First, he will experience ‘collective pressure’ (Nykänen’s ‘guilt’): ‘I’ve done something wrong. He (inevitably it will be a ‘he’) will face two distinct kinds of mental pain. To take a fictional example, imagine a highly respected professional who is arrested for a sex-related crime-kerb-crawling or downloading child pornography perhaps. Writing as a clinician, indulgence is craved for inevitable philosophical naiveté.įirst, Nykänen’s distinction between conscience and guilt makes good phenomenological and clinical sense. What follows are some clinical and evidential reactions to a stimulating and original paper. I also elucidate the concrete sense in which openness and love can be conceived as the very heart of moral understanding. I detail how bad conscience differs from superego guilt, how destructive emotions (e.g., jealousy) are in themselves moralised repressions of love, and how Freud’s officially amoral, drive-based accounts of the Oedipus complex and the installation of the superego break down, but can be understood if reconceptualised in the terms I propose. Thus, conscience is the repressed unconscious of the superego, and ‘morality’ not one thing, but a living contradiction. Conscience is actually an immediate moral understanding, an interpersonal openness that the moral normativity of collectivity (values, ideals, etc.) represses. However, Freud misunderstands love in drive-terms and confuses conscience with the superego. The new model offers ample opportunities for integrating affective neuroscience into the functioning of the conscience.įreud’s account of morality is distinctive, and right, in focusing on unconscious, emotionalised conflict, and specifically on the repression of love as the centre of moral life. It also brings clinical practice and psychoanalytic metapsychology closer to empirical research beyond the scope of clinical psychoanalysis. Affective neuropsychoanalysis can make important contributions to this rethinking of the superego. This new conceptualization provides useful tools for addressing the actual functioning of the conscience in clinical psychoanalysis. In this article, the superego is reconceptualized as a psychic regulation system for self-evaluation, comprising the capacity for empathy, the proneness to experience self-conscious emotions, such as shame, pride, and guilt, and the capacity for moral reasoning. With the transition from a one-person psychology of instinctual needs to a two-person psychology of relational needs, the metapsychological focus tends to shift from instinct theory to emotion motivation and systems theory, and, accordingly, familiar concepts have to be rethought. The limitations of both Freud's original conceptualization and the present model are discussed accordingly in an interdisciplinary framework. Acquisition of fire is discussed as a form of sublimation which might have helped Prehistoric man to maximize the utility of limited evolutionary biological resources, potentially contributing to the rate and extent of bodily evolution. The proposed model is built on knowledge from evolutionary and neural sciences as well as anthropology, and it particularly focuses on the evolutionary significance of the acquisition of fire by hominids in the Pleistocene period in the light of up-to-date archaeological findings. The present paper proposes an alternative model aiming to explain gradual development of superego in the primitive man. However, Freud theorized superego formation in the primal horde as if it is an instant, all-or-none achievement. This view suggests that although different attachment styles contribute to how people perceive their social/physical environments and master coping skills adaptively (Holmes, 2011), these did not compromise immediate survival fitness of growing offspring in the critical developmental period given that human evolution favored diversity in this domain.įreud proposed that the processes which occurred in the primal horde are essential for understanding superego formation and therefore, the successful dissolution of the Oedipus complex. Considering this point from a genetic perspective (Dawkins, 1976), evolution would not favor diversity in attachment styles in nonhuman animals, it is possible to speculate that the primal horde scenario might have occurred before humans mastered bipedal locomotion, when human behavior was more biologically determined. Therefore, once the mother-infant affective bond is formed, the females in the primal horde, as well as in nonhuman animals, must be hardwired to provide a secure attachment with their offspring so that offspring can master important survival skills which would directly influence the extent of how much of parents' genes will be available in the genetic pool in subsequent generations.
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