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Psychoanalysis has long lost its historical influence on U.S. academic psychiatry. Psychoanalytic theory, however, provides us with a rich and remarkably comprehensive knowledge of human development, both normative and pathologic. This article describes a psychoanalytic concept that enriches our understanding of the mind and its disorders: Freud's structural hypothesis. This core concept provides a theoretical foundation for understanding the clinical features of both neurotic and personality disorders. It also informs a psychodynamic psychotherapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Freud's mature theorizing about human morality entrenched the functioning of the superego in anxiety stemming from the fear of punishment, a view with which many later psychoanalysts took issue, producing a debate as to the distinction between superego and conscience. This debate would later be mirrored more broadly in academic psychology concerning distinctions between shame and guilt. This is an area where the clinical observations and theoretical discussions of psychoanalysis have subtly guided research in cognitive psychology and the cognitive and affective neurosciences. These areas, in turn, have both clarified and supported psychoanalytic theory and practice without negating the rich phenomenological and theoretical basis on which psychoanalysis rests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a chronic disabling disorder characterized by recurrent obsessions and uncontrolled compulsions. Recent research on anxiety disorders suggests that manual-guided short-term psychodynamic therapy (STPP) may be a promising approach. Building on this, a model of STPP for OCD was developed based on Luborsky's supportive-expressive (SE) therapy. Treatment consists of 12 modules, which include the characteristic elements of SE therapy, that is, a focus on the Core Conflictual Relationship Theme (CCRT) associated with OCD symptoms and on establishing a secure alliance. Disorder-specific treatment elements were integrated, including addressing ambivalence, differentiating between thinking and acting, mitigating the superego, addressing existential issues, and, last but not least, implementing Freud's original recommendation to induce OCD patients to face the feared situation and to use the aroused experiences to work on the underlying conflict (i.e., CCRT). There are reasons to assume that the empirically derived model of STPP described here may be beneficial in OCD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author traces the history of superego theories in Freud's work and shows how latter contributions to psychoanalytic theory by Gray, the Novicks, and Arlow have provided theoretical foundations for innovative treatments in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Arlow's insight into the continuous debates and discussions within our patients provides us with an opportunity to join in these discussions. Vignettes from two mildly obesssional male patients seen twice and twice a week provide demonstrations of this approach in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a guide for conceptualizing psychological difficulties across the broad spectrum of personality and symptom disorders. A psychodynamic model is used to organize these disorders along a structural continuum of severity. The authors propose that seven key indices of personality functioning be evaluated: cognition, affect, self-object relations, interpersonal relations, defenses, superego functioning, and primary dynamics. The results are then employed to determine where the patient should be placed along a continuum of nine diagnostic categories of ego development and their associated disorders. These include 'normal,' neurotic trait, and neurotic symptom organization; high-, mid-, and low-level borderline organization; and affective, cognitive-affective, and cognitive psychotic organization. An accurate evaluation of the seven variables will permit a more precise formulation of the nature and severity of the patient's difficulties, which will hopefully result in more accurate and appropriate treatment planning. Examples of the application of this model to a common symptom complaint are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I define psychic traumas as pre-concepts resulting when a transient event changes into a permanent one that will remain constantly conjoined1 and is structured as an unconscious emotional narrative that compulsively repeats. I refer to pre-conceptual traumas because they represent events that took place at a time when there was not a mind capable of containing them. All forms of existing psychopathology are, in summary, the result of the way that explicit pre-conceptual traumas have eroded and outlined the Oedipus complex. Thus, the superego is not heir to the Oedipus complex alone, as Freud (1923, pp. 34-36) once remarked, but heir to an Oedipus complex specifically chiseled and modified by the precise pre-conceptual trauma experienced; a condition I refer as the 'mark of Cain.' Thle unconscious sequence of events that structure the 'pre-conceptual' trauma follows a logic based on a kind of pseudo-causality or chain of beta elements (Bion, 1963, p. 40) in wait for a mind that could change them into a meaningful 'concept.' This form of pseudo-causality, considered as a minus knowledge (-K) (Bion, 1962, pp. 97-99), is the consequence of a continuous association of no-things or absences, that are modified with time: the appearance, form, or container, changes, but the meaning, or contained, remains the same. It is similar to the way that primary objects transform as the child grows, from breast to thumb, to a security blanket, to sexual acting out, smoking, obesity, drugs, and so forth. I have referred to this mechanism as 'homeomorphic symbolization' ( homos = same and morphus = form). It is similar to Plato's concept of the Form, in the sense that the external shape (thumb-blanket-obesity ...), the phenomenon, changes, but the noumenon, the 'thing-in-itself,' (breast) remains. When the mind is contained by the psychotic (traumatized) part of the personality, the projection or atomization of pre-conceptual traumas could reach such a power of density and distension that the individual could live completely submerged-like in a dream-in a world of his or her own, without being aware of it. In The Republic, Plato referred to the Allegory of the Cave, where he described a specific condition that all men find themselves living in, where things as they are perceived by the senses might not be exactly what they are, and where the real world can only be apprehended intellectually. Clinical material from analytical patients is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study which aims to prove that treachery results from abandoned ego ideals by using the Cambridge spies as a case. The author discuss the variations of a transformed personal and group ego ideal and argues that the ego ideal fulfills the selfish need to be part of a group as precursor to the superego. He then explores the social and political factors which led the Cambridge spies to betray their ego ideal.

The article discusses the aspects of the superego concept of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud in relation to sense of badness. It is stated that superego as a clinical concept entails that ethical principles are personal standards that differ with people and their culture. It is also noted that Freud has published several theories on the psychology of evil including the natural biological endowment, the genetic inheritance of guilt committed by ancestors in prehistory and social instincts.

Developing from the author's prior work in which the patient's superego is conceived as more accessible to consciousness than generally believed, this article undertakes greater illumination of technical matters arising in the clinical circumstance. Directly and firmly addressing the superego of the psychotic patient is regarded as having immediate therapeutic benefit, rendering the ego stronger and leading to increased rationality and firmer sense of identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an overview of the article entitled "Communicating with the Schizophrenic Superego Revisited: A New Technique" published within the issue. The author emphasizes several topics including the role of the superego and the spirituality and the psychic trauma of the individual's personality.

The article focuses on the psychologist, Sigmund Freud's development of the concepts of id, ego and superego. Freud defined primary narcissism as a primordial state prior to the formation of the ego, the prototype of which would be intrauterine life. The existence of further structural differentiations within narcissism generated by the establishment of the ego-ideal and of the symbolic function of the father is postulated.

The article focuses on the analysis of transference. The analysis of transference is a complex transformational process. The analyst is seen as providing transformation by way of interrupting the patient's neurotic vicious circle through mutative transference interpretation. In essence, the patient's transference toward the analyst is conceptualized as a superego projection onto the analyst. To the extent that the analyst responds to this projection with understanding, conveyed through a transference interpretation, rather than reacting in a way that confirms the projection, the patient introjects the understanding attitude of the analyst as a modification of his superego.

The article focuses on treating narcissistic or psychotic patients with paranoid-schizoid experiences of the self and the object. It states that paranoid-schizoid involves an intrapsyhic panic cause by the simultaneous fears of losing an object which is necessary to survival and being destroyed of such object. It mentions that the treatment process for the said patients involves the clarification and interpretation of the conflicts created by death instinct and sadistic superego.