ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author supports Melanie Klein’s theory of the early development of the superego and suggests a connection between the strength of the superego and deprivation. She argues against Anna S. Freud's contention that the superego in the child is too little developed to restrain him from acting out when its roots are analysed. To Riviere the severity of the superego is modified by the analysis of anxiety and guilt and the bitterness of frustration is thereby better tolerated; she shows how anxiety, guilt and frustration all contribute to superego excesses. The unconscious relations with these imagos are thentransferred to the real parents and worked off on them, and this gives rise to the morbid behaviour of which so often a child's neurosis largely consists. The objects of unconscious phantasies are imagos formed to some extent after the pattern of real people, but not to a material extent on real experience, at any rate in present-day individuals.
