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Conscious and unconscious guilt, their roots and consequences, are inevitably linked with the human condition and therefore have always been an area of interest for psychoanalysis. This work focuses on when a sense of guilt is so intolerable to be excluded from lived experience. It explores the destructive, disintegrating effects guilt can have in a person's life, and the psychical manifestations of these effects (primarily in the form of unconscious guilt). The aim is to discuss the origins of this experiential exclusion of guilt and its precursors (a discussion which brings to light certain paradoxes) and to investigate the ways in which a sense of guilt may be transformed and rendered tolerable. As a background to my reflections I will first outline their conceptual framework, which derives from the work of Freud, M. Klein and W.R. Bion.
With regard to Freud's vast-ranging investigation of guilt, I would like to focus on two key theoretical notions that are of important practical implications in clinical practice.
The first of these is the stress which Freud puts upon the paralyzing and destructive effects that the unconscious sense of guilt can have on a patient's life and on analysis itself (which is, in effect, a struggle to save that patient's life); there is, for example, particular focus on the notion of a negative therapeutic reaction in Freud's The Ego and The Id (Freud, 1922).
The other point is the key function of the Super-ego as an internal point of reference; nowadays, applying the concept of ≪unconscious fantasy≫, one might think of this in terms of an ≪internal Object≫ or as the ≪function≫ of an internal Object. Such a Super-ego as a paternal introjection rather surprisingly, but with striking human sensitivity and acumen, Freud criticises as troubling ≪itself too little […] about the happiness of the ego≫ in terms of the satisfaction of impulses (Freud, 1929, 143). A parent, one might well think, should be concerned about the happiness, about the nee