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In this volume, Judith Hughes traces the development of psychoanalytic thinking about guilt from Freud's writings through those of Klein and
her followers to the work of Bion, Britton, and contemporary Kleinians such as Betty Joseph. Laying the groundwork with a discussion of Freud's analysis of guilt and the origins of moral development, Hughes goes on, using clinical and theoretical writings of the Kleinians, to illuminate areas of accord among themselves and Freud, as well as areas in which, in her view, they carried forward and enlarged on Freud's account of moral development. Accounts of the 1943-1944 Controversial Discussions of the British Psycho-Analytical Society are included, illuminating, in particular, disputes regarding fantasy- and reality-thinking in infants and shifts within the thinking of Klein and her followers on this topic.
“[It is] my intention to represent the sense of guilt as the most important problem in the development of civilization …” (Freud 1930, p. 134). With the introduction of the superego, Freud established the study of moral development as an aspect of the psychoanalytic enterprise, reconceptualizing guilt as an unconscious as well as conscious phenomenon. In her introduction, Hughes lays out the themes of ambivalence, omnipotence of thoughts, and the inescapability of guilt—established by Freud as central to human moral development and later elaborated and revised by Klein. As the author observes, both Freud and Klein saw a moral sense as natural, but not native, an emergent phenomenon. Using case illustrations such as those of Little Hans and the Rat Man, Hughes elucidates the centrality, for Freud, of the oedipus complex and its dissolution in the establishment of the superego. She discusses Totem and Taboo (Freud 1912-1913), which seeks to lend historical weight to this explanation of the inevitability of guilt, with the murder and devouring of the jealous and domineering patriarch by his sons and their subsequent feelings o