Superego Manifestations in the Treatment of a Four-Year-Old Boy

This presentation evolves from both a theoretical and a therapeutic dilemma that I experienced in my casework and psychotherapeutic efforts in work with preschool youngsters. For a number of years I had difficulty in reconciling Freud's famous dictum, “the superego is the heir to the Oedipus complex,” with clinical manifestations of two-and-a-half-, three-, and four-year-old youngsters who appeared very preoccupied with standards of “good” and “bad,” “right” and “wrong,” and “touch” and “see, don't touch.” I often pondered the latent significance of these youngsters' remarks, wondering whether they were reflections of imitation and identification, “pre-superego” signs, or self-preservative ego manifestations.

Aside from their theoretical import, locating the essential derivation of exhortations like “see, don't touch,” “see, don't break,” would inevitably have to call forth differential treatment approaches. Particularly were the treatment implications crucial when working with adopted or foster children, where appropriate guidance to “significant others” in the child's environment could have an enormous impact on the malleable youngsters' development. A final concern which had both theoretical and treatment pertinence was a frequent observation, namely, that children whose over-all functioning seemed to be at a pre-Oedipal and sometimes a preverbal level nonetheless demonstrated what appeared to be clear cut superego manifestations. One could hypothesize here either a regression, fixation, or lack of maturation of many ego functions with the superego not participating in the regression, fixation, or lack of maturation or else,