Guilt (Ideas in Psychoanalysis) - Softcover

Singh, Kalu

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9781840461909: Guilt (Ideas in Psychoanalysis)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 184046190X ISBN 13: 9781840461909

Publisher: Icon Books, 1996

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A sense of guilt is a uniquely human experience, and a major theme in explorations of the human imagination, from Greek tragedy to headline condemnations of murderers and child abusers. A sense of guilt in the real world of moral transgressions would seem to be necessary to hold society together, but many people experience guilty feelings that cannot be explained in terms of their conscious values. Where do those feelings come from?

Psychoanalysis suggests that this neurotic form of guilt has its origins in childhood and the ambivalent unconscious feelings the child has towards internal representations of parental figures. In one interpretation, guilt occurs when the child's sexual, aggressive and destructive feelings conflict with its fear of destroying the source of love nd security. Kalu Singh explains the analytic ideas involved, and goes on to illuminate the consequent adult states of mind generated by neurotic guilt and its effect on society and culture.

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About the Author:

Kalu Singh came to England from India, and to psychoanalysis via Chemistry, Philosophy, English and Education. He works as a Civil Servant and as a Sessional Counsellor in a University Service. He lives in Cambridge.

Imagine a world without guilt. Imagine a life, your life, without guilt. What do you feel right now? Puzzlement, fear, relief, hope, desire, joy, release - or perhaps even shame; but I hope not guilt. That would be the world's end, wouldn't it?

Try again. Try these words:

"I refuse to feel guilty. Guilt is a destructive emotion and doesn't fit in with my Life Plan."

"Guilt is petit bourgeois crap. An artist creates his own moral universe."

The first quotation is from the feckless Adrian Mole, responding to a crisis with typically pointless bravado. It is one of Woody Allen's fictional creations who makes the second remark, but after quoting it, biographer Marion Meade comments:

"Woody was about to find out that playing by his own rules would cost him millions in legal fees, the loss of his children, and abandonment by his audience."

But what is guilt? Is it a sensation or a thought, or a medium for sensation and thought? Or a something, a force, sometimes internal, sometimes external, that is beyond thought and sensation? Most commonly, people say that guilt 'gnaws', capturing the sense of something inside and inaccessible, attacking one relentlessly. Or it is a burden one can never shake off. There may be other metaphors: that it is like a pebble in one's shoe, a chafing throng, a polyp, leaking silicone, a throbbing phantom limb, a torn disabling gene, an irregularly beating transplanted pig's heart, a skin graft that tears and becomes septic, Dorian Gray's picture, the pall of volcanic ash.

Psychoanalysis takes up the challenge to heal guilt. Theology and its bastard aspect - organised religion - are outraged at the temerity of psychoanalysis to encroach upon its fiefdom. Surely all one needs to know about guilt - how to define it, explain it, contain it and heal it - is given within the paradigm of theology? How can there be non-religious guilt? Perhaps since the Renaissance, and certainly since the Enlightenment, this has been the paradox: that religion has failed in its promise to alleviate guilt - the guilt it had created in order to demonstrate the faith's power by healing it. The only remaining excuse is the perennial plea of the tension between the perfection of the theology and the culpability of the believers. But from the psychoanalytic point of view, clients arrive at the therapeutic realm variously crippled by guilts which religion has failed to heal, even if it didn't create them. Religion has had two to seven milennia, depending on your religion, to!
perfect its theology and its technique: psychoanalysis has had one century.

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