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Celia Harding's last book about the superego, which she edited, is a capstone to a career with many notable achievements including the authorship of two prior books about the topics of sexuality and aggression: Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Perspectives (2001) and Aggression and Destructiveness (2006). She remarks that she completed this book as a “run-up” to her retirement (p. xi). I was surprised when I recently found it because I'd not seen it before, and I wondered if, coming out in 2019, it might have gotten a bit lost just as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded. The pandemic, of course, disrupted our field in so many significant ways that we are still accounting for. I read it eagerly because I have been thinking about the relevance of the superego in its multiple forms for contemporary analytic practice.
During my analytic training, which occurred in the early 2000s, I don't believe we ever discussed the superego. Perhaps it was taken for granted that we'd all had ample theoretical grounding in psychoanalytic concepts. Plus, psychoanalysis then was beginning to focus more intensely on relational issues in analysis. An increased awareness of the analytic “field” began to dominate the professional literature, along with an understanding of countertransference as a creation of the analytic field. Jung didn't write much about the superego; in the General Index to the Collected Works, the heading “superego” directs one to look instead under “Freud on the superego”, where there are fewer than a dozen references. But the superego has never gone away. I often find myself dealing with patients who, despite what anyone would regard as amazing achievements, including having wonderful families, continually punish themselves, feel empty, and who report an unrelenting devotion to their work. Additionally, I have seen over and over, in my practice and the consultation I provide to others, how parental judgments stemming from primitive or archaic superegos routinely undermine a child