ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the adverse aspects of the relationship of the ego and the superego within the individual: first, to talk of the ego's struggle for emancipation from a domineering superego; then, in the next, to discuss the notion of an ego-destructive superego. In his often quoted paper on mutative interpretation of 1934, James Strachey proposed that a therapeutic effect of analysis was a result of modification of the superego. By 1930, the concept of the superego was securely established as the seat of conscience and its punitive nature was emphasized. S. Freud attributed the aggression of the superego to the projection of aggression by the young child onto its parental precursors, acknowledging this to be a suggestion of Melanie Klein. The study of the nature of the superego in psychoanalysis had been preceded for centuries by the study in theology of the nature of its external representation, God.
