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Coline Covington starts by challenging the position of the moral philosopher Susan Neimann that “the group retains not just collective responsibility for its past but collective guilt” (p. xv). Neimann's work draws on the effort of the German people to atone for their deeds in the second world war and set an example for others, something they should do. It is the “should do” that raises Covington's aversion because in the Judeo-Christian tradition this perpetuates “a binary view of events and how we ‘should’ understand and feel about them” (p. xv). Covington refers to personal experiences and her defiance about having to adhere to what is meant to be felt while not having her experience recognized. She challenges her readers to do the same. The danger of dividing groups into victims and perpetrators, and apportioning blame for which guilt needs to be felt, often with a subjectively chosen trauma to support the group's narrative, thereby negating the need to understand how we all can become, and are-by virtue of being human-complicit in atrocities.
Covington's interest in political psychology was evident in her book Shrinking the News (2014), which brings together a wide range of short essays, previously published as a regular column in The Week. In these essays she addresses current affairs from a psychoanalytic perspective. She was a fellow of the International Dialogue Initiative, a think-tank founded by Prof. Dr. Vamik Volkan, Lord Alderdice and Dr. Robi Friedman for politicians and psychoanalysts to work together to understand the effect of past trauma and large group anxieties on intransigent political conflicts.
In the first book of her trilogy, Everyday Evils: A Psychoanalytic View of Evil and Morality (2017), Covington addresses atrocities arising from perverted belief systems but which are nevertheless based on a powerful need to belong, and in her second book For Goodness Sake: Bravery, Patriotism and Identity (2020) she suggests that the same belief system