ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the inhibition or prohibition that appears to operate at an earlier stage, stifling creativity close to its source within the internal world when the superego threatens, suppresses, and takes revenge on the ego's creativity. The concept of an envious, destructive internal object acting as superego raises two questions. How does this internal object originate, and how does it gain such a position in relation to the ego? The chapter discusses the concept of an envious superego: an internal object opposed to the ego's development and creativity which nevertheless occupies the status in the internal world that the police and judiciary do in the external world. Melanie Klein is describing something much earlier in development: a splitting of the ego giving rise to the superego when the ego takes into itself the good object and allocates to this split-off part the bad object.
