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Values play a fundamental role in shaping the emotional, intellectual and moral life of the individual. By values, I mean those ideas, ideals, attributes, attitudes and beliefs which are so intensely valued by the individual that they become motivating forces for behavior and standards for judgment. “Value,” writes Bloch (1960), “is ubiquitous since it is an attribute of all things — actions, objects and thoughts.” He used the term as equivalent to “preference.”
Although Freud made a great contribution with his concept of the superego, which is a primitive and unconscious aggregate of values, psychoanalysis and dynamic psychiatry have insufficiently recognized the paramount importance of values.
Hartman , who, in Psychoanalysis and Moral Values, called attention to the concept of values, believed that moral evaluations (except for so-called “health values”) are beyond psychoanalysts' concern and competence. Ricoeur (1974), in a chapter called “Psychiatry and Moral Values,” contends that “psychoanalysis cannot deal with the problem of value” (p. 988). True, The American Academy of Psychoanalysis devoted a whole meeting to the topic, “Psychoanalysis and the Problem of Values” in 1959 (Masserman, 1960), and the Society of Medical Psychoanalysts held a symposium on the topic of “Moral Values and the Superego Concept in Psychoanalysis” (Post, 1972).
A number of authors have written books and papers on this subject, including Flugel , Feuer , Nielson , Redlich (1960), Erikson (1964), Arieti (1972, 1975), Bieber (1972), and Ottenheimer (1972), to mention a few; but none of these works has attracted the attention the subject merits. The end