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Dr Karin Stephen has stated lucidly some aspects of the psychoanalytic position. There are, however, sides of this problem which she did not cover, and which seem to me pertinent both to the understanding of the origin of the super-ego and to Dr Waddington's thesis.
Here in brief outline are some of the facts which have become clear to me in my psycho-analytic work with young children, and which I wish to bring to your notice. The feeling of ‘good’, in the baby's mind, first arises from the experience of pleasurable sensations, or, at least, freedom from painful internal and external stimuli. (Food is therefore particularly good, producing, as it does, gratification and relief from discomfort.) Evil is that which causes the baby pain and tension, and fails to satisfy his needs and desires. Since the differentiation between ‘me’ and ‘not-me’ hardly exists at the beginning, goodness within and goodness without, badness within and badness without, are almost identical to the child. Soon, however, the conception (though this abstract word does not fit these largely unconscious and highly emotional processes) of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ extends to the actual people around him. The parents also become embued with goodness and badness according to the child's feelings about them, and then are retaken into the ego, and, within the mind, their influence determines the individual conception of good and evil. This movement to and fro between projection and introjection is a continuous process, by which, in the first years of childhood, relationships with actual people are established and the various aspects of the super-ego are at the same time built up within the mind.
The child's mental capacity to establish people, in the first place his parents, within his own mind, as if they were part of himself, is determined by two facts: on the one hand, stimuli from without and from within, being at first almost undifferentiated become interchangeable; and on the other, the baby's greed, his