The Nietzschean Monster: Reconsidering Guilt in Developmental Theory*

There is a tendency in psychoanalytic literature to view the nature of guilt in two contradictory ways. The first is often found in the theoretically derived developmental premise of the structural tripartite model of intrapsychic differentiation, which states that unconscious guilt emerges from an internalized superego, which presuposes a structured and mature ego. An assumption follows that the “capacity for guilt” is a higher or more adaptive form of mental functioning; it is healthy, civilized, and mature, and equated with notions of repair and concern. It is also often interchanged with the concept of conscience. The second view of guilt is to be found in clinical formulations of pathology where the destructiveness of guilt in psychic functioning is highlighted, especially in relation to the sadism of the superego. Despite the observation that guilt is usually, if not always, associated with destructive pathology, the developmental framework that positions guilt as a mature affect is left intact This contradiction begins with Freud, who suggested that guilt is not only the height of civilization, but also a deep-seated, intractable form of aggression such as he describes in The Economic Problem of Masochism (1924).

In the first part of this paper, I would like to present a sample of psychoanalytic theorists whose developmental theories, especially in relation to concepts of internalization, posit that guilt is mature or