The Immoral Superego: Conscience as the Fourth Element in the Structural Theory of the Mind
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I have argued (Carveth, 2013) that, coinciding with the rise of neoliberalism and the culture of narcissism, psychoanalytic concern with problems of guilt and the superego was displaced in favour of a range of other preoccupations. Today issues of conscience appear to be returning from repression both in society at large and in psychoanalysis, but our theory in this area is deficient in many respects. We have largely identified the superego with the moral and the id with the immoral, thus downplaying the frequent immorality of the superego and the morality of the id. We have implicitly succumbed to a moral relativism oblivious to the existence of a conscience capable of judging both society and the superego it shapes. If we are to live up to our claim to be “the psychology of the innermost mental processes of man in conflict” (Kris, 1938, p. 140), we need to recognize conflict between superego and conscience—and conscience itself as the fourth element of the structural theory of the mind.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".