You Ought To!: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Superego and Conscience

by Bernard Barnett

Overview

The superego is one of those psychoanalytic concepts that has been assimilated into ordinary language, like repression, the unconscious and the Oedipus complex. Because it has become such a familiar notion, its complexity may not always be appreciated, nor the controversy that it can inspire. Its origins, for example, its timing in the course of development, whether and how it is influenced by gender all these questions and others have been the source of lively disagreement. For psychoanalysts it is a fundamental concept of their discipline, but it belongs to a meta psychology whose value is often questioned, and opinions might vary on whether it remains truly alive as a generative, energising idea in contemporary psychoanalysis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781855759831
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	12/31/2007
Series:	The Psychoanalytic Ideas Series
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Bernard Barnett is a Fellow of the Institute of Psychoanalysis and a Training analyst of the British Psychoanalytic Society. He is a former Chairman of the Institute’s Education
Committee. He was for many years the Director of Psychological Training at the Child Guidance Training Centre and later at the Child and Family Department of the Tavistock Centre which he left in 1988. Since then he has been in full-time private psychoanalytic practice.

Table of Contents

Foreword — Introduction — The Freudian superego — The formation and development of the system — The object and the superego — Pathology, splitting, and fragmentation in the system: the superego, the object and the Holocaust — The superego, the self, and morality: contemporary ideas and critical approaches

Editorial Reviews

The clarity of the writing, the comprehensive approach, and the references, and notes, make this book an informative reference for the professional, a stimulating guide for the student, and a valuable text for the teacher.

Donald Campbell

"Dr. Barnett, a highly esteemed Training analyst of the British Society, has provided an excellent survey of ‘the system superego’ ( the ego, the ego ideal, conscience, the sense of guilt, need for punishment etc.). What makes the book fascinating is the illustration of the superego’s emotional power as a monitoring and judging agency and how the reader is guided along without any commands from a dictatorial authorial superego of the kind which insists that ‘You ought to know!’. The author’s account is also unusual in its detailed, development of the literary character studies. These describe, for example, George Eliot’s pre-Freudian account of ‘conscience’ and of ‘the unmapped country within us’. Another very interesting chapter describes the many factors which contributed to the catastrophic breakdown of the collective superego in the Holocaust. This is a valuable book which brings some clarity to a fundamental and highly complex topic."

Sylvia Zwettler-Otte

"Dr. Barnett, a highly esteemed Training analyst of the British Society, has provided an excellent survey of ‘the system superego’ ( the ego, the ego ideal, conscience, the sense of guilt, need for punishment etc.). What makes the book fascinating is the illustration of the superego’s emotional power as a monitoring and judging agency and how the reader is guided along without any commands from a dictatorial authorial superego of the kind which insists that ‘You ought to know!’. The author’s account is also unusual in its detailed, development of the literary character studies. These describe, for example, George Eliot’s pre-Freudian account of ‘conscience’ and of ‘the unmapped country within us’. Another very interesting chapter describes the many factors which contributed to the catastrophic breakdown of the collective superego in the Holocaust. This is a valuable book which brings some clarity to a fundamental and highly complex topic."

“The clarity of the writing, the comprehensive approach, and the references, and notes, make this book an informative reference for the professional, a stimulating guide for the student, and a valuable text for the teacher.

From the Publisher