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The notion of the superego as an autonomous depersonalized agency includes the commonly accepted idea that there is a sharp demarcation between the affect of fear of punishment and the affect of guilt. This distinction includes the idea of a developmental hierarchy which classifies guilt as a more developmentally advanced affective state than fear of punishment. Guilt is considered to be indicative of superego functioning (a higher developmental level), whereas anxiety in the form of fear of retribution and/or fear of punishment is thought to reflect mental functioning prior to superego development. In fact, Anna Freud (1970) states that “the advance from anxiety to guilt is made as the crowning step in [the] chronology of infantile fears” (p. 32).
As a result of the ubiquitous notion in the analytic literature of the developmental hierarchy of affects, the group spent a great deal