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It is by now a commonplace that psychoanalysis has pursued in its own developmental emphasis something like the course followed by the individuals it studies, i.e., from id to ego. It will be interesting to see if this pattern continues, and if psychoanalytic science will now focus special attention on the many and complex phenomena it subsumes under the label superego. One sign pointing in precisely this direction was a Symposium on Moral Values and
Superego Functioning held in March of 1968 by the Society of Medical Psychoanalysts. Eight of the papers presented at that symposium appear in the present collection of twenty-three articles; of the remaining fifteen, five have been previously presented or published elsewhere, while just under half the papers in this volume were evidently written at the request of its editor, Seymour Post.
Another commonplace, this one not confined to psychoanalysis, is that in the all too regular practice of publishing collections of papers by different authors, the books so created often suffer from the lack of cohesion and focus that a single author might have brought to the task. They often turn out to be a kind of potpourri, with the reader having to hunt about for the unifying thread which should be one of the justifying reasons for publishing a book in the first place. In the case of such a literary patchwork quilt it is the difficult task of the editor to try to provide such a sense of unity and direction, perhaps more than usually so when the topic is as profoundly complex and as crucially relevant to current problems as the present state of our knowledge of moral values and the superego. Our newspapers as well as our patients make it 'perfectly clear' that what is moral is no longer self-evident; if psychoanalysis is to help clarify the issues involved it will need to know its own mind on the subject first.
What does emerge with clarity from this collection of papers is that there is a decided lack of agreement, even amo