CONSCIENCE AND SUPEREGO 417 



reason for his sense of obligation; similarly, he must avoid 

 what the inwardly adopted images forbid, and if he does not, 

 he feels guilty. 



For Freud, this is the sole source of moral ideas; there is 

 no place in this scheme for intelligent insight into the natural 

 order of things or of values as a possible principle of the sense 

 of morality/^ Deliberate consideration and judgment play no 

 part in morality; the moral norms for any individual are the 

 parental images, with all their imaged laws, commands, power 

 and authority, which first exist for the child in external reality 

 and are then automatically introjected by the attempt to be 

 free from the Oedipal conflict. Thus Freud terms the moral 

 sense a precipitate in the ego of the parental figures, deriving 

 its compelling force from the sexual urges which have been 

 inhibited and re-channelled, deflected from their primal aims 

 and objects precisely by means of the formation of parental 

 images. By the force of these mental identifications, the child 

 is determined in his sense of morality — all that he will do and 

 say, think and like, is now established for him through parental 

 identification/* Morality then, is essentially infantile, on a 

 level with the mental development of the child absorbing it, 

 and hence uncritical. It is, moreover, unconscious, perhaps 

 because it was formed at an unreflective stage of life, perhaps 

 because the crisis by which it was formed and with which it is 

 associated was a painful crisis, and thus subject to repression; 

 these points are not clear in Freud. 



^' Some of Freud's disciples hold that the sense of morality has origin in elements 

 which are prior to the dissolution of the Oedipus complex (cf. Ferenczi, Melanie 

 Klein, Erikson) , and others give some weight to the function of reason (the reality 

 related ego) in forming the moral sense, but it seems safe to say that all orthodox 

 Freudians make the effects of the dissolution of the Oedipus complex the major 

 component in the production of a sense of right and wrong. In Freud's own WTitings 

 there is mention of pre-oedipal elements, e. g. instinctual movements and formations, 

 which presumably would have some effect in the development of a sense of 

 morality, but it does not seem that Freud himself made the deduction explicit. 

 See, for example, " Instincts and Their Vicissitudes," Coll. Papers, vol. 4, pp. 75-79. 



^* Freud, " The Economic Problem in Masochism," Coll. Papers, vol. 2, pp. 263- 

 266; The Ego and the Id, pp. 46-51. 



