Superego: an attachment perspective

With the help of attachment theory and research, the paper attempts to broaden and build on classical and current views on the superego. Attachment theory's epigenetic approach and the concept of the subliminal superego are described. The superego, it is argued, is as much concerned with safety as sex. The superego is 'heir', not just to the Oedipus complex or Klein's pre-oedipal constellation, but also to the attachment relationship. Under favourable developmental conditions a 'mature superego' emerges, facilitating, in the presence of an internal secure base, maturational boundary crossings towards adult sexuality. In the light of the above, the paper reviews Lear's updating of Strachey's model of psychic change and explores the concept of transgression in relation to the 'professional superego', its development and maturation. Theoretical arguments are illustrated with clinical examples.     

Five-month-old infants know humans are solid, like inanimate objects

Infants know that humans are exempt from some of the principles that govern the motion of inanimate objects: for instance, humans can be caused to move without being struck. In the current study, we report that infants nevertheless do apply some of the same principles to both humans and objects, where appropriate. Five-month-old infants expect humans, like all material objects, to be solid.     

The felt presence of other minds: Predictive processing,counterfactual predictions,and mentalising in autism

The mental states of other people are components of the external world that modulate the activity of our sensory epithelia. Recent probabilistic frameworks that cast perception as unconscious inference on the external causes of sensory input can thus be expanded to enfold the brain’s representation of others’ mental states. This paper examines this subject in the context of the debate concerning the extent to which we have perceptual awareness of other minds. In particular, we suggest that the notion of perceptual presence helps to refine this debate: are others’ mental states experienced as veridical qualities of the perceptual world around us? This experiential aspect of social cognition may be central to conditions such as autism spectrum disorder, where representations of others’ mental states seem to be selectively compromised. Importantly, recent work ties perceptual presence to the counterfactual predictions of hierarchical generative models that are suggested to perform unconscious inference in the brain. This enables a characterisation of mental state representations in terms of their associated counterfactual predictions, allowing a distinction between spontaneous and explicit forms of mentalising within the framework of predictive processing. This leads to a hypothesis that social cognition in autism spectrum disorder is characterised by a diminished set of counterfactual predictions and the reduced perceptual presence of others’ mental states.