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In Clinical Evolutions on the Superego, Body, and Gender in Psychoanalysis, a newly published collection of academic papers and short essays, Janice Lieberman, a psychoanalyst and social psychologist, draws our attention to the prevalence of a “new superego” and highlights the profound impact it has had on individuals, society, and the nature of our analytic work.
In the tradition of Lasch (1979) and Kernberg (1975, 2007), Lieberman argues that the new superego is manifest both individually, in terms of character structure and defenses, and culturally, across our society. She covers topics including superego/character issues: deception, greed, and envy; body, skin, and gender; relationships; and superego, gender, and body in art.
In writing about our current times, Lieberman notes that the superego is supposed to “perpetuate the culture” (p. 13), and that there has been a troubling “loss of integrity” (pp. 1-9) throughout society. She observes that a number of individuals come to treatment valuing image over relationships, and money and possessions over all else, and lays bare the question of what happens when the analyst has vastly different values than those of her patients. And it is a question that reverberates, even after the final pages have been digested and the book returned to the shelf.
Lieberman reminds us that psychological norms and clinical presentations have changed: while Freud and subsequent generations of analysts saw a preponderance of “hysterics” who were understood to be psychologically intact but needed to integrate painful affects and “reminiscences,” clinicians today encounter, as a result of the new superego, a different sort of fragility in individuals who routinely use more primitive defenses. And so, where guilt and responsibility once were, modern analysts now see deflecting, blame, shame, and externalization. The change in superego represents a major paradigm shift, and has profound implications for all aspects of modern life: from work an