Vollständiges Transkript von „GUILT: A Psychoanalytic Perspective, Part 1, Theory“. Klicke auf einen Zeitstempel, um das Video an dieser Stelle zu öffnen. Du brauchst ein anderes Video? Nutze den YouTube-Transkript-Generator.
0:01 In 2023, I published with Routledge a book called Guilt, a contemporary introduction. Uh guilt being a topic that uh for six or seven decades psychoanalysts have tended to turn away from, I would even say evade, although Freud himself had a great deal to say about it, a great deal of clinical interest, but the field, like the wider culture, has tended to be engaged in guilt evasion uh of an increasingly
0:47 um severe sort, I feel. In any case, guilt, on one level, I think we all know what that is. It's uh a very unpleasant, painful, often nagging feeling that one has done something wrong, uh one has committed uh a fault, a misdemeanor, some form of wrongdoing, perhaps a sin, uh and this awareness
1:35 uh that in the eyes of perhaps other people or in one's own eyes, one has done wrong. Uh this is what we mean by conscious guilt, and of course psychoanalysis has much more to do with unconscious guilt. Um the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche uh points out in the Genealogy of Morals uh that the idea of guilt um is rooted in the idea of debt, of debt.
2:23 Uh when criminals who have been prisoners have served their time, uh we say they have paid their debt to society. So, it's it seems we we feel that when someone has uh injured someone or even through committing a crime has somehow injured the moral fabric of society, um one incurs a debt. Um one owes something. Uh and um sometimes it's possible
3:10 to pay the debt, which involves a kind of repair. Through paying the debt, one kind of repairs the damage that one has done through one's sin or through one's crime to someone or to the moral fabric of society in general. Okay. Um Psychoanalysis has been far more interested in unconscious guilt than in conscious guilt. Uh Freud in several places points out that um
3:56 in the analysis of psychopathology and the analysis of neurotics, uh it seems that one comes upon a moral factor, and uh a big part of the resistance to overcoming the neurosis has to do with the fact that the neurosis causes suffering, and it is if as if the patient is unwilling to give up the punishment of suffering. Uh but uh this guilt, this unconscious guilt, Freud
4:42 says is dumb. It does not tell the neurotic that he's guilty. He does not feel guilty. He feels ill. Okay? The guilt is unconscious. What's conscious is a feeling of unease, of malaise, of discontent, unhappiness, restlessness, but the person who is suffering this unhappiness, this illness, this this discontent, this malaise may not at all be linking this
5:31 to guilt. His guilt is unconscious. What is conscious is some other kind of suffering. Um in other words, the patient is resistant uh to tracing his or her unhappiness back to the idea of guilt that Freud believes is often at the root of varied forms of suffering. It could be psychosomatic suffering. It could be hysterical uh suffering. Um it could be the suffering that this person endures in an unhappy
6:17 relationship or or marriage. Um People seem to put up with a great deal of suffering that they could probably escape, but for some reason they don't escape this suffering. And perhaps the reason they don't escape it is that on an unconscious level they feel guilty, and therefore they feel deserving of suffering. They feel on an unconscious level that they don't deserve to stop suffering. So, they put up with it. Sometimes people seek suffering. Uh
7:04 they often neurotic people avoid opportunities for happiness. They avoid opportunities for success. Freud writes about the fear of success. Um they turn away from opportunities for pleasure and success, and they seem to often seek pain and suffering of various sorts. This Freud traces back to unconscious guilt. Um Freud introduces us to the idea of therefore uh the idea of the guilt
7:50 equivalent or the guilt substitute. In other words, the IBS, irritable bowel syndrome, perhaps, is a guilt equivalent. Or the finding a partner who makes us suffer and staying with that partner, uh that could be a guilt equivalent. Uh I put up with this suffering because unconsciously I feel I deserve it. Um there is the guilt equivalent. Um Karl Menninger in Man Against Himself
8:38 expands this idea, and he speaks of suicide equivalents. An animal caught in a trap will often chew off its leg in order to survive. Um it seems that some people avoid literal suicide by adopting a suicide equivalent. In other words, instead of destroying their lives, they destroy their marriages or they destroy their careers or uh they destroy their liver, cirrhosis of the liver, by virtually drinking themselves often not sometimes to death, but often just to the point of considerable
9:24 suffering. Um they destroy uh careers, their health. These are suicide equivalents. They save their lives by sacrificing something else. These are analogous to ancient primitive sacrificial religions. Um we we thought we had uh transcended these religions of sacrifice, but it seems that we haven't abandoned them. Many people carry on sacrificing to the savage God that Freud
10:09 called the superego. The superego is demanding its pound of flesh because of the unconscious guilt. Superego is the inner judge, the inner critic. It's not a fair judge. Uh It's not a just judge. It's a judge that wants us to suffer. And uh it might drive us to suicide, but uh we placate it. We placate the murderous superego by sacrificing our health, our careers, our marriages, whatever.
10:55 This is uh an obscured form of the ancient primitive religions of sacrifice to placate the savage God Freud called the superego. Okay. Um There are many different kinds of guilt, but we've already touched on the main distinction, the distinction between conscious guilt and the concept of unconscious guilt. And of course psychoanalysis is focused on guilt that is repressed, uh buried, evaded.
11:41 And of course we live in a society, a culture of narcissism that is busy evading guilt and has been for decades. And of course psychoanalysis is not just the analyst of the culture. Psychoanalysis is a part of the culture and is influenced by the culture. And just as the culture of narcissism has been running away from guilt, so psycho analysis has been running away from guilt. Uh in writing about guilt, I'm trying to bring us back to Freud's insights uh developed in the early decades uh of the 20th century, especially
12:27 essays that he wrote in the 1920s and 1930s, where he wrote extensively about unconscious guilt and how it manifests in the fear of success, people who are wrecked by success, um people who clutch defeat from the jaws of victory, um people who commit crimes in order to get caught, leave clues, return to the scene. They commit the crime in order to get caught and punished for guilt arising from other uh usually childhood sources. For Freud, the main childhood source
13:15 tended to be the Oedipus complex, but Freud was a bit fixated on that complex between the years of say two and a half to five or six, but Melanie Klein and subsequent psychoanalysts recognized that in addition to Oedipal guilt, there is the pre-Oedipal guilt stemming not from the triadic conflicts of the Oedipal phase, but from the dyadic conflict of the mother-infant or primary caretaker-infant relationship, where things can often go wrong uh as Melanie Klein certainly understood, um leaving the child with a big
14:02 reservoir of unconscious guilt leading to self-punishment and self-sabotage and so on. So, not all guilt is Oedipal. There is plenty of pre-Oedipal guilt. Guilt is usually a combination of both of these things. And in fact, in most people, um one sees elements of both Oedipal and pre-Oedipal conflicts. Okay. Uh the field of unconscious guilt. Um The second big distinction between kinds of guilt is uh a differentiation that Freud himself did not make,
14:49 but that was made by Melanie Klein and especially by one of her followers, Leon Grinberg. I think his essay in 1960 was called two kinds of guilt. Uh This is the distinction between persecutory guilt and reparative guilt. And these two kinds of guilt uh are associated with the two mental positions, um not stages, but let's call them the two different organizations of mental life. And we all of us have both. The most primitive layer or uh organization of mental life, Klein
15:34 called the paranoid-schizoid position. Uh schizoid meaning splitting. Uh there is no ambivalence. This is a pre-ambivalent phase. Um Things are either all good or all bad. Other people are either all good or all bad. There is a good breast and a bad breast, and there is a good me and a bad me. Uh the image of the self is split into all good and all bad. The image of the other is split, all good, all bad. Uh no middle ground. And uh today a lot of people mistakenly think that this kind of splitting is characteristic of the so-called borderline personality disorder, and
16:21 certainly it is found there, but but splitting is everywhere because uh we're talking about a permanent position in the mind. And even those who move beyond this primitive paranoid-schizoid position to the much more mature depressive-reparative position, uh they continue to split uh because PS, paranoid-schizoid, is a layer of the mind, and we all visit it. We all oscillate really to some degree or another. Some people oscillate a lot, some people uh oscillate less, but we all fluctuate between these two mental positions, PS and D standing for depressive-reparative position.
17:06 So, we all split. Some people split a lot. Some people seem to do nothing but split. Some people split moderately, some people split minimally, but from time to time we all regress into this primitive world where things are either all good or all bad. Um Okay, in that primitive mental position, guilt is persecutory. It amounts to uh a punitive position. We are persecuted. Uh we're persecuting ourselves, we're being persecuted by others. This is very painful guilt.
17:54 Uh Uh and well, the example I always use is that I've been in a fight and I've injured someone, and he's bleeding in the corner, and I have a cat-o'-nine-tails, and I'm whipping, I'm flagellating myself. And of course, this does nothing for him. That's persecutory guilt. It's narcissistic. Uh the paranoid-schizoid position is we could equally call it the narcissistic position because in this world where it's kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, uh I don't have time to be concerned about other people. I'm completely concerned about myself. I'm trying to survive. I'm being hunted by predators.
18:41 Uh I'm entirely narcissistic or self-concerned. And my persecutory guilt is completely narcissistic. It's all about how bad and terrible I am. Um and this is a form of depression. Uh depressed people are horrible to be around because they are totally preoccupied with themselves. Not how wonderful they are. Uh I mean, not only how wonderful they are, because in the splitting sometimes the narcissism takes the grandiose form of how wonderful and amazing and superior I am, but it also takes the form of how terrible and horrible and inferior I am.
19:29 Depressed people are are are uh self-obsessed. Just as are the grandiose narcissists, self-obsessed. Um Okay, but guilt in the PS position is persecutory. Uh this is a very different form of guilt than the kind of guilt that we encounter if we manage to pull out of regression and move advance, develop into what Klein called the depressive and that I refer to call the reparative position. Uh it's unfortunate she, in a way that she called it depressive position because there's no depression there. I've just explained anything that merits the term
20:15 depression involves this persecutory guilt. It's it's a paranoid schizoid phenomenon. Serious depression belongs not to the depressive position, but to the paranoid schizoid position. Uh why did she call it depressive then? Because she did not mean depression, she meant what she called depressive anxiety. Depressive anxiety, it's a type of anxiety. Um and Winnicott helpfully renamed this the capacity for a concern. In this position, I am able to recognize finally that other people exist and they're real and they have feelings and they can be harmed
21:01 and in the depressive reparative position, I'm worried that I may have harmed, I may have seriously damaged, I may have destroyed another person. I'm anxious. Is it Is there time to get him or her to the emergency? In other words I drop my cat-o'-nine-tails. I stop whipping myself and instead I call 911 or I get out my first aid kit and start bandaging out of my because I've developed a capacity to be concerned about others, not just about myself. So, this is a great moral advance from the narcissism of PS
21:47 to the object concern in D, the depressive reparative position. And so, here we have reparative guilt as distinct from persecutory guilt. Persecutory guilt leading only to self-flagellation. Uh depressive reparative guilt leading to reparation, an attempt to repair the damage done. An attempt to heal. Um uh And I would say this move into D is also a move towards repentance. I I I acknowledge the damage that I've
22:34 done and I'm concerned about the welfare of the person I've harmed which could also be myself. I I I may recognize that I've done serious uh harm to myself and I may get busy trying to repair the self that I've damaged and I may try to repair the other that I've damaged. I have moved into repentance and reparation. Repair, repentance and repair characteristic of the reparative position. So, two big kind Well, we've got conscious and unconscious guilt and now we've got persecutory and reparative guilt.
23:22 Um One point that some Kleinian analysts, including myself, uh I wrote a paper, I think, and published it in around 2006. Uh the title of that paper was um I think it was called um self-punishment as guilt evasion. Self-punishment as guilt evasion. I mean, Freud had thought of self-punishment as a manifestation of guilt. But I came to recognize, along with a few other Kleinian analysts, that some people
24:07 will go on forever engaging in self-punishing activities as a defense. Self-punishment as a defense against reparative guilt. Freud could not make that distinction because he didn't have the two kinds of guilt persecutory and reparative. Persecutory guilt can be a defense against reparative guilt. In fact to look at Melanie Klein's theory, her mo- model as a whole the paranoid schizoid position as a whole can function as a defense against the terrifying move into the depressive reparative position. From the standpoint of the narcissistic person who is living
24:53 in PS, the idea of moving into this other world of concern and facing his guilt and moving into repentance and reparation to him that looks like a catastrophe. He can't go there. Acknowledging that he's bad? Uh genuinely facing his crimes and sins uh seeking forgiveness seeking to repair the harm that he is now acknowledging that he has
25:41 done. This is ex- an extremely frightening move for the narcissist ensconced in in PS. Uh It's frightening. It's a bit of a nightmare. Um he will evade it. He will go on punishing himself. It's as if he prefers a life of constant self-punishment to the terrifying move into confession repentance reparation. Okay.
26:26 Self-punishment as a defense. Persecutory guilt as a defense against reparative guilt. Okay. Uh Melanie Klein moved the superego back much earlier than the Oedipal phase where Freud Freud had thought of the superego as heir to the Oedipus, h e i r, heir to the Oedipus complex. At the end of the Oedipus complex the child gives up on the pursuit of the desired object and gives up the rivalry with the uh rival parent and takes the hostility he or she has been feeling towards the
27:13 rival and turns it on the self. And that is the birth of the superego. It is the turning of Oedipal hostility towards the rival away from the rival and back on the self. And now one is attacking oneself the way one wanted to attack the rival. That's the superego. Oedipal hatred turned away from the the rival back onto the self. Um Okay, that doesn't come till age five or six for Freud. Melanie Klein moved this way back into the so-called pre-Oedipal phase. Um the child early on begins to distinguish
27:58 between pleasure on the one hand and pain on the other and in states of pleasure it is there is an image of the good breast the good nurturing one together with good me uh with positive affect and that is distinguished from painful affect where you have the bad persecutory breast or object together with an image of bad me. So, here we have the splitting. Good me and bad me, good breast and bad breast. These are
28:44 this is the phase that Klein called the phase of part objects as distinct from whole objects when which one en- encounters when one moves on into the depressive reparative position. But here we have splitting. We have part objects and part self images. And this distinction between a soothing breast and a persecuting breast the bad breast is identified with is introjected and identified with and now there is a persecutory object, a persecuting object and this is the core of the superego as far as I'm concerned. Uh the superego is a persecutor in this
29:32 pre-Oedipal phase. This the core of the superego is the bad attacking persecuting part object. Um And of course, there is also introjection of the good breast. The nurturing object uh and also identification with the good breast. And this for me is the origin of conscience. Conscience is grounded in the internalized good breast, the soothing nurturing object. And the superego is uh the origin is is originates in a introjection and identification with the
30:17 bad attacking persecuting breast. So, we have in the paranoid schizoid position, we have the superego as an attacking object, but we also have conscience, the grounds of conscience as a soothing loving object. This is the distinction between love and hate. The superego is all about hate. It's grounded in hate. Uh conscience is grounded in love. Uh okay. Conscience has its roots in the early PS position, but as we move into the depressive reparative position,
31:03 uh conscience hopefully has been developing. It's It's I I believe it has a biological basis. We're primates and and we now know that even very young children have a uh a a crude sense of the distinction between right and wrong. So, as primates and even as very young children, we already have a I think a built-in biologically grounded differentiation between right and wrong, but this this is the very primitive basis of consci- conscience, but but conscience develops through identification with nurturers, uh those who who love us, those who soothe
31:51 us, those who contain and hold and uh nurture us. So, identification with nurturers builds up the conscience. As we have been loved, so we learn what love is. And because we've been loved, we feel an obligation to give love back. And when we fail to give love back, our conscience bothers us. It doesn't persecute us, but it nags at us, that's for sure. And when we are out of sync with conscience in this way, we are then very vulnerable to attack by the superego, which is always looking
32:36 for an opportunity to flagellate us, because that's what the superego does. That's what it's about, dealing out punishment and humiliation. Um Okay. Um Superego fundamentally an attack or conscience basically grounded in love and and a need to return love for love received. Okay. Uh So, what what then is psychoanalytic therapy? It's It's about helping people who
33:22 are stuck in PS and have failed to move on developmentally into the depressive reparative position. We're trying to give them an opportunity, a place, a context, an environment in which they can resume growth that has failed to happen, uh to move on into the depressive reparative position. Um we're trying to help people who have failed to mature uh to resume their development and to engage in a maturation process
34:11 where over time, and this is why the therapy takes a long time, uh it's a major developmental transformation that we're trying to bring about. People who are stuck in the narcissism and the persecution and the suffering and the addiction and all of the rest of it characteristic of the PS position, we're trying to give them a relationship with the analyst, uh a context, a reliable series of meetings, a confidential quiet space in which they are encouraged
34:57 to speak about everything. Uh we're we're trying to give them this context where development can be resumed and maturation can begin to take place. So, this is a radical transformation. A life lived in PS is radically different from a life lived in D. A life centered on hate and anxiety and suffering is a very different life than a life centered on love
35:42 and repair. Um There is suffering, of course, in both of these positions. Suffering is an inevitable part of human existence, um but we have to distinguish between the necessary and unavoidable suffering um involved in being a human from the exaggerated and unnecessary suffering and persecution characteristic of a fixation in the paranoid schizoid world. Okay. Um These two positions uh can be used to uh understand
36:28 uh sociopolitical issues. Obviously, the world of PS is a totalitarian world. It's an autocratic world. It's a a world where there is a tyranny of the authoritarian superego seeking to dominate and punish and persecute. Uh it's a simplistic world where things are all good or all bad. You're either with us or you're against us. There's no democracy in PS. There's no equality. This is the world of S&M, sadomasochism. It's the world of D&S, dominance and submission. Very much in contrast to the reparative
37:14 position where liberal democracy can occur, where there can be equality, where there can be rule of law as opposed to tyranny. Uh PS is an authoritarian world. D is a democratic world. Uh So, well, we can apply all of this to our current political situation. As the society has been evading guilt for many decades, um look where we are now with a gangster uh and a severe pathological narcissist,
38:02 I would say a psychopath, in the White House. Uh Unfortunately, psychoanalysis has has not helped as much as it should have helped us understand what's going on in the society, because psychoanalysts, like the society, turned away from these psychoanalytic insights into the dynamics of guilt and self-punishment. Um Okay, there are many other distinctions we can make uh about guilt, but these are are the major ones, conscious and unconscious, persecutory versus reparative. Um But um we have justified and unjustified guilt. We
38:49 can't talk about rational and irrational guilt because um guilt can never be said to be rational or irrational, because reason cannot make value judgments, but certainly a considerable amount of guilt may be entirely unjustified. It may be grounded in fantasy rather than in reality. I had a patient who for a time was quite convinced that she had murdered her sister. She had not murdered her sister. Uh her crime was not murder. Her crime was uh being delighted on one level that the sister had died. That meant she could get daddy back. She was in an Oedipal rivalry, a sibling rivalry with
39:35 the sister. When the sister was gone, rival was gone, and she was delighted. She was also devastated, because she loved her sister as well as hating her, but >> [clears throat] >> the amount of her guilt that was grounded in the idea that she had murdered her sister, that was unjustified. She had not murdered her sister, but her guilt was justified because she had hated her sister and partially uh was happy that she had died. Um so we have this important distinction, and one of the analytic tasks is to try and sort out justified uh versus unjustified guilt. Some psychologists and therapists went crazy about this. They they they came to
40:22 the dumb conclusion that all guilt is unjustified. Guilt is a bad thing that we should get rid of. That, of course, is nonsense. Uh persecutory guilt is bad, and we should get rid of it. But reparative guilt is good, necessary. We need much more reparative guilt in civilization. So, part of the therapeutic task to distinguish justified from unjustified guilt. Um Okay, there is also uh survivor guilt, and it's >> [snorts] >> guilt not just for surviving, but also for succeeding. I think
41:08 survivor guilt success guilt. If I achieve success, uh I can feel guilt because I triumphed over those who failed. Uh and I may have Schadenfreude. I may enjoy the fact that um I survived and they didn't. I succeeded and they didn't. There's a kind of glorying and uh exulting in one's triumph over the other, and there is guilt from this success and uh survivor guilt. Um There is existential guilt because life confronts us with catch-22s from time to time.
41:55 Uh if I don't develop my potential, I have existential guilt towards myself. I have failed myself. I have failed to utilize my gifts, my talents. Um but if I develop myself, I may move on. I may move beyond. I may um surpass um someone that I had been uh attached to. Uh I may grow away uh from another, and that can feel like a betrayal of the other. And I can then feel guilty for having moved away or beyond the other.
42:41 Uh so guilty if I grow, uh but guilty if I don't grow. Kierkegaard uh is perhaps the philosopher who most draws our attention to this kind of bind in which we're we're going to have guilty on our guilt on our hands no matter what we do. Existential guilt. Uh Then, of course, there is collective guilt. Uh the guilt that stems not just from our personal lives, but that we have as members of a of a community. Perhaps the com well, Karl Jaspers wrote a book about
43:28 uh the collective guilt of the German nation that had allowed Hitler to take power and to do the horrendous, heinous things that that regime did. I think there is growing and there will be a great deal of collective guilt in America if and when Trump finally goes. Many people are going to be a bit haunted by the question, why did they remain silent? Why did they not speak out? Why did they not take steps? Uh How did they allow this criminal to become the president of the United States? There's going to be a lot of collective guilt,
44:15 I think, in America if we survive uh long enough to experience that. So, collective guilt as well as individual guilt. Um There are other distinctions, but I think we've covered many of them. Um It's a rich topic that unfortunately psychotherapists have been evading. Um How many psychotherapists today still listen with the third ear? I think it was 1948, Theodor Reik, R E I K, wrote his book Listening with the Third Ear,
45:00 which means listening not just to the manifest content, but to the latent content, listening for the becoming or has become something of a lost art. I think many psychotherapists don't know how to listen with the third ear. And therefore, of course, they're going to remain oblivious to unconscious guilt. Uh how many therapists, when they're confronted by a patient who comes complaining of emptiness, um boredom, uh an affectless state, the world is meaningless. Um
45:46 How many therapists suspect that this might be grounded in repressed guilt? Does it even occur to the modern therapist to think that unconscious guilt might be behind this indifference, this emptiness? Heinz Kohut said guilty man is of the past. The modern era creates tragic man. This is a ridiculous notion. If you analyze analyze tragic man, you find that he is guilty man. Underneath, on the surface, he may seem to have nothing whatever to do with guilt. But if the analysis is going somewhere, his unconscious
46:32 self-attacking superego will emerge, and it turns out that guilt is at the core of the problem. So, we need to turn back to um the psychoanalytic literature of the 1920s, '30s, even into the '40s. Well, not everyone turned away. Uh one great uh analyst, Leo Rangell, in 1980, he published a book called The Mind of Watergate. He'd been watching Nixon. Early on, he knew that Nixon was a sociopath. And then he studied the Watergate. Uh and that the people, Haldeman and Ehrlichman, all
47:18 of those people around Nixon, those criminals, um those hypocrites, um He more broadly, Rangell was studying what he called the syndrome of the compromise of integrity. Psychoanalysts had long known that ego defenses can be directed against the drives, the sexual and aggressive drives of the id. Rangell pointed out that ego defense mechanisms can equally be directed against superego, and I would say also conscience. We can defend not not only against impulses of the sexual and aggressive impulses of the id, we can direct
48:04 defenses against the demands and the reproaches of the superego and the voice of conscience. And when we do that, we produce the syndrome of the compromise of integrity. And boy, do we know a lot about that. Think of the Epstein files and the resistance to bringing them out. Um The syndrome of the compromise of integrity. It's it's all around us. Okay.
