Chapter 10. The Genesis of the Super-Ego-Ideal

Rather than pause to explain the elision of super-ego and ego-ideal in the title, let us press on to the substance, hoping that by the end its significance will have become clear.

Freud took an evolutionary view of psychic structure and nothing in our scientific findings since his time militates against his thesis. The ego has evolved from the id by specialisation of function and the super-ego-ideal has evolved from the ego in like manner. Nothing speaks against this view, but what is the evidence for it? The answer is surely, “The totality of the psycho-analytical process!”. It is the phenomenon par excellence of our study, but as our method concerns itself particularly with psychopathology through study of the disturbances in the evolution of the transference, we are prone to overlook the wealth of evidence it lays before us regarding psychic health and growth. It is true that in our methodological preoccupation with the disturbances of the transference we operate on the assumption that by removing the obstacles to growth and by blocking divergent pathways of development we make it possible for the vital processes to push on unaided. But while cogent in theory, this often does not happen in fact. Something akin to what Freud called “psychic inertia” so opposes growth that an input of vitality in the form of analytic determination is required during the working through periods.

The first three years of a male patient's analysis had been very fruitful in resolving the problems of projective identification which had, since early childhood, imposed a pseudo-mature character upon him, manifest in smugness, pomposity, hypochondria and impoverished interests and imagination. Obsessive difficulties and a variety of minor phobias had yielded to the analysis of zonal confusions and of his strong passive anal trends. But the approach to the depressive position was bogged down in a prolonged period of inertia, well-characterised by a dream in which he was lying