Dissecting the Superego

Moralities Under the Psychoanalytic Microscope

Celia Harding, Celia Harding

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351117081
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Psychologie
• Categoría: Psychanalyse

Dissecting the Superego: Moralities Under the Psychoanalytic Microscope offers a comprehensive overview of how the superego, the workings of our moral faculties, may be understood and clinically utilised in contemporary practice.

Drawing on the latest psychoanalytic thinking – as well as neurobiological, psychological and ethical perspectives - this book reinstates the superego as a central concept, and gives a clear guide to its importance in the modern world. In addition to the theoretical background of this construct, the contributors provide a clear guide to the importance of the superego in a range of pathological and everyday scenarios, and particularly in clinical settings.

With an emphasis on the wider social and cultural context, Dissecting the Superego: Moralities Under the Psychoanalytic Microscope will be of interest to trainee and qualified psychotherapists, social workers, youth offender and probation workers and ethicists.

Part I

Theoretical and developmental considerations

Chapter 1

The good, the bad and the superego

From punishment to reparation¹

R. D. Hinshelwood

Freud’s ‘discovery’ of the superego in 1923 gave psychoanalysts a clear, and intensely useful conception. Though the idea of a moral conscience is timelessly old, Freud gave a perspective on the origins of that mental agency in the course of development of a child’s mind. He drew on the almost limitless possibilities of the Oedipus complex which he had been exploiting conceptually for 25 years. In a subtle way Freud created a non-evaluative function for the capacity of humans to evaluate everything.

The concept however was not without criticism. Ernest Jones, as soon as 1926, raised a number of questions, including the curious issue that if the superego was an internalisation of the loved primary object, the mother for the little boy, how come it had the characteristics of a harsh, castrating father? In a nearly lost paper by Karen Stephen (1945) written in the 1940s, she queried how the supremacy of the reality principle, which entailed foregoing the Oedipal love, led to some agency based on the extremely unrealistic fear of castration, since few little boys have witnessed (or experienced) castration in reality. Nevertheless, the clinical usefulness of the concept was very considerable as it brought morality and ethics within the purview of psychoanalysis. Heinz Hartman (1960), a central figure in the development of classical psychoanalysis, ego-psychology, admired the concept for this reason. It was essential, he claimed, to distinguish the neutral attitude of the scientific psychoanalyst from the evaluation a patient makes as a moral person. Lack of such a distinction

is bound to create confusion in the evaluations of mental health. It promotes a greater arbitrariness in these evaluations because it burdens the concept of mental health with a great many extraneous valuations, moral or even political.

(p. 248)

To this end, Hartman meticulously detailed characteristics of mental health which he regarded as morally neutral – capacity for enjoyment and work, absence of pathology, rationality, adaptation, reality-testing, integration, autonomy, ego-strength.

This materialist aspect of the theory of the superego had attracted the attention of C. H. Waddington (1942), a Nobel Prize–winning biologist. He was so impressed by Freud’s theory that he organised a book of commentaries and criticisms, from philosophers, theologians and psychoanalysts – the psychoanalysts being Karin Stephen (1942) and Melanie Klein (1942). The intriguing possibility for him was that Freud explained how morality evolved biologically. It is a product of nature, and not from divine counsel, or philosophical endeavour. Freud’s theory seemed to support an argument for a natural ethics. That is, ethical conduct arises in nature itself, through evolution and in personal biological development. It is the capacity to embrace morals and ethics at all which has been the evolutionary achievement; although, to be sure, specific moral and ethical principles are instilled into that capacity by the society in which the person is brought up. Not surprisingly the authors of the critiques Waddington (1942) gathered came to no general consensus at all! Neither theologians nor philosophers liked it much.

For quite unrelated reasons, shortly after the description of the structural model in 1923 psychoanalysis began to take a different course in London, compared to Vienna. The odd and rather Spartan form of upbringing of children in the English upper middle classes, from which most British psychoanalysts then came, led to a significant interest in child development amongst the members of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and it led to the invitation to Melanie Klein to visit and settle in London. Klein was an early exponent of child psychoanalysis, inventing her ‘play technique’. She was not shy to present new observations and theories, and to stand by them with a determined vigour. She argued that the development of children could be better understood by the analysis of children. That is, we can observe better during the time when their development is actually happening, rather than inferring back to childhood from work with adults.

One of Klein’s boldest revisions in the 1920s was completely to rewrite the origins of the superego. Because she was unwilling to be branded a dissident as Jung, Adler and Rank had been recently, she rather tactfully implied that her re-conceptualisations were minor adjustments to Freud’s established theories. Her tact was probably fairly quickly seen through but after she moved to London in 1926 she had the firm patronage of Ernest Jones. So, she described Rita thus:

As early as her second year, those with whom Rita came into contact were struck by her remorse for every naughtiness, however small, and her hypersensitiveness to any sort of blame.

(Klein, 1926: p. 132)

Rita was only 2¾ years of age, very young on Freud’s timetable of development; but ‘her inhibition in play proceeded from her sense of guilt’ (p. 29). But for Freud, the Oedipus complex develops in the third year of life, the genital phase; and it is only after that, as a resolution to the Oedipus complex, that the Oedipal parents are given up and introjected. That is, the superego and the guilt it provokes come later, after the Oedipus complex has arisen and declined. The superego is, as Freud said, the ‘heir’ to the Oedipus complex.

However, Klein was finding differently:

[Rita] did not dare to play at being the mother because the baby-doll stood for her amongst other things for the little brother whom she had wanted to take away from her mother, even during the pregnancy. But here the prohibition of the childish wish no longer emanated from the real mother, but from an introjected mother, whose rôle she enacted for me in many ways and who exercised a harsher and more cruel influence upon her than her real mother had ever done.

(p. 132)

So, it was clearly a matter of guilt, and therefore of that internal moral agency. Moreover, the symptoms Klein traced to the Oedipus complex had arisen even earlier than the analysis:

One obsessional symptom which Rita developed at the age of two was a sleep-ceremonial which wasted a great deal of time. The main point of this was that she insisted on being tightly rolled up in the bed-clothes for fear that ‘a mouse or a butty might come through the window and bite off her butty (genital)’. Her games revealed other determinants: the doll had always to be rolled up in the same way as Rita herself, and on one occasion an elephant was put beside its bed. This elephant was supposed to prevent the baby-doll from getting up; otherwise it would steal into the parents’ bedroom and do them some harm or take something away from them. The elephant (a father-imago) was intended to take over the part of hinderer.

(p. 132)

If the play is seen as a display of the internal world of unconscious phantasy, father (elephant) stood for the inhibiting superego:

This part the introjected father had played within her since the time when, between the ages of eighteen months and two years, she had wanted to usurp her mother’s place with her father, to steal from her mother the child with which she was pregnant, and to injure and castrate the parents. The reactions of rage and anxiety which followed on the punishment of the ‘child’ during such games showed, too, that Rita was inwardly playing both parts: that of the authorities who sit in judgement and that of the child who is punished.

(p. 132)

Clearly, the ‘part the introjected father had played within her’ had begun at that earlier period of development (between 18 months and two years). If this threatening father was inside her, then the internalisation of the Oedipal parents had occurred before the accepted moment in the third and fourth years when the Oedipus complex resolves. So, the damaging rage and its inhibition are both parts of mental life inside the child as far back as 18 months. And thus, the child already has an inhibiting figure (felt as father) way before Freud said the Oedipal conflicts come into play. Rita was a patient in 1923 (when Klein was still in Berlin; Frank, 2010), precisely the same year as Freud’s The Ego and the Id when he first postulated the superego and the classical structural model.

So Klein was finding from early on that the superego existed prior to Freud’s resolution of the Oedipus conflict. And this turned Freud’s theory on its head. In fact, Klein went on to postulate that the superego formed even earlier, and indeed she eventually (1932) used Freud’s theory of the death instinct (despite her rather eccentric understanding of instincts). She drew on Freud to the extent that the death instinct is the origin of the negative feelings towards threatening objects, and is the origin of erotic masochism when fused with the libido; but she then claimed:

It seems to me that the ego has yet another means of mastering those destructive impulses which still adhere to the organism. It can mobilize one part of them as a defence against the other part. In this way the id will undergo a division which is, I think, the first step in the formation of instinctual inhibitions…. We may suppose that a division of this sort is rendered possible by the fact that, as soon as the process of incorporation has begun, the incorporated object becomes the vehicle of defence against the destructive impulses within the organism.

(pp. 183–184)

This is the first of the rare occasions when Klein uses the concept of the death instinct. She keeps close to Freud’s ideas of deflection outwards (projection) and fusion; but then describes something absolutely new – a split in the id, which is a completely different view of the origin of the superego. There is no reason given as to why the id divides in order to combat its deflected rage, and as we shall see Freud was not too happy about that. But, it did present a possible solution to a problem with Freud’s views which he had not solved – and he did acknowledge her solution.

The problem that Freud had noted is that the superego is not a simple internalisation. The introjected parents, once they function as internal inhibitors, are much harsher than the actual parents ever were – the point Karin Stephen (1945) had noted. Internally Father is a castrator, but in actuality Father probably never did such things. So Klein’s solution was that the very beginnings of the superego are a hang-over from the self-directed destructiveness of the death instinct; it is that self-destructiveness which aims to bring the ego to death. Part of that instinctual self-harm forms a root from which the superego develops.

Freud noted Klein’s idea, in the three brief mentions of Melanie Klein in his published work (Freud, 1930; p. 130n, 137n; Freud, 1931: p. 242), and acknowledged this as a possible cause of the curious added harshness. However, Freud recognised this, correctly, as a major re-writing of the classical development of the child:

This dating of [the origins of the superego], which would also necessarily imply a modification of our view of all the rest of the child’s development, does not in fact correspond to what we learn from the analyses of adults.

(Freud, 1931: p. 242)

He hesitated to accept it completely. Nevertheless, he did seem slightly concerned about sticking with the evidence from adults.

The early positions and the reality principle

Klein however maintained the continuity between the very early ‘bad’ internal objects, ‘even the earliest incorporated objects form the basis of the superego and enter into its structure’ (Klein, 1935: p. 151). She graphically described this inner persecution,

If we accept this view of the formation of the superego, its relentless severity in the case of the melancholic becomes more intelligible. The persecutions and demands of bad internalized objects; the attacks of such objects upon one another (especially that represented by the sadistic coitus of the parents); the urgent necessity to fulfil the very strict demands of the ‘good objects’ and to protect and placate them within the ego, with the resultant hatred of the id; the constant uncertainty as to the ‘goodness’ of a good object, which causes it so readily to become transformed into a bad one – all these factors combine to produce in the ego a sense of being a prey to contradictory and impossible claims from within.

(p. 151)

This is from her paper that introduces the depressive position, but she elaborated it ten years later when she described the paranoid-schizoid position and the schizoid mechanisms. The picture is that in both depressive and schizoid states the person at first feels very persecuted, to the point of paranoia. Klein’s deduction from this is that severe mental health conditions imply a hang-over of very early functioning. For Klein, it is not so much about the direction the libido is aimed at, but in her terms, it is the value of the object, its intentions towards the early self/ego, and the intensity of their intentions.

In other words, the infant begins life with considerable potential fears, which the primitive ego has great difficulty dealing with. This is the paranoid-schizoid position where objects are all-good or all-bad, and swiftly mutate from one to the other. So, at the beginning of life the infant does not recognise reality very clearly, in part because the real world is unknown to it, and it has yet to master its distance perceptions to survey the actual others; and it is partly because it needs to distort reality in order to cope with its fears. For Klein this primitive world is not just that of the severely mentally ill, but the most significant elements, especially the paranoia and the unreality, are usual enough for all humans at that stage. It is just that they hang over for some of us as the torturing condition of mental illness. And also in the form of the superego.

Psychotic anxieties and defences

It is clear that the reality of others is potentially distorted at, and from, the beginning. The infant ego has to employ its defences to cope with such experiences, and as Klein described in 1946, these include various forms of splitting, projection and introjection. Such processes do not enhance the capacity to see reality, but are aimed at constructing a more comfortable ‘reality’, and indeed the reality of the self and one’s identity. They ignore or distort reality, because they involve phantasies of an omnipotent kind (see Freud, 1909 and his description of ‘the omnipotence of phantasy’, in the Ratman case). It is the tampering with reality which gives rise to the term ‘psychotic’, because a break with reality is the hallmark of psychosis.

Those phantasies tend to see extremely or completely ‘good’ things, or the opposite, extremely ‘bad’ objects. More than that the ego tends to see itself in similar ways, extremely good or extremely bad in itself. Good and bad are initially experienced in terms of comfort and discomfort at a bodily level. However, that bodily initiative, in the form of the superego, transmutes into a moral evaluation as time goes on. The sense of being under attack in the hands of a bad object which threatens life is first of all inborn in the biology, according to Klein, and only later do family patterns of behaviour adhere to the superego.

Equally inborn is dependence on the wonderfully good object which typically the infant sees as counteracting the bad one, especially at first in the form of the feeding breast. So, the blissful taking in of milk, is more than just bodily feeding: Klein described how the infa...