ABSTRACT
Adelaide Johnson, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, presented this monumental paper to the Chicago Psychoanalytic Society on March 25, 1947. It was subsequently published in Kurt Eissler’s edited book, Searchlights on Delinquency. Her phrase superego lacunae has been embedded in psychoanalytic thought ever since. Central to our memory of this paper is Johnson’s clinical argument that certain immoral and antisocial behaviors are intergenerationally transmitted from parents to children through the parents’ unconscious feelings, impulses, attitudes, and acts. What is not always remembered about this paper is equally important: the gradual identification of the child with the image of him in his mother’s mind. In health, the mother’s object representation of him as an honest and moral character, and her firm confrontation of him without guilt and anxiety when he is not, shapes his destiny.
