ABSTRACT
Among the central themes characterizing these critical psychosocial studies the first concerns my distinction between conscience and the superego and my proposal that we reverse Freud’s (1923) regrettable decision to fold five mental structures into three, thus, occluding our capacity to study the full range of conflicts, fifteen to be exact, within and among id, ego, superego, ego-ideal and conscience. Related to my advancing conscience as a separate structure and function from the superego is my claim that psychoanalysis is a fundamentally ethical enterprise, in no way a “value-free,” but rather a “value-infused” “science,” a discipline somehow transcending the division between verstehen and erklaren, interpretive (hermeneutic) and causal explanation, Geisteswissenschaft and Naturwissenschaft (Dilthey, 1961).
