Introduction

With the introduction of the superego, Freud made clear that he regarded the study of moral development as central to psychoanalytic theory. He also made clear how he understood the start of that development. Brie¯y the account of the superego ± something he had worked out over the years ± went like this. Its function ± prohibition and bearer of standards ± could be traced back to censorship, which played a crucial role in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), to shame, disgust, and morality, which turned up repeatedly in The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), and to the ego-ideal, which loomed large in ``On Narcissism: An Introduction'' (1914). Its formation harked back to ``Mourning and Melancholia'' (1917). There Freud argued that the melancholic identi®ed with an abandoned love object. In identifying with the lost object, the melancholic incorporated or introjected it: he took it into himself, more speci®cally, he felt he had

devoured it. Then, in The Ego and the Id, Freud claimed that the establishment of the critical agency itself ± the superego ± could be explained along similar lines. At the same time he spelled out the relations between the superego and the parents and other authority ®gures in the child's environment. The superego derived from these ®gures; it was the incorporated or introjected version of them. And in Freud's view that incorporation took place on a massive scale at a particular moment ± with the dissolution of the Oedipus complex. Hence on numerous occasions he referred to the superego and ``the heir to the Oedipus complex.''2 (Note: in this narrative the ``weaker sex'' ended up with the weaker superego.)

With the superego in place, guilt acquired a fresh signi®cance ± ``the expression of a condemnation of the ego by its critical agency.''3 But Freud's concern with guilt hardly ranked as new ± and his earlier thinking on the subject ®gured as part of his legacy. Melanie Klein and her followers took advantage of this conceptual richness; they exploited and elaborated Freud's pre-1923 as well as post-1923 theorizing. Perhaps not in a tidy fashion: the tidiness may be mine, not theirs. I am keen on piecing together ± and giving order to ± Kleinian re¯ections on guilt, its pervasiveness and superabundance and its simultaneous absence from consciousness. To my mind, this body of psychoanalytic theory captures most vividly and poignantly the vicissitudes of man's moral sentiments.