Abstract

Whereas Freud commonly associates guilt with the self-directed aggression of the punitive superego and invariably equates unconscious guilt with the unconscious need for punishment expressed in patterns of self-torment and self-sabotage, Klein views guilt as what Winnicott called “the capacity for concern,” the depressive anxiety that our hate may damage or destroy the good object and self. Without calling into question Freud’s equation of unconscious guilt with the unconscious need for punishment, writers in the Kleinian tradition have addressed the ways in which self-torment, rather than being a manifestation of guilt, serves as a defence against it. As a guilt-substitute, the unconscious need for punishment should not be conflated with the guilt it evades. As depressive anxiety or concern for the object, guilt is a manifestation of attachment and love (Eros) and motivates the desire to make reparation. In contrast, the unconscious need for punishment involves the persecutory anxiety and shame characterizing the paranoid-schizoid position and is a manifestation of narcissism and hate (Thanatos). The discontent Freud links with civilization is not a manifestation of guilt but of the self-torment resulting from its evasion. The enlarged capacity to experience and bear guilt (i.e., to love and thereby have conscience) that is a mark of civilization reflects the healing, not the deepening, of our cultural malaise.