An Explanation of Superego Functioning in the Development of a Bourgeois Revolutionary: A Review of La Vita Interiore

Young people from the upper middle classes have sometimes joined radical and even violent political movements in the United States, Italy, Germany, and in Latin America. There have been some attempts to study young people caught up in radical movements. For example, Keniston's Young Radicals (1968) and Liebert's Radicals and Militant Youth (1971) are both descriptions of the U.S. radical student movement of the late 1960s. They investigated the moderately radical student groups who, by and large, still had the expectation that the system could be changed. The students Keniston evaluated often showed commitment to their parent's values. Powers (1971) presented an account of the development of a young revolutionary student (Diana) whose political evolution paralleled that of the Weathermen (a U.S. radical group who advocated and planned violence). The author places Diana in a political rather than psychological context so that much of her personal motivation remains a mystery.

The Italian author, Alberto Moravia, in his novel La Vita Interiore (1978) provides what is essentially a case study, describing how a young girl of the upper middle class in Rome becomes a revolutionary. La Vita Interiore, whose English title is Time of Desecration (translated by A. Davidson, 1980), shows how the girl's conflicted superego dictates and controls her life.

Although not formally trained in psychoanalysis or political theory, Moravia was an avid student of, and participant in, the intellectual