This book offers a description of Freud's account of moral development and later Kleinian reflections on guilt. The author describes Freud's writings on the super-ego and its function as an internal censor, and how he considered guilt as a universal phenomenon arising, perhaps, from universal taboos. For Freud, ambivalence was ‘a source of conscience’; and the author describes how ambivalence has its roots in group psychology, and the conflicted feelings that the infant has for the mother. She concludes that the super-ego, in Freud's account, has ‘hate at its core’, and that learning to tolerate the conflict of love and hate in each one of us is the medium of psychological growth and maturation.
The book is extremely well-written by a professor of history and psychiatry. It has a wealth of examples and excerpts of material which add a clinical and personal quality to the text. There is no doubt that the writer is a superior academic writing thoughtfully and with assurance about their subject: guilt from a psychoanalytic perspective.
My difficulty is that I came away knowing something of what Freud said about guilt, but not much about the experience of the guilty. Only one single theoretical exegesis (i.e. psychoanalysis) was on offer. But guilt, as one of the moral emotions, has been studied and discussed in great depth since Freud and later analysts were writing; does it not make sense to relate the analytic vision to later or different accounts? How, for example, might the Freudian account of guilt relate to later accounts of the development of moral thinking by Piaget, Kohlberg and Gilligan? How does Freud's account of taboos fit with cross-cultural work about violators of group rules? What is the relationship between conscious guilt and unconscious guilt?
This last issue is important because, as a moral emotion, guilt has elements of internal and external reality. Arguably, guilt arises in relation to an internal discourse which begins, ‘I should have not done that’ or ‘Others will say that I should have not done that’. It is part of the discourse of ‘ought’ and ‘should’ that marks an ethical, not a factual, discourse: it is oriented in a social matrix.
Hence, what I missed in this book was any other accounts of guilt to compare Freud's with: I wanted to compare it with contemporary philosophical, theological and psychological accounts. It was difficult nottofeel thatthis was abookwritten by an analyst (as Yeatman and Sellars might have said), ‘for other analysts who will understand’. This may indeed be of some analytic interest (no pun intended; actually, who am I kidding? some pun intended), but I am not sure it helps me, as a busy clinician, to understand the problems of guilt as it is lived out by the guilty.
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