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This study of guilt and depression, aiming to be comprehensive and profound, ranges in approach from totem and taboo, through myth, religion, and ethics to the structure of the psyche; and from Aeschylus to Sartre and Hiroshima Mon Amour. There is a chapter on mourning in children with brief examples. Throughout the book there is but one case presentation of eight pages. The rest is theoretical formulations with many references to the literature. Kleinian constructions are considered as complementing or as superseding freudian psychoanalysis. Within the first forty pages the words 'basic' and 'deep' appear ten times. Repetition does not make it so, nor does it make it scientific.
The clinical theorizing is illustrated by the following excerpts. '… depressive anxiety is intimately related to guilt, and the sense of reparation … these feelings appear with the introjection of an object as a totality … [even as early as] the time of the schizoid-paranoid position in the first three months of life … therefore [they] are related to partial objects such as the breast, the penis, etc. From a very early age there is a certain degree of synthesis of love and hate in the relation to the partial objects… To understand fully the origin and the nature of the two types of guilt, it is necessary to admit the strong relationship which exists between the persecutory sense of guilt combined with a diffuse death instinct and the depressive sense of guilt and the erotic impulses.'
The book consists mainly of statements unsubstantiated by clinical instances. The classification is in terms of depressive position, paranoid position, schizoid-paranoid position, etc. It can be read simply to clarify one's own ideas.