Presidential Address: Psychoanalytic Therapy in a Cultural Climate of Pessimism*

Psychoanalytic treatment has always been a difficult enterprise. The complexity of the human mind and the effort made by the patient to repress or suppress have made the job of the analyst and of the analysand not only uncertain and to a considerable extent unpredictable, but also lacking in uniformity and having ill-defined directions.

It seems to me that to all these well-known difficulties, others have been added in the last decade or so which make our task even more arduous and less rewarding. These difficulties stem from our present cultural climate. It is therefore appropriate to review them at a meeting like the present one, devoted mainly to the relations between psychoanalysis and the social sciences.

It is impossible in the time allowed to discuss all of these problems, but I shall focus on some which seem to me very important.

It is true that Freud himself gave credit to repressing socio-cultural forces that he included in the concept of superego as an incorporation of parental or societal authority. For Freud, the superego was an ally of society and of the ego insofar as it controlled the undesirable aspects of the id. But it is not about the role of the superego or the relation between superego and society that I intend to talk to you today. As a matter of fact, if I could say something about the present status of the superego, I would be inclined to say that today the superego is out, the id is in. What I want to discuss instead is how the general cultural climate