Rescuing Conscience from the Moralistic Superego | November 28, 2020

WBCPS presents the Quarterly Scientific Meeting #4

“Rescuing Conscience from the Moralistic Superego: Notes on the New Puritanism in Psychoanalysis” |
Donald L Carveth, Ph.D., RP, FIPA

November 28, 2020
9:30am – 12pm PST (Pacific Standard Time)

One way we defend ourselves against the persecutory superego is by identifying with it and targeting various scapegoats. Heinrich Racker referred to people who have a “mania for reproaching.” Today the totalitarianism of the right is echoed on the left, often aided and abetted by “woke” centrists willing to stifle any qualms in favour of a “moral” consensus. As “social justice warriors” bring “cancel culture” into psychoanalysis, both reason and conscience are in danger of eclipse.

Freud’s (1923) decision to fold conscience and ego-ideal into the superego made it difficult for us to understand their very different origins and functions, as well as the important conflicts among the five, rather than three, structures of the mind. Whereas the superego is composed of id aggression turned back against the self, plus the internalization of socially constructed, culturally relative and, often immoral (racist, sexist, heterosexist, etc.) norms, the conscience is grounded in our mammalian and primate heritage, in attachment and identification with nurturers. Although there is often a degree of overlap between them, it is nevertheless fair to say that while conscience is a manifestation of Eros, all too often the superego is driven by Thanatos.

Clinically, it has been difficult for us to grasp that while we must not be “superego-ish” with patients, we must nevertheless carry the conscience in the treatment until such time as they are able to begin to carry it themselves. Today, in the face of a new puritanism, psychoanalysis needs to recover both its conscience and its ego strength in order to retain its emancipatory, anti-repressive stance. While relevant clinical material will be presented, for background on the distinction between superego and conscience, see: Carveth, D. (2016). Why we should stop conflating the superego with the conscience. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2017) 22, 15-32.

“Why we should stop conflating the superego with the conscience”
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Donald L Carveth, Ph.D., RP, FIPA is Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Social & Political Thought at York University in Toronto. He is a training and supervising analyst in the Canadian Institute of Psychoanalysis, past Director of the Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis, and past Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis/Revue Canadienne de Psychanalyse. He is the author of The Still Small Voice: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Guilt and Conscience (Karnac, 2013) and Psychoanalytic Thinking: A Dialectical Critique of Contemporary Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2018). Many of his publications are available on his website at http://www.yorku.ca/dcarveth
His video-lectures on psychoanalysis may be found online at www.youtube.com/doncarveth  He is in private practice in Toronto.

Learning Objectives:

1. To distinguish the conscience from the superego.
2. To distinguish conscientious ethical concern from moralism.
3. To distinguish the counter-cultural, emancipatory spirit of psychoanalysis from conformism.
4. To recognize the threat to psychoanalysis constituted by repressive and moralistic trends within psychoanalytic institutions.
5. To recognize psychoanalysis as a value-infused rather than value-free practice guided by the values of life, love and truth (Erich Fromm’s biophilia) and inherently opposing the necrophilia all-too-present in the wider culture and the superego.