ABSTRACT
Phyllis Greenacre’s paper, first read at a New York conference on April 26, 1945, and subsequently published in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, established the critical groundwork for the later superego theories of Jacobson and Kernberg. She emphasizes two psychodynamics: first, the projected aggressive impulses of the child in response to frustration as a part-object of the parent; and second, the pathologically narcissistic milieu of the family in which the child takes on a “show window display role.” What seems to be is more valued than what is. If remnants of conscience appear in the psychopath, they are often isolated and useless. As she concludes, it is “a gossamer substance, shot with magic, valued only as an adornment.”
