It will not be very important, but it may be just as well to go more precisely into the meaning of certain words like super-ego, conscience, sense of guilt, need for punishment, remorse, which we have perhaps often used too loosely and in place of one another. They all relate to the same situation, but they denote different aspects of it. The super-ego is an agency or institution in the mind whose existence we have inferred: conscience is a function we ascribe, among others, to the super-ego; it consists of watching over and judging the actions and intentions of the ego, exercising the functions of a censor. The sense of guilt, the severity of the super-ego, is therefore the same thing as the rigour of conscience; it is the perception the ego has that it is watched in this way, the ego’s appreciation of the tension between its strivings and the standards of the super-ego; and the anxiety that lies behind all these relations, the dread of that critical institution, the need for punishment, is an instinctual manifestation on the part of the ego, which has become masochistic under the influence of the sadistic super-ego, _i.e._ which has brought a part of the instinct of destruction at work within itself into the service of an erotic attachment to the super-ego. We ought not to speak of conscience before a super-ego is demonstrable; as to consciousness of guilt, we must admit that it comes into being before the super-ego, therefore before conscience. At that time it is the direct expression of the dread of external authority, the recognition of the tension between the ego and this latter; it is the direct derivative of the conflict between the need for parental love and the urgency towards instinctual gratification, and it is the thwarting of this urgency that provokes the tendency to aggression. It is because these two different versions of the sense of guilt—one arising from dread of the external and the other from dread of the inner authority—are superimposed one on the other that our insight into the relations of conscience has been hampered in so many ways. Remorse is a general term denoting the ego’s reaction under a special form of the sense of guilt; it includes the almost unaltered sensory material belonging to the anxiety that is at work behind the sense of guilt; it is itself a punishment and may include the need for punishment; it too, therefore, may occur before conscience has developed.