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On reading Althea J. Horner's commentary, I came to the paragraph where she quotes from Arthur Miller, “And suddenly he remembered: ‘I don't need you any more!' His own words came back, shrill and red with fury.” Before finishing the brief paragraph, my eyes were filled with tears. That struck me as odd. Why was the paragraph getting to me? I was not familiar with the Miller story. But there I was getting emotional. Miller asks a question of his narrator, “Why was that so terrible?”
The answer, Horner argues, is that just as the drive to attach is inherent to our blood, so too is the sense of good and evil inherent to attachment. And thus the superego is inherent to neonatal attachment. The neonate from the moment that he or she first reaches to be held is fashioning superego forerunners. Attachment, an ego function if you will, cannot be separated from the assignment of value, a superego function if you will.
And to leave a good enough caregiver—whether that caregiver be mother, father, sibling, lover, friend—confers a certain level of autonomy (“He could tie his laces now”), but it also includes a recognition—that in leaving, one leaves someone who was, is, on some level, good. It is a value recognition. It is a superego recognition. And as Horner points out, it is the Darwinian recognition that with our first attachment comes the basis for all of our subsequent evaluations of good and evil. It is a recognition that in that brief unexpected moment, filled my eyes with tears.