ABSTRACT
The way people interact is socially controlled by laws and customs. On the whole, these are established on an intuitive basis, but moral philosophy attempts to ground these laws and customs within a rigorous conceptual framework. One set of characteristics that applies to relations between people concerns the degree to which they allow each other to be individuals. The significance of psychoanalysis for moral issues has attracted interest mostly amongst psychoanalysts. Freud introduced the concept of the superego as the moral principle in human beings with the implication that, prior to the development of the superego at around 3–5 years, children are amoral beings. In contrast, Klein regarded the human being as born into a moral universe of conflicting and competing objects which, from the beginning, it evaluates as good or bad amoral behaviour and criminality are, then, forms of acting out an internal state of persecution.
