You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This is a collection of three papers delivered at the 43rd Annual Margaret S. Mahler Symposium on Child Development (Philadelphia, 28 April 2012), together with three response papers, an introductory overview, and a concluding commentary. Of the spate of books that have emerged recently representing the return of the topic of guilt from repression for over four decades in psychoanalysis, many of which I have reviewed in these pages (Carveth, 2011, 2014), this is by far the best from a clinical, as well as a theoretical, point of view. Salman Akhtar, as editor, is to be congratulated for gathering and presenting us with excellent work on this important topic. The papers by William Singletary, Desy Safán-Gerard, and Stanley Coen, together with Elio Frattaroli's discussion of Coen and elaboration of his own important ideas regarding the absence of morality in psychoanalytic theory and practice, are each in their own way gems of clinical and theoretical psychoanalytic insight. They deserve our close attention and should be required reading for candidates.
In his introductory overview, Akhtar addresses a range of important conceptual issues, seeking to clarify distinctions between guilt, shame, regret, and remorse. He helpfully outlines the different varieties of guilt (annihilation, epistemic, Oedipal, separation, induced, deposited, survivor's) and varying consequences of guilt, both pathological (its projection,