The Still Small Voice

Résumé du livre

Whereas Freud himself viewed conscience as one of the functions of the superego, in The Still Small Voice Carveth argues that superego and conscience are distinct mental functions and that, therefore, a fourth mental structure, the conscience, needs to be added to the psychoanalytic structural theory of the mind. Conscience is formed in identification with the nurturer; the superego in identification with the aggressor. Like Franz Alexander and Ferenczi before him, Carveth views the therapeutic task as the disempowerment of the superego, but unlike his forebears he does not propose its replacement by the rational ego for, in his view, rationality cannot serve as the source of values. Following Rousseau, he finds the roots of morality not in reason but in feeling, in sympathetic identification or "pity." It is the author's view that in human history the damage done by id-driven psychopaths amounts to nothing compared to that brought about by superego-driven ideologists. Freud and subsequent psychoanalysis has largely whitewashed the superego while demonising the id, the alleged "beast" in man. In the closing chapters Carveth critically reviews the concepts of psychopathy and evil, and argues for a demythologising, deliteralising or deconstructive approach to the Bible as metaphor, one that escapes Freud's derogation of this approach by acknowledging that its result is a humanistic ethic no longer to be equated with religion. Book jacket.