This paper examines the psychic fate of destructiveness by placing Freudian metapsychology in dialogue with ethnographic accounts of sacrificial ritual. In Freud's account, superego formation is bound to Oedipal resolution through identification with the prohibiting parent and the internalisation of moral constraint; redirected hostility contributes to guilt and, under specific conditions, to persecutory severity. Drawing on Kleinian and Bionian developments, the paper argues that the clinical problem posed by destructiveness concerns not its intensity but its capacity for symbolisation and containment. Through comparative reading of Evans-Pritchard's analysis of Nuer sacrifice and Lienhardt's account of Dinka ritual, the paper explores alternative symbolic architectures in which violence and destructive affect are externalised, redistributed, and collectively mediated rather than psychically privatised. These ethnographic materials are approached heuristically, not as therapeutic models, but as contrasts that clarify the historical specificity of psychoanalytic solutions to destructiveness. The discussion returns to the clinic to consider implications for severe superego formations and guilt without representation, situating psychoanalysis as a historically situated mode of containment rather than a universal psychic necessity.