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meaning of no, and, of course, some of them have
rarely, if ever, been told no that they must not do this
or that. Nor have they been threatened or scolded
much things were explained to them, over and over,
with great professed patience, and with much assurance
of the parents love.
 I think I covered a lot of this in Normality and Pa-
thology in Childhood how, with the best of intentions,
many of the most progressive and enlightened parents
went out of their way to do everything in accordance
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with the latest psychoanalytic principles, taking care of
all  needs and anticipating all the anxieties and fears
and worries that any of us could imagine or had seen in
our work only to have, as a result, not an absence of
childhood difficulties (and worse) but a whole new
order of them. Gone were the children deeply afraid of
doing the wrong thing, or worried that they might slip
up, get into serious trouble, or bothered by frightening
thoughts or nightmares, in which they step over the
bounds, and get punished severely [for doing so]. Now
we have, even in our younger children, what has be-
come mentioned by more and more of us in our clinical
case conferences, the  narcissistic personality. These
children aren t afraid of being caught, judged, sen-
tenced, and punished by their conscience, their Super-
ego; if they are afraid of anything (and some of them
seem brazenly fearless!), they are scared that they will be
able to do anything, that there are no limits.
 What then will happen? I recall describing that
[state of affairs] in several papers and in the book [we d
been discussing Normality and Pathology in Childhood]:
 When . . . the severity of the Superego is reduced, chil-
dren get the deepest, most troubling anxieties of all, the
fear that they can t prevail against the pressures of their
own drives, words to that effect. [They were almost the
exact words she used in the book.] That is, I think, what
some of our contemporary philosophers are getting at,
when they talk about their existential despair? I don t
mean to speak for them; I have to admit, I haven t read
them much but I do read of them, in the papers, and I
hear of them, from friends and my analytic patients
and I think they are telling us that the old Superego is
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no longer around for them, and for a lot of others, and
they are more and more  rational, thanks to psycho-
analysis, I would suppose, and physics and biology, all
we know today, and so  everything goes, as the expres-
sion says, all depending on your own choice. Even if
you really don t want it so that  everything goes, and
even if you know the dangers you re hard put to build
a series of prohibitions. On what will you base them?
(What that you can defend, that is, in a logical argu-
ment?) We ve come full circle, I m afraid [the irony of
her use of that last word!]: we started out trying to use
our wits to help people be less anxious, less driven by a
tyrannical Superego, and we ve come to the point that
people are more anxious and even alarmed and fearful,
but not of the Superego, but of themselves, their
 drives, we say, or their  situation, their  existential
fate, their  nature, others put it. How do people say it:
live long enough!
If God is declared  dead, if the Bible is regarded as
a historical text, or a series of stories, all to be decon-
structed, if religion is an  illusion, and if children are
seen as our big hope, our only chance of a future life
(lived through them), and as ones to be encouraged, en-
abled, given all possible intellectual and emotional lee-
way small wonder that the Superego of old is gone,
with its nays and oughts, its muscled insistence on pro-
hibitions, requirements, amplified by commandments
and encyclicals and powerful preaching and hymns
sung or cantors singing, by the Talmud or the words of
God become man, and now part of God again, by the
believed presence of a hovering Holy Ghost that, as one
child said to me years ago,  can see right through you,
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so there s no trick you can pull that isn t noticed (he of
working-class Catholic background). All of that reli-
gious tradition is a thing of the past for more and more
people, even as that boy just mentioned would go to a
first-rate high school, then to an Ivy League college, and
lose interest in, retain only a nominal belief in,  the
Holy Ghost.
Instead, we have, as Miss Freud adduced, a still ener- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]