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is ordinarily missing in the early lives of such patients is the massive,
but phase-appropriate experience of both infatuation with and dis–
appointment in the Oedipal parents, an experience thqt leads "ulti–
mately to the idealization of the superego, a developmental and
maturational step which is of great importance in protecting the per–
sonality against the danger of narcissistic regression ." That is to say,
there has not occurred in such patients "the building up of those
aspects of the superego which direct toward the ego the commands
and prohibitions, the praise, scolding and punishment that the
parent has formerly directed toward the child." Such patients lack, in
other words, an adequate "nuclear superego" upon which later struc–
tures may be built. In general, what these patients have suffered are
fathers whom they have been unable to idealize, in large measure
because, according to Kohut's testimony, the fathers themselves
have been disturbed in their own self-esteem so that they have been
unable to tolerate the role of idealized figures that children (sons, of
course, in particular) demand and require of their parents if they are
in fact to achieve the large-scale internalization of structure that
forms a superego.
These perceived changes in what appears to be the dominant
pathology - the dominant structure of unconscious defenses of those
members of the middle class who choose to resort to psychoanalytic
treatment-have suggested a number of areas of possible explora–
tion. What seems to come into sharpest focus in these patients is not
a representation of a "psychic apparatus trying to deal with drives
and structural conflicts," but an unconscious struggling to maintain
its primitive cohesion, a self moved by the anxiety that it may in fact
be disintegrating. These young patients have been raised in families
in which distance rather than excessive closeness seems to have char–
acterized the relations between parents and children. The older
structural neuroses were in part the result of deprivations and nega–
tive excesses that arose out of such circumstances as the belief in,
and even the reality of, the integrity of the family as a unit, out of a
social life that was densely concentrated upon the home, and out of
the relatively "clear-cut definition of the roles of father and mother."
Where the surrounding immediate world of the middle class child
"used to be experienced as threateningly close," it now tends "more
and more" to be perceived "as threateningly distant." Children who
in the past tended to be
"overstimulated
by the emotional . . . life of
their parents . . . are now often understimulated." Where previously
childhood erotic life was connected with Oedipal rivalries, parental
inhibitions, and severe internal conflicts , "many children now seek
