This morning, Joe, a thirty-year-old attorney, is running five min-
utes late for an extremely important meeting that, with or without him, will start promptly at eight o'clock. He needs to keep up a good impression with the more senior members of his firm, which means just about everybody, and he would like to have the first word with these wealthy clients, whose concerns include Joe's budding specialty of estate planning. He has been preparing his agenda for days because he feels there is a lot at stake, and he very much wants to be in the conference room at the start of the meeting. Unfortunately, the furnace in Joe's town house suddenly stopped making heat in the middle of the night. Freezing and pacing, afraid the pipes would burst, he had to wait for the emergency repairman from the fuel company before he could leave for work this morning.
When the man showed up, Joe let him in and then, desperate to get
to the meeting, abandoned him in the toWn house to fix the furnace, hoping the fellow would prove reasonably honest. At last, Joe was
able to race to his Audi and set off for the office, but with only
twenty-five minutes left to make a thirty-minute drive. He resolved
to bend the rules a little and make up the time. Now Joe is speeding along a familiar route to work, clenching his teeth and swearing under his breath at the slow drivers, at all the drivers really. He reinterprets a couple of red lights, passes a line of traffic by using the breakdown lane, and clings frantically to the hope that he can somehow make it to the office by 8:00. When he hits three green lights in a row, he thinks that he may just succeed. With his right hand, he reaches over to touch the overnight bag in the passenger's seat, to reassure himself that he remembered to bring it. In
addition to everything else, he has to catch a 10: 15 plane to New
York this morning, a trip for the firm, and there will certainly not be time after the meeting to go back home for his things. His hand contacts the cushiony leather of the bag-it is there and packed.
And at this very moment, Joe remembers. He forgot to feed
Reebok. Reebok is Joe's three-year-old blond Labrador retriever, so named because, before he got too busy at the firm, Joe used to take early-morn:ing runs with his enthusiastic new pet. When work took over and the morning routine changed, Joe fenced in the small backyard and installed a doggy door in the basement, allowing the dog solo access to the outside. At this point, runs together in the park are weekends only. But exercise or not, Reebok consumes several pounds of Science Diet every week, along with a huge assortment of leftover human food and at least one full box of jumbo bone treats. The young dog's appetite is stupendous, and he seems to live quite happily for two pleasures alone-his time with Joe, and his food. Joe got Reebok as a puppy, because when Joe was a boy, his father would not let him have a pet, and he had vowed to himself that when he was grown up and successful, he would have a dog, a big one. At first, Reebok had been not very different from the Audi, another acquisition, a marker of Joe's independence and material prosperity. But soon Joe had fallen in love with the animal himself. Howcould he not?Reebok adored Joe unconditionally, and from puppy hood had followed him around the house as if Joe were the center of all that was good in the universe. As his puppy grew to doghood, Joe realized that this creature had as distinct and individual a personality as any human being, and that his liquid brown eyes contained at least as much soul. Now, whenever Joe looks into those eyes, Reebok
wrinkles his soft beige brow into several folded-carpet furrows and
stares back. In this way, the sweet, ungainly dog appears preternatu-
rally thoughtful, as if he can read Joe's mind and is concerned.
Sometimes when there is a business trip, like today, Joe is gone from home for a day and a half, or even a little longer, and each time he comes back, Reebok greets him at the door with bounding joy and instantaneous forgiveness. Before he takes one of these trips , Joe always leaves large mixing bowls full of food and water for Reebok to consume in his absence, which Reebok does easily. But this time, between the furnace problem and his panic about the 8:00 meeting, Joe forgot. The dog has no food and maybe even no water, and no way to get any until tomorrow evening, when Joe returns from his trip.
Maybe I can call someone to help out, Joe thinks desperately.
But no. He is between girlfriends at present, and so no one has a key to his house. The impossibility of his situation begins to dawn on him, and he grips the steering wheel even harder. He absolutely must make this meeting, and he can be there on time if he just keeps going. But what about Reebok? He will not starve to death in a day and a half,
Joe knows, but he will be miserable-and the water-how long does it take an animal to die of dehydration? Joe has no idea. Still driving as fast as the traffic will bear, he tries to think about his options. The available choices tumble over one another in a rush. He can attend the 8:00 meeting and then go home and feed the dog, but that will make him miss his 10: 15 flight, and the trip is even more important than the meeting. He can go to the meeting and leave in the middle.No, that would be seen as offensive. He can try to get a later flight, but then he will be very late for his appointment in New York, may ,
even miss it entirely, which could cost him his job. He can ignore the dog until tomorrow. He can turn around now, miss the 8:00 meeting at the firm, take care of the dog, and still make it to the airport for his 10:15 flight.
Like a man in pain, Joe moans loudly and slumps in his seat. Just
a few blocks from work, he pulls the car into a spot marked CON-
STRUCTION ONLY, dials the office on his cell phone, and tells a secretary to inform those at the morning meeting that he will not be attending. He turns the car around and goes home to feed Reebok.

CONSCIENCE VS SUPEREGO

Whether or not one believes that superego is an intrapsYchk
schemer, or that it is, to use Freud's words, "the heir to the Oedipus complex," superego itself must be acknowledged as a rich and useflill concept. As an inner voice acquired through our significant chilhood relationships, commenting on our shortcomings and railing against our transgressions, superego is a feature of subjective expe-
rience that most people recognize easily. "Don't do that." "You
shouldn't feel that way." "Be careful; you'll hurt yourself." "Be nice to
your sister." "Clean up that mess you made." "You can't afford to buy
that." "Well, that wasn't yery smart, was it?" "You've just got to deal
with it." "Stop wasting time." Superego yammers at us inside our
minds every day of our lives. And some people's superegos are rather
more insulting than others.
Still, superego is not the same thing as conscience. It may feel
like conscience subjectively, and may be one small part of what con-science is, but superego by itself is not conscience. This is because Freud, as he to conceptualized the superego, threw out the baby with the bathwater, in a manner of speaking. In ejecting moral absolutism from psychological thought, he counted out something else too. Quite simply, Freud counted out love, and all of the emotions re-lated to love. Though he often stated that children love their parents in addition to fearing them, the superego he. In his view, just as we fear our parents' stem criticisms when we are children, so do we fear the excoriating voice of
superego later on. And fear is all. There is no place in the Freudian
superego for the conscience-building effects of love, compassion, tenderness or any of the more positive feelings. and conscience as we have seen in Joe and Reebok, is an inter-vening sense of obligation based in our emotional attachments to
others-all aspects of our emotional attachments-including most
especially love, compassion, and tenderness. In fact, the seventh
sense, in those individuals who possess it, is primarily love and compassion based. we have progressed, over the centuries, from faith in a God-directed synderesis, to a belief in a punitive parental superego, to an understanding that conscience is deeply and affectingly anchored in our ability to care about one another. This second
progression-from a judge in the head to a mandate of the heart.
involves less cynicism about human nature, more hope for us as a group, and also more personal responsibility and, at times, more personal pain. As an illustration, imagine that under some impossibly bizarre set of circumstances, one night you take temporary leave ot your
senses, sneak over to the house of an especially likable neighbor,
and, for no particular reason, murder her cat. Just before daybreak, you recover your senses and realize what you haye done. What do you feel? What is the specific nature of your guilty reaction? Unseen behind your living room curtain, you watch your neighbor come but
to her front step and discover the cat. She falls to her knees. She
scoops up her lifeless pet in her arms. She weeps for a very long time. "What is the first thing that happens to you? Does a voice inside your head scream, Thou shalt not kill! You'll go to jail for this!-thus reminding you of theconsequences to yourself? Or, instead, do you feel instantly sick that you have murdered an animal and made your neighbor cry in grief? , In those first moments of watching your stricken neighbor, which reaction is more likely to befall you? It is a telling question. The answer will probably determine what course of
action you will take, and also whether you are influenced only by the strident voice of your superego, or by a genuine conscience. The same kind of question applies to our old friend Joe. Does he decide to sacrifice his meeting because of the unconscious fear instilled in him in childhood by his father's opinions about dogs, Or does he make the sacrifice because he feels awful when he thinks, about Reebok's predicament? What directs his choice? Is it pure superego, or is it fully formed conscience? If it is conscience, then Joe's decision to be absent from a scheduled meeting at work is a minor illustration of the fact that, ironically; conscience does not always follow the rules. It places people (and sometimes animals) ' above the codes of conduct and institutional expectations. Fortified with potent emotions, conscience is a glue that holds us together, and it is stickier than it is just. It cherishes humanistic ideals more than laws.and if push comes to shove, conscience may even go to prison. Superego would never do that. A strict superego berates us, saying, You're being naughty, or
You're inadequate. A strong conscience insists, You must take care of him [or her or it or them], no matter what.
Fear-based superego stays behind its dark curtain, accusing us
and wringing its hands. Conscience propels us outward in the direction of other people, toward conscious action both, minor and great.
Attachment-based conscience causes the teenage mother to buy the little jar of creamed peas instead of her favorite fingernail polish. Conscience-protects the privileges of intimacy, makes ,friends keep
their promises, prevents the angered spouse from striking back. It induces the exhausted doctor to pick up the phone for his frightened patient at three in the morning. It blows whistles against institutions when lives are endangered. It takes to the streets to protest a war. Conscience is what makes the human rights worker risk her very life.
When it is combined with surpassing moral courage, it is Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi. In small and large ways, genuine conscience changes the world. Rooted in emotional' connectedness, it teaches peace and opposes hatred and saves children. It keeps marriages together and cleans up rivers and feeds dogs and gives gentle replies. It makes individual , lives better and increases human dignity overall. It is real and com-
pelling, and it would make us crawl out of our skin if we devastated our neighbor.
The problem, as we are about to see, is that not everybody has it.
In fact, 4 percent of all people do not have it.
_the sociopath next door.