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PARTISAN REVIEW
complex is impaired, we often see instead of a normal conscience an
unconscious need for punishmenl.
The balance between the different mental agencies has changed.
Simplifying, we may say that formerly a rigid superego restricted the id
drives more than many people could bear without developing neurotic
symptoms, whereas today, the id weakens the incompletely established
superego, which has no support from society. Hence, the integration of
the conflicting parts of the personality is shaky.
In
treatment, the id-material is less repressed, seemingly less
forbidden-"anything goes"-guilt feelings are often denied, and it
may take a long time to obtain the repressed reproaches of the superego
and to convince patients of its punishing power and of the need for
approval of the superego or of the part of it that Freud called the ego
ideal. Many people have learned somewhere that the superego is a kind
of neurotic symptom that has to be eliminated, a sick remnant of a
fortunately overcome, rejected reactionary culture. (As Philip Roth
said in an interview about
Portnoy's Complaint:
"There is certainly a
personal element in the book, but not until I had got hold of guilt, you
see, as a comic idea.... ")
Patients must be shown, despite a kind of ideological resistance,
that the superego is an indispensable part of our psyche and that the
superego as well as the id can be frustrated.
It
is not an easy task to
lessen the rigidity of a harsh superego, but it can be done in a successful
analytical treatment; it is much more difficult to handle the problems
of an incomplete superego. The assumption that all instinctual drives,
including the pregenital ones, are of equal value for the adult personal–
ity, rather than steps in the sexual evolution toward maturity-and the
acting out of them-dilutes in many cases the libidinal energy avail–
able for the analytic process. And the acting out of these fantasies is
expected in the present cultural climate. Many young people, seduced
by the drug culture with its instant gratification, prefer hallucinatory
pleasures to the laborious task of exploring their psychological diffi–
culties. They are not interested in reason. With these people, psychoan–
alysis loses its power.
In
many cases, we have to help the patient
to
find his way in the
chaos of his environmenl. This task is more difficult when the
guidelines for life are not transmitted by former generations. Why
should an average young person know today how to live? Thus
interpretation, the pure gold of analysis, is often not enough; but this
sometimes inevitable deviation from classical technique may disturb
the analysis of the transference, one of our best tools.
We feel, following Freud, that a therapy has been successful if the
