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Edna O'Shaughnessy's paper appeared in Part 5, Volume 80 and was placed on the Internet for discussion earlier, on 13 October 1999. The paper had originally been presented as one of the W. R. Bion Centenary Lectures (London, 1997).
This is a highly clinical paper, difficult to convey in summary since it depends for its conviction on the analyst's clinical work recorded in fine detail. The paper presents a complex discussion of a particular psychopathology, while at the same time illustrating a particular technique that is itself the mode of investigation and enquiry. In her paper Edna O'Shaughnessy delineates what she calls an ‘abnormal superego’, different in form and function from the normal superego. This ‘abnormal superego usurps the status and authority of a normal superego’ and aims at the destruction of the ego itself by enticing the ego away from its objects.
Even before Bion described ‘the egodestructive superego’, there are implicit in the thinking of Freud, Abraham and Klein two discrete kinds of superego, which O'Shaughnessy links to the distinction she is making. In contrasting the superego of Freud's New Introductory Lectures—‘the advocate of a striving towards perfection’ (1933, p. 66)—with the superego he describes in The Ego and the Id—systematic torturing of the object … pure culture of the death instinct (1923)—the author thinks that Freud is noting a distinction of a quite different order from just the relative harshness of the superego. She writes that in some patients ‘the superego, even when primitive and strict, is a guiding force, but in others an abnormal form of the superego is a destroyer of the self, its relations and its objects’ (1999, p. 861). Klein too distinguished between a normal, though primitive and harsh, pre-oedipal superego and another early superego, formed in a defusion of the instincts unmodified by the normal processes of growth (1932, 1958).
O'Shaughnessy illustrates the conflict between these two forms of superego through