This new book re-examines some of the fundamental ideas already presented in the author's 1997 text, now published in English as Speziale-Bagliacca (2004). What is it about? To use Joyce McDougall's cover comment, ‘guilt is not only a legal and moral concept, as well as a state of mind, but it is also an omnipotent way of thinking’. In contrast with this way of thinking (called ‘the ethos of guilt’), there is another way of thinking that transcends guilt (‘the ethos of tragic responsibility’). This latter stems from a different point of observation of the human vicissitudes, which the author traces back to Galen and to Spinoza, and which he believes should be the perspective adopted by psychoanalysts, sociologists and historians.

If the ethos of guilt leads one to be judgemental, the other kind of ethos leads one to understand, without judging them, the factors that have determined our choices. Those who want to heal and believe in the existence of the unconscious could only