The superego occupies a structurally pivotal position across the depth-psychology corpus, yet the term is far from semantically stable. Freud’s foundational account in The Ego and the Id (1923) roots the superego in the dissolution of the Oedipus complex: it arises through identification with the parental imagoes, inherits the authority of conscience, and exercises its dominion over the ego through guilt, self-punishment, and the categorical imperative. Freud subsequently linked the superego’s sadism to the death instinct and primary masochism, producing a dark economy of self-destructiveness that pressed beyond simple moral regulation. Klein extends and radicalizes this picture: working with young children, she discovers a pre-Oedipal superego of terrifying primitivity, rooted not in Oedipal identification but in the earliest introjection of the mother’s breast, split between persecutory and idealized poles. Her later work refines this further, distinguishing the pathological figures of the deep unconscious from a superego proper that is constituted under the preponderance of Eros and therefore capable of guidance rather than mere torture. Kalsched, drawing on Bergler, maps the superego’s sadism onto the self-care system of trauma, while Schore grounds superego development in neurobiological shame-affect circuitry. Horney challenges the entire framework, arguing that what Freud calls the superego’s tyranny is more productively understood as the internalized ‘tyranny of the should.’ The cumulative picture is one of a concept contested across developmental, clinical, neurobiological, and ethical registers.