Toward a Reconceptualization of Guilt

FREUD'S CONCEPTUALIZATION OF GUILT, stated most clearly in Civilization and Its Discontents, remains the predominant conceptualization of guilt in psychoanalysis although it is embedded in a theory of motivation (drive theory) that has been increasingly rejected. According to Freud, guilt is the fear of an internalized threat of loss of love and loss of protection from a variety of dangers. While it is difficult to overestimate the importance of the fear of an internalized threat of loss of love as a motivation in human life, I do not believe that this concept represents what people ordinarily mean by guilt. More importantly, it has, in my opinion, obscured a significant line of human motivation and has impeded the effective treatment of a wide range of psychopathology. The purposes of this paper are (1) to examine Freud's concept of guilt; (2) to review some recent research and theory in developmental psychology and evolutionary biology which point to an alternative concept of guilt; (3) to review several attempts within psychoanalysis to modify or supplement Freud's concept of guilt, all of which can be seen as efforts to move toward this alternative concept; (4) to make some tentative suggestions toward a reconceptualization of guilt; and (5) to illustrate some clinical implications of this reconceptualization.

This paper has grown out of my participation in the Mount Zion Psychotherapy Research Project led by Joseph Weiss and Harold Sampson, whose insight into the importance of unconscious guilt in psychopathology has inspired the research of our group as well as this essay (Weiss, Sampson, et al, 1986). The classical psychoanalytic concept of guilt, however, did not fit our data. We used terms like survivor guilt and separation guilt (Weiss, Sampson, et al, 1986) ;