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But some of these young men eventually banded together, killed their father, and gained access to the females, who were, of course, their own mothers. As his male progeny matured, each boy was banished to prevent him from one day challenging his fathers rule. In Totem and Taboo (Freud 1912), he speculated that prehistorical society organized itself into patriarchal groups, with one dominant male hording the females. It was the latter possibility that interested Freud. The universality of this compulsion leads to the conclusion that it is either genetic, or stems from a common historical event. The Oedipal myth, Freud wrote, seizes on a compulsion which everyone recognizes because he feels its existence within himself.(Freud, 1897). Finally the authors suggest a metaphor for the metapsychology of clinical cure from Greek Mythology.įreud introduced the term superego (ber-ich) in 1923 (Freud, 1923), but he had been forming his concept of it for years, drawing his ideas from mythology, his insight with patients, and especially his self-analysis, in which he first glimpsed the primary source of the superegos development, the Oedipal complex. An illustrative clinical case is summarized and annotated with vignettes following a modified central dynamic sequence in a 15 hour block therapy case with good clinical results. They discuss the different points of view about the origin of the punitive superego and the importance of making the unconscious feelings of guilt, conscious as early in therapy as possible. They articulate specific criterion for diagnosing a punitive superego and outline a system for de-identifying patients from their punitive superego part. SummaryIn this article the authors review the historical roots of the concept of the superego from an analytical perspective. IDENTIFYING AND OVERCOMING THE PUNITIVE SUPEREGO IN SHORT-TERM DYNAMIC PSYCHOTHERAPYRobert J.