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Don Carveth is a training analyst with the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society and a professor of sociology at York University in Canada. I first came across him through his YouTube videos, where he shares lectures and discussions on the history of psychoanalytic thinkers as well as his take on more contemporary discussions. It is unusual for an analyst to be so active online and to share so many resources, and much of what he shares feels accessible to the interested.
This book is a short and pithy pulling together of his ongoing areas of interest in psychoanalysis and where they intersect with the social. Namely, his re-evaluation of conscience and morality, and a return to the clinical importance of superego issues and unconscious guilt and their broad impacts upon our social world. At its core, this book has a story, and it goes like this: Freud made a mistake in his structural model when he included conscience in the superego. Rather, conscience should be understood as its own unique structure, capable of internal conflict with other structures. Carveth seeks to untangle the theoretical and conceptual difficulty he believes that we have inherited from Freud’s structural model, and in doing so, he tells us that he is dusting off a little-known book by Eli Sagan titled Freud, Women, and Morality: The Psychology of Good and Evil (1988), a text which he sees as having been overlooked as the first to differentiate the superego and conscience as different psychic structures. Carveth suggests that Totem and Taboo, Freud’s founding myth of the primal father and the introduction of the moral injunction, contains a contradiction: that the superego emerges both as the cause and effect of guilt. Klein attempts to rectify this by bypassing the need for the phylogenetic story and instead turning toward the infant’s experience of the breast, with all the complexity of building towards whole object relations and reparative concern.
Carveth argues that many theorists describe the deve