with a t