Hate & Love Pyschoanalytical I, Reeder, Jurgen

The prescriptive aspect works like a professional ideal, and in this respect the superego can be said to sustain a professional ethos or spirit, commanding what the professional should know, and what his or her relations to clients and colleagues should resemble. It helps to bind the members of the analytical community together.

The prohibiting aspect installs a vigilant inner eye. It offers necessary protection against detrimental aberrations, but it also evokes fantasies of critical or condemning colleagues who might have insight into what transpires within the walls of the analysts own private practice--leading to a reluctance to communicate openly about the analytical experience. In this sense, the professional superego contributes to the paranoization of collegial communication, a circumstance that has a hampering effect on spontaneity and creativity in both clinical and theoretical work.